After many leaks and rumours, Lenovo has officially announced the Legion Go handheld and with it a Legion 9i laptop targeting gamers seeking the best performance in a small footprint.
Legion Go
Entering the portable gaming market full steam ahead, Legion Go is a handheld we’ve covered extensively due to its interesting design. Not satisfied with the usual 1080p or lower screens found on competing products like the ROG Ally, Lenovo went and installed an 8.8in 2560×1600 IPS panel boasting 144Hz refresh rate alongside 10-point touch while delivering 500-nit brightness and covering 97 per cent of DCI-P3 colour gamut. Most impressive. As a point of reference, ROG Ally tops at 1080p 120Hz, with the Steam Deck at 1280×800 60Hz.
If maximum frame rates are what you’re after, Legion Go ought to scale efficiently lower resolution; dropping back to 1280×800 ought to be easy and you shouldn’t get the Vaseline effect that plagues some games. For the rest, the higher pixel density will do marvels in delivering sharp images, let’s say when playing RTS games or watching videos.
To drive these pixels, Lenovo opted for AMD’s Z1 Extreme chip coupled with 16GB of 7,500MT/s LPDDR5X and 256GB/512GB/1TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage, powered by a 2-cell 49.2WHr battery – 900mAh on the controllers – able to recharge back to 70 per cent in only 30 minutes thanks to a 65W AC adapter.
While we’ve talked about the controllers previously, we would like to point out that the Legion Go carries Hall Effect joysticks which use a magnetic field to detect the position instead of potentiometers that tend to have joystick drift the older they get, not to forget the smaller deadzone on the former.
Finally, we have more information regarding the mouse aspect of said controllers, the right one of which can be placed on top of a plastic base allowing it to act as a normal mouse, thus delivering higher aim precision in FPS games.
The Legion Go is expected to become available on October 31 starting at €799, alongside the Legion AR Glasses at €499.
Legion 9i
With the portable out of the way, let’s talk a bit about maximum performance. For this, look no further than Legion 9i, a beast of a laptop packing a Core i9-13980HX CPU, 32GB of DDR5-6400 or 64GB of DDR-5600 memory, up to 2TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage, and up to an RTX 4090 16GB laptop GPU, all inside a 358mm (W) x 278mm (D) x 22.7mm (H) frame weighing 2.56kg.
To take advantage of the capabilities of said hardware, Lenovo slapped a 16in 3200×2000 Mini-LED panel featuring 165Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time, while covering 100 per cent of Adobe and DCI-P3 colour gamut. This screen is also VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certified thanks to its brightness reaching 1,200 nits.
Regarding power, we have a massive 99.99WHr battery – the maximum capacity allowed on aircraft – again capable of recharging back to 70 per cent in 30min, or 80min for a full recharge. This is done using a 330W AC adapter, though slower charging is possible through 140W USB Type-C power delivery.
Finally, for I/O we get one USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, two Thunderbolt 4, one HDMI 2.1, an SD card reader, combo audio jack, and Ethernet, not to forget Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 wireless connectivity.
The Legion 9i is expected to become available this October starting at a jaw-dropping €4,499.
