Hasta La Gadget!

Lenovo has a new series of updated Legion gaming laptops at CES 2025. The star of the show is the 10th-generation Legion Pro 7i. It supports up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, thanks to its cooling system that enables up to 250W thermal design power (TDP). It also has an AI engine that dynamically adjusts CPU and GPU wattage for optimal performance.

The 2025 Legion Pro 7i supports up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and the aforementioned RTX 5090 on the graphics side. Lenovo’s Legion Coldfront Vapor cooling helps it support that high-end hardware. Tack on up to 64GB of 6400Mhz DDR5 (2 X 32GB) RAM and the built-in LA1+LA3 AI chip, and you’re looking at a souped-up machine for on-the-go gaming (and just about anything else you could throw at it).

The laptop has up to a 16-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600, 16:10) OLED display. The screen supports up to a 240Hz frame rate and has a 1ms response time. It can reach 500 nits of brightness. The Legion Pro 7i has two USB-C ports (one of which is Thunderbolt 4), three USB-A ports and HDMI 2.1. With all that high-end hardware inside, it’s quite the beefy machine, with a starting weight of around 6 lbs.

It launches in March. But all that horsepower doesn’t come cheap: Lenovo says the Legion Pro 7i has an expected starting price of $2,399 — and you can safely bet that RTX 5090 variants will fetch a premium on top of that.

Lenovo

Meanwhile, the 10th-gen Legion Pro 5i (Intel) and Legion Pro 5 (AMD) offer up to an Intel Ultra 9 275HX (the same as the Pro 7i) or AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX, respectively. Their thermal power supports up to 200W, which enables up to an RTX 5070 Ti Laptop for graphics. You can order configurations with up to 32GB (2 X 16GB) of 6400Mhz DDR5 RAM.

It also has up to a 16-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600, 16:10) OLED screen at up to 500 nits with a 1ms response time. But at 165Hz, its maximum frame rates don’t go quite as high as the Pro 7i.

Like the Pro 7i, the Pro 5 series uses Lenovo’s AI Engine+ with a Scenario Detection feature that dynamically tweaks the CPU and GPU wattage based on the moment’s needs. It has the same port setup as the Pro 7i, but at least it weighs a bit less (a minimum of 5.58 lbs).

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait longer for the more affordable Pro 5 series. The Legion Pro 5i launches in May (starting at $1,499), while the Legion Pro 5 arrives in June (starting at $1,399).

Lenovo

Lenovo also has a 10th-gen version of the (non-“Pro”) Legion 7i, which the company’s oddly specific PR copy says is for “gamers actively studying in STEM programs and fields.” It also supports up to an Intel Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5070 GPU and has up to a 16-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600) OLED with up to 240Hz and 1ms. However, its Coldfront Hyper cooling maxes out at a lower 145W TDP, so you won’t get the same top-level performance as the more expensive Pro models.

Starting at 4.4 lbs., it’s notably thinner and lighter than the Pro models. (The fact that it’s more portable but still decently powerful likely explains Lenovo’s strange “STEM student” framing.) It has an all-metal chassis. It will be available in June for $1,599.

Finally, there’s also a 10th-gen Legion 5i. Sticking with the oddly specific PR framing, Lenovo says this model is for “university gamers in non-STEM programs.” (Gotta nail down every niche!) It has up to a 15.1-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600, 16:10, 165Hz, 1ms) OLED and supports up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5070 Laptop GPU. (There’s also an AMD variant with up to a Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU.)

The Legion 5i is slated for a May launch, starting at $1,299.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/lenovo-ces-2025-the-10th-gen-legion-pro-7i-gaming-laptop-supports-up-to-rtx-5090-graphics-160004703.html?src=rss

Lenovo has a new series of updated Legion gaming laptops at CES 2025. The star of the show is the 10th-generation Legion Pro 7i. It supports up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, thanks to its cooling system that enables up to 250W thermal design power (TDP). It also has an AI engine that dynamically adjusts CPU and GPU wattage for optimal performance.

The 2025 Legion Pro 7i supports up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor and the aforementioned RTX 5090 on the graphics side. Lenovo’s Legion Coldfront Vapor cooling helps it support that high-end hardware. Tack on up to 64GB of 6400Mhz DDR5 (2 X 32GB) RAM and the built-in LA1+LA3 AI chip, and you’re looking at a souped-up machine for on-the-go gaming (and just about anything else you could throw at it).

The laptop has up to a 16-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600, 16:10) OLED display. The screen supports up to a 240Hz frame rate and has a 1ms response time. It can reach 500 nits of brightness. The Legion Pro 7i has two USB-C ports (one of which is Thunderbolt 4), three USB-A ports and HDMI 2.1. With all that high-end hardware inside, it’s quite the beefy machine, with a starting weight of around 6 lbs.

It launches in March. But all that horsepower doesn’t come cheap: Lenovo says the Legion Pro 7i has an expected starting price of $2,399 — and you can safely bet that RTX 5090 variants will fetch a premium on top of that.

Lenovo

Meanwhile, the 10th-gen Legion Pro 5i (Intel) and Legion Pro 5 (AMD) offer up to an Intel Ultra 9 275HX (the same as the Pro 7i) or AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX, respectively. Their thermal power supports up to 200W, which enables up to an RTX 5070 Ti Laptop for graphics. You can order configurations with up to 32GB (2 X 16GB) of 6400Mhz DDR5 RAM.

It also has up to a 16-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600, 16:10) OLED screen at up to 500 nits with a 1ms response time. But at 165Hz, its maximum frame rates don’t go quite as high as the Pro 7i.

Like the Pro 7i, the Pro 5 series uses Lenovo’s AI Engine+ with a Scenario Detection feature that dynamically tweaks the CPU and GPU wattage based on the moment’s needs. It has the same port setup as the Pro 7i, but at least it weighs a bit less (a minimum of 5.58 lbs).

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait longer for the more affordable Pro 5 series. The Legion Pro 5i launches in May (starting at $1,499), while the Legion Pro 5 arrives in June (starting at $1,399).

Lenovo

Lenovo also has a 10th-gen version of the (non-“Pro”) Legion 7i, which the company’s oddly specific PR copy says is for “gamers actively studying in STEM programs and fields.” It also supports up to an Intel Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5070 GPU and has up to a 16-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600) OLED with up to 240Hz and 1ms. However, its Coldfront Hyper cooling maxes out at a lower 145W TDP, so you won’t get the same top-level performance as the more expensive Pro models.

Starting at 4.4 lbs., it’s notably thinner and lighter than the Pro models. (The fact that it’s more portable but still decently powerful likely explains Lenovo’s strange “STEM student” framing.) It has an all-metal chassis. It will be available in June for $1,599.

Finally, there’s also a 10th-gen Legion 5i. Sticking with the oddly specific PR framing, Lenovo says this model is for “university gamers in non-STEM programs.” (Gotta nail down every niche!) It has up to a 15.1-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1600, 16:10, 165Hz, 1ms) OLED and supports up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and RTX 5070 Laptop GPU. (There’s also an AMD variant with up to a Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU.)

The Legion 5i is slated for a May launch, starting at $1,299.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/lenovo-ces-2025-the-10th-gen-legion-pro-7i-gaming-laptop-supports-up-to-rtx-5090-graphics-160004703.html?src=rss

Life for Sleepers is fraught. They gain consciousness in a state of indentured servitude, an emulated human mind inside an android body, forced to work until they’re discarded. Those who escape don’t last long due to trackers in their bodies, and their hardcoded dependence on a drug known as Stabilizer. Without it, a Sleeper’s body will eventually reject its biosynthetic organs.

If this sounds like tech’s worst excesses of the present taken to their most extreme, you’re grasping what Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector’s creator, Gareth Damian Martin, is driving at.

“Citizen Sleeper was me drawing on things from when I was in my early 20s,” they tell me. In the past, Martin has spoken extensively about how the time they spent as a gig economy worker informed the alienation and atomization of labor that ran through the original game, which they released to widespread critical acclaim in 2022.

“With Citizen Sleeper 2, I’m no longer looking at things from that perspective, I’m thinking a little more about how do we continue to build a future when we know that it’s going to fall apart. We know that there’s an inevitable entropy to everything, not just political systems and structures, but our lives and our physical bodies. We know it’s going to fall apart, and yet each day, we keep getting up and we keep doing things.”

For story reasons I won’t spoil, the protagonist of the upcoming Citizen Sleeper 2 has managed to deactivate their tracker and no longer needs Stabilizer, but that hasn’t made their existence any less precarious. Where Citizen Sleeper took place exclusively on a single space station, Citizen Sleeper 2 lets the player explore the Starward Belt, a location that’s referenced frequently in the first game.

With the change of locale comes a ship and crew for the player to manage, and a dramatic increase in scope. At approximately 250,000 words long, Citizen Sleeper 2’s script is nearly double the length of the original game’s. The stakes are higher too, with a corporate proxy war threatening to engulf the Starward Belt.

Jump Over the Age

Martin has been working on Citizen Sleeper 2 for nearly two years, or about the same amount of time it took them to complete the original game. All essential systems were already in place, allowing Martin to spend more time on gameplay experimentation and story writing, drawing in particular on two of the most beloved (and deeply human) space operas.

“You know, Cowboy Bebop is a really good story about the gig economy,” Martin says, laughing. “And people forget how little the characters in Firefly like each other, right? They’re more colleagues than friends, so there’s something really relatable in that.” During their days as a gig economy worker, Martin notes they met many people from different walks of life and places, and while the work pulls people apart almost by design, workers still find solidarity and human connection.

The new game inherits many of its predecessor’s gameplay systems. Each day or “cycle,” the player has up to five dice to assign to actions that can earn them money or advance the story. The likelihood of completing an action successfully depends on the die the player assigns to it. A five, for instance, has a 50-50 chance of producing either a neutral or positive outcome, while a six guarantees success. Each task also carries with it a risk factor, with negative dice rolls resulting in more severe results on “risky” and “dangerous” actions.

Then there are what the game calls “clocks,” the system that binds everything together. Most story objectives require the player to chip away at a task across multiple cycles. At the same time, there’s often a competing clock counting down the amount of time before a story deadline.

On the surface, all of Citizen Sleeper’s systems are simple, but they come together in a way that reinforces the game’s narrative. At least they did at the start. On my first playthrough of Citizen Sleeper, my character eventually earned enough money that securing Stabilizer for them was not an issue. Martin tells me that was by design.

“I knew I needed to have players on my side,” they say of the first game. “I needed to win people over. If the game was too harsh, I felt like players wouldn’t give it the time that I wanted them to give to it. This time around, I feel in a very different position.”

Jump Over the Age

Citizen Sleeper 2, by contrast, is a more confident game — in itself, and in its players to accept a certain degree of suffering. There are story beats and content the players can miss, which was mostly not true in the first game. It also features multiple difficulty settings, and on the hardest one, the player’s Sleeper can experience permadeath. (If you want to continue that save file, you need to lower the difficulty, but your Sleeper will be forever changed.)

“I didn’t know how Citizen Sleeper 2 was going to end when I started making it,” Martin tells me, describing that as a “dangerous game” for a developer to play. “But because I’d made the first one, I felt confident that I could play that game, and that it would come to something really exciting.”

The intended effect of Citizen Sleeper 2 is for the player to feel like Martin is leading them through a tabletop RPG experience, like Dungeons & Dragons or Blades in the Dark. The story should feel improvised, surprising and moving.

Nowhere is that newfound confidence and TTRPG inspiration more apparent than with “Contracts,” Citizen Sleeper’s 2 signature new gameplay feature. Contracts take the Sleeper and up to two companions on jobs away from the safety of the Starward Belt’s population centers.

An early one tasks the Sleeper’s crew with diffusing a damaged corporate battle drone. In practice, that meant deactivating two separate systems on the spacecraft, with the catch being that as soon as I gained access to one system, the timer for both started ticking. Each Contract is a miniature pressure cooker, with self-contained risks that can’t be relieved until the Contract is over or the player fails.

Jump Over the Age

Contracts also allowed Martin to explore one of Citizen Sleeper’s less fully realized ideas, “that the dice are the Sleeper’s body.” During Contracts, negative and neutral rolls made during risky and dangerous actions will cause the Sleeper’s stress gauge to increase — a system reminiscent of the need to obtain Stabilizer in the first game. As the gauge fills, specific rolls will begin damaging the player’s dice. Each of the Sleeper’s five dice can sustain three hits before they break; they can’t be repaired until fully broken, and not until a Contract is over. Crewmates also have stress gauges, and filling them will leave them out of commission for the remainder of a Contract.

Further complicating things is that even after fixing the Sleeper’s dice, they don’t work as expected right away, due to another new mechanic called Glitch. Depending on the components the player uses to fix the Sleeper’s body, they will fill more or less of the Sleeper’s Glitch gauge. In turn, that means there’s a greater chance of a regular die being converted into a glitched one, which has an innate 80-20 chance of producing either a negative or positive outcome, and skill points do nothing to change those odds.

At first getting a glitched die feels punishing, but I think it is one of the smartest systems Martin has added to the game. The fact that glitched dice aren’t impacted by skills means they also ignore negative modifiers, which made them great for attempting tasks my Sleeper wasn’t good at, and it really felt like I was pushing my luck. In a nice touch, there’s even an achievement players can earn, an apt nod to Cowboy Bebop named “Whatever happens, happens,” when they score a positive outcome with a glitched die.

Jump Over the Age

I never felt comfortable playing Citizen Sleeper 2 the way I did with its predecessor. The game’s constant surprises meant I often had to push my Sleeper’s body to its breaking point to complete some of its more challenging scenarios. In that way, Citizen Sleeper 2 is far more successful at bringing together its narrative and gameplay ambitions.

I also found the story profound and essential at a time when it feels like the world isn’t moving in the right direction. The characters of Citizen Sleeper 2 are surrounded by endless hardship, and yet they find a way to move forward.

“Is it pointless that we continue to strive to have human, meaningful relationships and build lives when we know that there are structures bigger than us that might crush us at any moment?” Martin asks me. “Or is it that, even though those structures are so big and powerful, we still live and work with a sense that we can build something and have meaningful relationships because our realities are very personal, real and direct?”

Like any good GM, Martin isn’t interested in handing anyone the answer to that question but hopes Citizen Sleeper 2 might lead them to their own.

Citizen Sleeper 2 arrives on January 31 on Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/citizen-sleeper-2-asks-how-we-stay-human-in-a-hopeless-future-180050858.html?src=rss

Asus unveiled the Zenbook A14 at CES 2025, a lightweight Windows laptop positioned as a competitor to Apple’s MacBook Air. Weighing just 2.18 pounds—lighter than Apple’s M3 MacBook Air—and featuring a magnesium alloy chassis with a ceramic-like “Ceraluminum” finish, the A14 prioritizes portability and style. It is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X processor, promising up to 32 hours of battery life from its 70Wh battery, significantly larger than the MacBook Air’s 52.6Wh cell.

Launching in mid-January at $1,099.99, the base model includes 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 14-inch OLED display with 1920 x 1200 resolution, 600 nits brightness, and 60Hz refresh rate. In March, a more affordable $899.99 variant with a Snapdragon X Plus processor, 16GB RAM, and 512GB SSD will be available exclusively at Best Buy, weighing slightly more at 2.4 pounds.

The A14 offers a broader range of ports compared to the MacBook Air, including two USB 4 Type-C, one USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, a full-size HDMI 2.1, and a 3.5mm audio jack. It supports up to three external monitors, though one must supply power via USB-C.

While the Zenbook A14 stands out for its design, OLED display, and competitive pricing, questions remain about its performance and compatibility. Snapdragon X processors have shown progress in balancing efficiency and performance, but Windows on ARM can still face app compatibility issues. Benchmarks suggest that while the Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite processors compete with Apple’s M3 chip, the A14’s entry-level Snapdragon X may struggle, especially with Apple’s anticipated M4 models on the horizon.

Specs

Zenbook A14 Unveiled As A Great Rival For The MacBook Air

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Life for Sleepers is fraught. They gain consciousness in a state of indentured servitude, an emulated human mind inside an android body, forced to work until they’re discarded. Those who escape don’t last long due to trackers in their bodies, and their hardcoded dependence on a drug known as Stabilizer. Without it, a Sleeper’s body will eventually reject its biosynthetic organs.

If this sounds like tech’s worst excesses of the present taken to their most extreme, you’re grasping what Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector’s creator, Gareth Damian Martin, is driving at.

“Citizen Sleeper was me drawing on things from when I was in my early 20s,” they tell me. In the past, Martin has spoken extensively about how the time they spent as a gig economy worker informed the alienation and atomization of labor that ran through the original game, which they released to widespread critical acclaim in 2022.

“With Citizen Sleeper 2, I’m no longer looking at things from that perspective, I’m thinking a little more about how do we continue to build a future when we know that it’s going to fall apart. We know that there’s an inevitable entropy to everything, not just political systems and structures, but our lives and our physical bodies. We know it’s going to fall apart, and yet each day, we keep getting up and we keep doing things.”

For story reasons I won’t spoil, the protagonist of the upcoming Citizen Sleeper 2 has managed to deactivate their tracker and no longer needs Stabilizer, but that hasn’t made their existence any less precarious. Where Citizen Sleeper took place exclusively on a single space station, Citizen Sleeper 2 lets the player explore the Starward Belt, a location that’s referenced frequently in the first game.

With the change of locale comes a ship and crew for the player to manage, and a dramatic increase in scope. At approximately 250,000 words long, Citizen Sleeper 2’s script is nearly double the length of the original game’s. The stakes are higher too, with a corporate proxy war threatening to engulf the Starward Belt.

Jump Over the Age

Martin has been working on Citizen Sleeper 2 for nearly two years, or about the same amount of time it took them to complete the original game. All essential systems were already in place, allowing Martin to spend more time on gameplay experimentation and story writing, drawing in particular on two of the most beloved (and deeply human) space operas.

“You know, Cowboy Bebop is a really good story about the gig economy,” Martin says, laughing. “And people forget how little the characters in Firefly like each other, right? They’re more colleagues than friends, so there’s something really relatable in that.” During their days as a gig economy worker, Martin notes they met many people from different walks of life and places, and while the work pulls people apart almost by design, workers still find solidarity and human connection.

The new game inherits many of its predecessor’s gameplay systems. Each day or “cycle,” the player has up to five dice to assign to actions that can earn them money or advance the story. The likelihood of completing an action successfully depends on the die the player assigns to it. A five, for instance, has a 50-50 chance of producing either a neutral or positive outcome, while a six guarantees success. Each task also carries with it a risk factor, with negative dice rolls resulting in more severe results on “risky” and “dangerous” actions.

Then there are what the game calls “clocks,” the system that binds everything together. Most story objectives require the player to chip away at a task across multiple cycles. At the same time, there’s often a competing clock counting down the amount of time before a story deadline.

On the surface, all of Citizen Sleeper’s systems are simple, but they come together in a way that reinforces the game’s narrative. At least they did at the start. On my first playthrough of Citizen Sleeper, my character eventually earned enough money that securing Stabilizer for them was not an issue. Martin tells me that was by design.

“I knew I needed to have players on my side,” they say of the first game. “I needed to win people over. If the game was too harsh, I felt like players wouldn’t give it the time that I wanted them to give to it. This time around, I feel in a very different position.”

Jump Over the Age

Citizen Sleeper 2, by contrast, is a more confident game — in itself, and in its players to accept a certain degree of suffering. There are story beats and content the players can miss, which was mostly not true in the first game. It also features multiple difficulty settings, and on the hardest one, the player’s Sleeper can experience permadeath. (If you want to continue that save file, you need to lower the difficulty, but your Sleeper will be forever changed.)

“I didn’t know how Citizen Sleeper 2 was going to end when I started making it,” Martin tells me, describing that as a “dangerous game” for a developer to play. “But because I’d made the first one, I felt confident that I could play that game, and that it would come to something really exciting.”

The intended effect of Citizen Sleeper 2 is for the player to feel like Martin is leading them through a tabletop RPG experience, like Dungeons & Dragons or Blades in the Dark. The story should feel improvised, surprising and moving.

Nowhere is that newfound confidence and TTRPG inspiration more apparent than with “Contracts,” Citizen Sleeper’s 2 signature new gameplay feature. Contracts take the Sleeper and up to two companions on jobs away from the safety of the Starward Belt’s population centers.

An early one tasks the Sleeper’s crew with diffusing a damaged corporate battle drone. In practice, that meant deactivating two separate systems on the spacecraft, with the catch being that as soon as I gained access to one system, the timer for both started ticking. Each Contract is a miniature pressure cooker, with self-contained risks that can’t be relieved until the Contract is over or the player fails.

Jump Over the Age

Contracts also allowed Martin to explore one of Citizen Sleeper’s less fully realized ideas, “that the dice are the Sleeper’s body.” During Contracts, negative and neutral rolls made during risky and dangerous actions will cause the Sleeper’s stress gauge to increase — a system reminiscent of the need to obtain Stabilizer in the first game. As the gauge fills, specific rolls will begin damaging the player’s dice. Each of the Sleeper’s five dice can sustain three hits before they break; they can’t be repaired until fully broken, and not until a Contract is over. Crewmates also have stress gauges, and filling them will leave them out of commission for the remainder of a Contract.

Further complicating things is that even after fixing the Sleeper’s dice, they don’t work as expected right away, due to another new mechanic called Glitch. Depending on the components the player uses to fix the Sleeper’s body, they will fill more or less of the Sleeper’s Glitch gauge. In turn, that means there’s a greater chance of a regular die being converted into a glitched one, which has an innate 80-20 chance of producing either a negative or positive outcome, and skill points do nothing to change those odds.

At first getting a glitched die feels punishing, but I think it is one of the smartest systems Martin has added to the game. The fact that glitched dice aren’t impacted by skills means they also ignore negative modifiers, which made them great for attempting tasks my Sleeper wasn’t good at, and it really felt like I was pushing my luck. In a nice touch, there’s even an achievement players can earn, an apt nod to Cowboy Bebop named “Whatever happens, happens,” when they score a positive outcome with a glitched die.

Jump Over the Age

I never felt comfortable playing Citizen Sleeper 2 the way I did with its predecessor. The game’s constant surprises meant I often had to push my Sleeper’s body to its breaking point to complete some of its more challenging scenarios. In that way, Citizen Sleeper 2 is far more successful at bringing together its narrative and gameplay ambitions.

I also found the story profound and essential at a time when it feels like the world isn’t moving in the right direction. The characters of Citizen Sleeper 2 are surrounded by endless hardship, and yet they find a way to move forward.

“Is it pointless that we continue to strive to have human, meaningful relationships and build lives when we know that there are structures bigger than us that might crush us at any moment?” Martin asks me. “Or is it that, even though those structures are so big and powerful, we still live and work with a sense that we can build something and have meaningful relationships because our realities are very personal, real and direct?”

Like any good GM, Martin isn’t interested in handing anyone the answer to that question but hopes Citizen Sleeper 2 might lead them to their own.

Citizen Sleeper 2 arrives on January 31 on Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/citizen-sleeper-2-asks-how-we-stay-human-in-a-hopeless-future-180050858.html?src=rss