Lenovo always has some pretty awesome new products to check out at CES, like last year’s dual-screen laptop, and this year is no different. We visited the folks at Lenovo here at CES 2024 and wanted to make sure you knew about our favorite picks.
Legion Gaming Laptops
Legion Pro 7i
The Legion Pro 7i from Lenovo is designed with young gamers in mind, and you can instantly see that by the inclusion of an RGB keyboard and light bar that runs along the front edge of the laptop body. Sporting up to a 16″ display and 2560 x 1600 resolution with a 240Hz refresh rate, this laptop offers both high quality imagery, and smooth framerates thanks to NVIDIA G-SYNC. Powering this system is an Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU and NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, paired up with up to 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2TB Gen 4 PCIe NVMe SSD. A plethora of ports, including 1 x Thunderbolt 4, 1 x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, DisplayPort 1.4 + 140W power delivery, 3.5mm audio, SD card reader, 4 x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, and HDMI 2.1, are available to ensure plenty of options for connecting your external peripherals. Available in standard Eclipse Black, we expect to see the Legion Pro 7i sometime in March for $2,699.
Legion 7i
With a more subtle look is the Legion 7i, a laptop with similar specifications to the Pro 7i, but with out the RGB, and geared towards gamers, content creators, and STEM-type apps. Again we see the Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU with up to an RTX 4070, along with up to 32 GB of DDR5, and 1TB of Gen 4 PCIe storage. This time the hardware is paired up with a 16″, 3.2K (3200 x 2000) IPS screen with a refresh rate of 165Hz, as well as DCI-P3 RGB color space and NVIDIA G-SYNC compatibility. The Legion 7i is also available in Eclipse Black, as well as the new Glacier White, and offers 2 x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, DisplayPort 1.4 + 140W power delivery, 3.5mm audio, SD card reader, 3 x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, and HDMI 2.1. We really liked the looks of the Glacier White model, and we expect to see the Legion 7i in March for $2,099.
Magic Bay Components
We have seen Lenovo’s Magic Bay in the past, but if you aren’t familiar with this technology, simply put, it utilizes pogo-style connectors on the laptop screen to easily connect additional components to the laptop for expanded functionality. Here are a few of our favorite components we took at look at.
ThinkBook Magic Bay Studio
This camera and speaker combination device provides a 4K camera with up to 30fps, and a pair of 2W speakers. This improved visual clarity and complementary speaker setup easily improves your virtual meeting setup without the need for extra cables. This add-on combo unit will be available in April of 2024 for $199.99.
AI avatar
This fun add-on features a round screen that comes to life when connected to a compatible Magic Bay device. As we saw it, it lit up with a digital smiley face that showed various reactions and emotions, and we expect that it will be able to react accordingly, depending on what actions you are performing on your system.
External Monitor
Our favorite, and probably the most functional, is the 10.1″ external monitor. Being able to quickly connect this screen to your Lenovo laptop via the Magic Bay is so much easier and cleaner than dealing with the hassles of power cables and making sure your device has the right ports for your external monitor. This small 1920 x 1080 screen is very lightweight, and will be a must-have for Lenovo users with Magic Bay devices. As of now, this is just a concept product, but by the way everyone was reacting to it, we could see this becoming a real product in the future.
ThinkBook Graphics Extension
Here to bring added graphical horsepower to your portable ThinkBook laptops is the ThinkBook Graphics Extension. This external GPU enclosure is connected via Lenovo’s TGX (Oculink) port, which offers PCIe Gen 4 x 4 bandwidth, so you won’t find any bottlenecks here. The aluminum exterior of the case has passive cooling on both sides, and looks great in the Storm Grey color. Compatible with RTX graphics cards from the 4060Ti all the way up to the 4090, the 370mm x 210mm x 180mm footprint packs a lot of power into the size of a small form factor system. This enclosure, along with an RTX 4070 and ThinkBook 14 G6+ will be available in a bundle sometime in Q2 for just $2,199.
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