Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS

Introduction

The Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS is the first proper third-party handheld to run SteamOS.

Besides buying a Steam Deck or Steam Deck OLED, there haven’t been any other handhelds that have come running Valve’s Linux-based operating system from the factory. Of course, you could take any one of the existing models and install a distro such as SteamOS or Bazzite on them, but then it isn’t strictly a factory experience.

In essence, the way to think of the Legion Go S SteamOS is a ‘Steam Deck Plus’ of sorts, as it provides some upgrades over Valve’s own handheld. It’s got an 8-inch 1920×1200 120Hz IPS screen, plus the option of either AMD’s Ryzen Z2 Go or Z1 Extreme chips, which are more potent than the ageing chip inside the Steam Deck, and comes in a fetching purple colour.

My sample came with the Z2 Go SoC, plus 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and a 1TB SSD (the base model has 512GB of SSD storage), which will run you £549/$600. This makes it a little more expensive than the Steam Deck and OLED models, and dearer than the recent Asus ROG Xbox Ally that’s powered by a rebadged Ryzen Z2A chip.

I’ve been testing the Legion Go S SteamOS for the last couple of weeks to see how it performs against a very crowded market.

Design

• Stylish chassis
• Comfortable frame
• Decent port selection

The Legion Go S SteamOS, being a specific Steam edition, comes in a fetching dark purple colour that Valve’s own handheld should have come in in the first place. It looks sharp and stylish, and is a nice change to the usual sea of black and grey handhelds elsewhere.

Despite a larger 8-inch screen, this handheld doesn’t ‘feel’ big, if that makes sense. It’s comfortable to hold for extended periods, with controls in sensible places. When you hold it, your fingers naturally sit over the thumbsticks, shoulder buttons and triggers, and the rear paddles. It’s the same layout as an Xbox controller and feels familiar.

A weight of 740g puts the Legion Go S SteamOS as being heavier than both the Steam Deck models and ROG Xbox Ally, although with how the weight is distributed evenly across the unit, this Lenovo handheld doesn’t feel unwieldy. Granted, the chassis is entirely plastic, but it has a pleasant texturing to it to aid comfort greatly.

As for ports, it’s pretty comparable to other handhelds at this price, with two USB4-capable Type-C ports (one of which can be used for charging), plus a headphone jack on the top side. The bottom side houses a microSD card reader for extra expandable storage without taking the unit apart.

Being USB4 means those ports support both display out and high-wattage charging capabilities, so you can easily hook the Legion Go S SteamOS up to an external monitor with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, using the handheld as more of a traditional desktop device.

Controls

• Familiar control layout
• Hall-effect thumbsticks by default
• Smaller trackpad than Steam Deck

For the most part, the controls here mimic an Xbox controller, although without the extra comfy extended grips of the ROG Xbox Ally. The Legion Go S SteamOS has two diagonally opposing thumbsticks – one on either side of the screen – plus a D-Pad on the left and offset ABXY buttons on the right.

The thumbsticks here are Hall-effect, meaning they’re a lot more accurate and durable than more traditional mechanisms, and have a smooth feel to them in use. This is another smaller upgrade for this Lenovo handheld over the Steam Deck – plenty of folks have taken their Steam Decks apart and upgraded to Hall-effect thumbsticks, but having them by default saves extra manual labour.

The top side of the Legion Go S SteamOS is home to a set of shoulder buttons and triggers, the latter of which has deep but snappy travel for more refined analogue inputs. Turning the unit over reveals two paddle switches to provide even more in the way of controls.

There is also a small black panel below the right thumbstick, which I initially thought was a fingerprint reader. However, it’s actually a trackpad if you want to use a finger for mouse-style navigation. It is a little finicky, owing to the fact that it’s tiny, and the Steam Deck has a larger and much more usable trackpad.

Hidden in the Legion Go S SteamOS’s settings menu are some basic control configurations, such as enabling or disabling rumble and controlling the deadzone of the thumbsticks, plus you can switch to a Nintendo-style layout. Beyond this, there doesn’t seem to be any more advanced configuration or remapping.

Display

• Slick 8-inch 120Hz panel
• Bright, with decent contrast, although middling black level
• Perfect colour accuracy for mainstream gaming workloads

Lenovo has stuck with the same screen as with the Windows variant of the Legion Go S with an 8-inch 1920×1200 120Hz IPS option. It isn’t OLED, as with the Steam Deck OLED, but it’s a bigger and higher resolution option with a higher refresh rate than the Steam Deck in any guise.

With the Ryzen Z2 Go or Z1 Extreme variant, this resolution is likely to be a better pairing, considering the original Legion Go came with a 2560×1600 resolution panel that’s much harder to drive with the hardware on offer.

Getting my colorimeter out revealed some reasonable results in some areas, such as a peak SDR brightness of 495.2 nits, making this a punchy screen. A 1530:1 contrast ratio is generally decent for dynamic range, although at peak brightness, the 0.42 black level is on the verge of usable. Moreover, the 8200K colour temperature pushes more towards the bluer end of the scale.

For mainstream gaming workloads, the 100% sRGB colour accuracy is great, although both the 77% DCI-P3 and 76% Adobe RGB results mean it isn’t a screen for anything more than that. Given this device’s purpose, it isn’t much of a miss.

Performance

• Faster processor than a Steam Deck or ROG Xbox Ally
• Very beefy performance at full 40W TDP
• Balanced 15W mode is more modest

The Legion Go S SteamOS is utilising one of AMD’s brand new Z2 series chips, although it isn’t the top-of-the-line Z2 Extreme chip you’ll find on more expensive handhelds such as the MSI Claw A8.

With this in mind, the Ryzen Z2 Go my sample came with is a generally ‘new’ chip over the Van Gogh APU inside the Steam Deck (and the rebadged Z2A variant inside the ROG Xbox Ally). It sticks with four cores and eight threads, although these are based on AMD’s more modern Zen 3+ architecture. As for the GPU, that’s still on AMD’s older RDNA2 architecture, but there are now 12 GPU cores against the eight of the Steam Deck’s APU.

Alongside the Z2 Go APU, my sample came with 16GB LPDDR5X RAM and a 1TB SSD, providing a little more scope for installing more than a couple of AAA games to the internal drive. The base model has a more paltry 512GB inside, though. The SSD is replaceable, although you’ll need an M.2 2242 or 2280-sized drive to do so.

SteamOS doesn’t play particularly nicely with our usual synthetic suite of benchmarks, so I took the liberty of partitioning the internal SSD and installing Windows on the Legion Go S SteamOS to provide some quantifiable numbers in a range of our usual tests.

This was quite revealing in favour of this Lenovo unit, with scores in both the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests that were higher than the Z2A chip inside the Asus ROG Xbox Ally by a good margin. As much as the core and thread count haven’t changed, it proves the benefit of more modern, faster cores. Even with the device unplugged and running at a lower wattage, it’s still faster than a plugged-in Xbox Ally.

The 1TB SSD inside is reasonably brisk, especially when the Legion Go S SteamOS was plugged in. Here, it provided reads and writes of 5164.90 MB/s and 4555.41 MB/s, although unplugging the handheld dropped this to 3466.99 MB/s reads and 3265.44 MB/s. That’s the same story as with the ROG Xbox Ally’s SSD.

As for games, most of these (apart from Rainbow Six Extraction) were run on SteamOS for comparable results to Valve’s own handheld, and provided an intriguing alternative to the ROG Xbox Ally. They were run on both the Balanced preset with 15W TDP, and the ‘Custom’ option at the Legion Go S SteamOS’s full 40W of power.

In Horizon Zero Dawn with the full 40W of power, this Lenovo handheld managed a 33fps average at 1080p, while at 720p, it sat at 50fps, putting it miles ahead of the Steam Deck and its OLED brother. It’s also ahead of the original Legion Go, and on par with the Asus ROG Ally.

Dialling the power back to 15W in the Balanced mode pushed results down to 21fps at 1080p and to 32fps at 720p. That’s more in line with other handhelds, and means that this Lenovo handheld sips power by comparison to if run at its full-blown 40W option.

Moving over to the less intensive Dirt Rally, we saw 47.43fps at 1080p and 65.19fps at 720p with the full 40W of power, providing a healthy lead over the Steam Deck, the original Legion Go and the Asus ROG Ally. At 15W,  the Legion Go S SteamOS falls back into line with 49.05fps at 720p and 36.15fps at 1080p, putting it in the middle of the pack.

For a fair test, I ran Cyberpunk 2077 on its ‘Steam Deck’ preset, both without any upscaling, and with its default FSR 2.1 Balanced setting. At the full 40W of power, I saw 51.90fps at 720p and 29.64fps at 1080p without any upscaling, which pushes way ahead of the Steam Deck, and even the Asus ROG Xbox Ally. Adding in FSR 2.1 in Balanced form took results up to 42.92fps at 1080p and  64.89fps at 720p.

Taking it down to 15W, results predictably took a hit, although the 31.48fps result at 720p natively pushes this Lenovo handheld ahead of the Steam Deck and its OLED model, although it is behind the Asus ROG Ally and original Legion Go model. At 1080p, I observed a 24.71fps natively. Adding in FSR 2.1 in Balanced form took results up to 25.97fps at 1080p and  42.11fps at 720p.

The only game that wasn’t run on SteamOS, owing to official launcher support, was the less-demanding Rainbow Six Extraction. This hit 60fps at its maximum preset at the 1920×1200 resolution without any form of resolution scaling, proving it’d be possible to max out the 120Hz refresh rate with some lower quality settings. That result is also some ten percent faster than the ROG Xbox Ally.

The thermals of the Legion Go S SteamOS impressed me, with the handheld having plenty of cooling and ventilation to stop it from becoming too warm to the touch. Granted, it produces a fair amount of fan noise under intensive load, but it wasn’t so much that it became an annoyance.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 1 hours 36 minutes in the gaming battery test
• 65W brick puts charge back into it reasonably fast

Where Lenovo hasn’t been the smartest with the Legion Go S SteamOS is with its battery capacity. Its 55.5Whr cell is less than you’ll find in the ROG Xbox Ally, although bigger than a Steam Deck’s.

Owing to the slightly more powerful components inside, I didn’t have much in the way of hopes for its endurance. It’s a tale of two halves, to be truthful, as with the brightness dialled to 150 nits and in running the PCMark 10 Modern Office test, this Lenovo handheld kept chugging for 12 hours 38 minutes. That’s some three hours longer than the ROG Xbox Ally.

That is only one side of the story, though, as in the Gaming test, it barely managed two hours with a total runtime of one hour and 36 minutes. This is nearly an hour less than the ROG Xbox Ally, and half an hour less than the Steam Deck.

The Legion Go S SteamOS comes with a compact 65W charger, which is decently effective at getting go-juice back into the unit quite quickly, taking 36 minutes to get it back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 80 minutes. This is a little faster than the Steam Deck’s times, and on par with the ROG Xbox Ally.

Games & Software

• SteamOS is slick and polished
• Can be finicky to run non-Steam games
• Desktop mode is present, although less intuitive than Windows

The kicker with the Legion Go S SteamOS is that it runs SteamOS – it’s the first third-party handheld that Valve has allowed to do so – which provides a slick and fast operating system that puts your Steam library front and centre.

Having dual-wielded SteamOS and Windows on this Lenovo handheld, I can see the appeal of SteamOS. It boots much faster, and is much more intuitive on first boot, with a similar UI to consoles, than having to deal with a full desktop Windows setup that’s horrible to use. 

I didn’t necessarily feel the need to immediately hook up a mouse and keyboard to this Lenovo handheld, not least with Steam in its ‘gaming’ mode. Booting into a Windows handheld and using the touchscreen for navigation immediately made me question my life choices, for comparison’s sake.

Running SteamOS obviously provides easy access to any Steam games you have, which can be installed at the touch of a button. You can also buy games through the integrated storefront. What’s more, most games on Steam have been rated to work with handhelds, with fully approved ones getting a green tick, playable ones are in orange, and ones that won’t work are marked in red.

If you want to delve into a more desktop-style experience (which you will need to to get third-party launchers running), then SteamOS is fundamentally built on a form of Linux. You can go into Desktop Mode reasonably easily through the Legion Go S SteamOS’s menu system, which puts you into a convenient desktop environment in a similar vein to Windows, If you’ve never really delved into the world of Linux before, it can be a bit daunting, but it’s there if you want to learn or try it out.

It is possible to run games from third-party launchers such as Ubisoft Connect in SteamOS, although it requires you to jump through a few hoops to install the launcher and the games, and then integrate it into Steam by adding a ‘non-Steam game or app’ in the settings menu. It’s in this aspect that Microsoft’s new Xbox Full Screen Experience has a bit of an edge, as it pulls through games from all launchers by default, and provides the compatibility edge of Windows out of the box.

With this in mind, I like the slickness of SteamOS and how responsive it feels. It’s also less of a performance burden than Windows can be, allowing for faster gaming performance. For folks wanting a console-style experience in a PC-type handheld, it’s polished and very easy to live with – just as long as you don’t mind a little bit of tinkering in Linux to get all your games working.

Should you buy it?

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