It’s unhealthy how much I love Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090. The fastest consumer GPU on earth has been powering my desktop for a couple of years now, and it’s ludicrously good at running the best Steam games at absurdly fast frame rates. The laptop version is also incredibly impressive, and it’s the star component of one of the best gaming laptops we’ve reviewed here at Tom’s Guide over the past 12 months. And wouldn’t you know it, said portable PC is currently discounted.
Right now, the 16-inch Lenovo Legion 9i with RTX 4090 is on sale for $3,933 at Lenovo. The official site normally sells this puppy for $4,438, making for a not too shabby saving of $505. Obviously that’s still an eye-watering stack of cash, but that sizable discount isn’t to be sniffed at.
And make no mistake, you really are getting pretty much the absolute best of the best with this particular configuration of the Legion 9i. In fact, this model is even more impressive than the one Andrew Hayward gave a glowing write-up to in our Lenovo Legion 9i review, as it packs a more powerful processor.
While the unit Andrew tested sported an Intel Core i9-13980HX CPU, the discounted beast above has a 14th Gen Intel Core i9-14900HX with cores that can be overclocked up to 5.80GHz. Combine that processor with The RTX 4090 and you’re dealing with a CPU/GPU combo that’s truly top-of-the-line. With these amazing two components joining forces, you can run the even the most demanding PC games at lightning frame rates.
During our testing of the slightly less powerful i9-13980HX config at 1080p resolution, we managed to run Far Cry 6 at 112 fps and Rockstar’s astonishing Wild West epic Red Dead Redemption 2 at 108 fps. Thanks to the faster processor of this discounted Legion 9i, you’ll be able to squeeze even more frames out of those graphically impressive sandbox titles.
So what else do you get for your money? Well, one of the most outstanding aspects of the Lenovo Legion 9i is its screen. It’s simply sensational.
The 16-inch mini LED brings “epic clarity” according to Andrew, thanks to its pin-sharp 3.2K (3,200 x 2,000) screen resolution. Color accuracy is also spot on — this panel covers 160.2% on the SRGB scale and 113.5% on the DCI-P3 scale — while its handling of HDR content is stellar. That’s mainly due to this display being so bright it could scorch your corneas, with it hitting an average peak brightness of 667.4 nits. That’s a fairly jaw-dropping number for a gaming laptop screen.
Elsewhere, you get 32GB of DDR5 RAM, which is frankly overkill for even the best PC games. If you plan to do a lot of video editing on the Legion 9i, though, that extra memory will come in handy for processing large files. A 1TB NVMe SSD is also the absolute least I’d expect from a laptop that costs this much, too.
Andrew also really digs the design of the Legion 9i, praising it for being “sleek, refined and lighter than expected.” It also puts on quite the light show. With my colleague giving it further love for RGB effects that “are appealing but not overwhelming.” In his review, Andrew also describes this laptop’s keyboard as “a delight to use.”
You probably don’t want to take this monster out on a daily commute, though. Not only is it super expensive, but it also brings the chonk, weighing in at 5.52 pounds.
Even discounted, this is obviously one of the most expensive gaming laptops on the market. Yet if you can afford it, the Lenovo Legion 9i is a knockout machine.
