Lenovo is eager to prove that expanding its Legion brand from gaming laptops to gaming handhelds wasn’t a one-hit wonder. The company’s first attempt at competing with the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go, was a big swing that mostly hit its mark, though it saw more than a few of the growing pains that often come with first-generation hardware. Nearly two years later, Lenovo is back with new hardware featuring AMD’s latest custom mobile gaming processor, the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go.
The Lenovo Legion Go S ($729) is a sleeker, slimmer redesign of the Legion Go. It improves on much of the original, cutting down on the system’s bulkiness by trimming the screen size, ditching the removable controllers, and improving the battery. But it comes up short where it counts: performance. The Legion Go S is an undeniable improvement compared with the first Legion Go, but the gains aren’t significant enough to warrant an upgrade. For that, wait for the true Legion Go successor expected later this year, or consider the Asus ROG Ally X, our current Editors’ Choice award winner in the category.
Design: A New and Improved Handheld
The Legion Go S is not quite a sequel to 2023’s Lenovo Legion Go—in fact, it’s probably more accurate to compare it with something like the Nintendo Switch Lite—but that didn’t stop Lenovo from making more than a few key changes. The first is the device’s size: The original Legion Go measured in at 5.16 by 11.7 by 1.6 inches (HWD) and weighed 1.88 pounds, far bulkier and heavier than the likes of the Steam Deck OLED (1.41 pounds), the Asus ROG Ally X (1.49 pounds), and the MSI Claw (1.48 pounds). The trimmer Go S measures 5 by 11.7 by 0.8 inches and tips the scales at 1.61 pounds.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The new Go feels lighter in my hands, even if it’s still the heaviest. It’s also more comfortable, with an anti-slip texture around the console’s grips. The detachable controllers, one of the selling points of the original Go, are gone, though if you ask me, they were more trouble than they were worth. The kickstand on the back of the housing is also gone.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Legion Go S features 32GB of DDR5 memory, 1TB of storage, and an AMD Ryzen Z2 Go CPU. The top of the machine houses two USB-C ports, each supporting 40Gbps data transfers, Power Delivery 3.0, and DisplayPort 1.4 for connecting to external displays. A 3.5mm headphone jack accompanies these ports. That’s one fewer connection than the Legion Go, which had a third USB-C port at the bottom. On the Legion Go S, that area instead includes a microSD card slot.
The screen has had a nip-and-tuck, measuring 8 inches diagonally (0.8 inch smaller than the original). Display resolution also takes a hit, landing at 1,900 by 1,200 pixels with a 16:10 aspect ratio and a 120Hz refresh rate, down from 1600p and 144Hz. You might think this a significant downgrade, but truthfully, you wouldn’t find many games (if any) that benefitted from the higher-resolution screen or its faster refresh rate at this screen size. Hence, the step back is one that many users won’t notice.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The resolution and refresh rate might differ, but the Legion Go S still has a 10-point IPS touch screen with 500 nits of brightness. The new display supports variable refresh rates (VRR), which was missing from the previous model. Two forward-facing 2-watt speakers and a dual-array mic are built into the machine. The touchpad module also returns, though it’s considerably smaller than the previous model’s.
Legion Space, a software tool for aggregating game launchers and managing device settings, also returns with a much-needed facelift. It’s similar to Asus’ Armoury Crate, providing a place to manage and purchase games. The tool also provides insight into the console’s settings and logistics, like CPU temperatures and fan speeds. It’s instantly available by pressing the Lenovo Space button at the top left of the screen.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Another noticeable difference is the use here of adaptive triggers, which are adjustable to your play style with the flip of a switch on the backside. For example, switching the trigger down allows for longer presses, ideal for racing games, while short trigger presses (with less travel time) might be better suited for twitchy action titles. Frictionless Hall-effect joysticks also make a return. The joysticks use a small magnetic field to detect position, eliminating stick drift and dead zones. Two additional paddles are also easily accessible on the machine’s backside.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Like the Lenovo Go, the Go S uses fans to draw cool air through the handheld’s generously perforated backplate, letting hot air out through the top vents. Without the kickstand, the vents have a little more room to breathe, and they’ll need all the space they can get, as the high-performance mode can reach up to 40 watts of TDP, up from 30W.
The AMD Ryzen Z2 Go Detailed
Despite its redesigned exterior and slightly slimmer design, the real game-changer lies inside the Legion Go S body. The Go S utilizes AMD’s new mobile-gaming processor, the Ryzen Z2 Go. Revealed at CES 2025, it’s the successor to AMD’s Ryzen Z1, the chip that powered the Legion Go, the Asus ROG Ally, and the Ally X.
Here’s where things get a little muddy. The Z1 came in two flavors: the Z1 Extreme and the slightly downgraded plain Z1. The Z2 is available in three variants: the Z2 Extreme, the vanilla Z2, and the Z2 Go seen here.
(Credit: AMD)
As you may have guessed, the Z2 Go is the least potent chip in the newer generation, with only four cores and eight threads versus the Z1 Extreme’s eight cores and 16 threads. Lenovo has not confirmed a version of the Legion Go S that would use the Z2 or Z2 Extreme, but they have confirmed that a cheaper version of the Go S and a $599 model running SteamOS will launch this May.
This situation means we’ll have to wait for the release of the real successor to the original Go, the Legion Go 2, to see the Z2 Extreme in action. As of now, Lenovo has no pricing or release window available.
Testing the Lenovo Legion Go S: Slow and Steady Doesn’t Win the Race, After All
While AMD’s Z2 Extreme sits on a cloud on the horizon, we must settle for the Z2 Go today. So, how much of an improvement does the new hardware make? To figure that out, I conducted our gaming laptop benchmarks to test the system’s processing prowess and other graphics, battery, and content creation benchmarks. I’ve also played a handful of new and old games to see how the system handles real-world scenarios.
Since we recently switched to a new benchmark suite, I can’t compare the Lenovo Go S directly with the first Lenovo Go, the MSI Claw, or the Asus ROG Ally. I can, however, compare it with the Asus ROG Ally X and MSI Claw 8 AI+, along with a couple of similarly stacked gaming laptops.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, tests a system in productivity apps such as web browsing, word processing, and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC’s storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoding tool HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
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In these comparisons, the Go S slumped behind much of its laptop competition, but it’s interesting to see how it compared with the ROG Ally X, which has the Z1 Extreme. The additional cores and threads are at work in the Ally X, as it outperformed the base-level Z2 Go in all of these tests. When the Ally X costs just $70 more, the math works against the Legion Go S here.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We challenge systems’ graphics with several animations or gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) uses the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. At the same time, Steel Nomad Light (also 1440p) focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. The Solar Bay subtest emphasizes ray-tracing performance.
Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. Here, each game was tested at two sets of graphics settings.
We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push test systems fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies.
The Go S fared just OK in the 3DMark tests. The fact that they ran at all is impressive enough, but these tests don’t necessarily reflect actual gameplay 1:1. Thanks to advances in upscaling tech, less-than-stellar numbers don’t mean the handheld computer can’t punch above its weight.
You can see some of that in the benchmarks with actual games. Notice how AMD’s FSR upscaling technique transforms F1 2024 from a slideshow to something playable. (Where you see references to Nvidia’s “DLSS” in the charts, we’ve used each system’s native-supported upscaling tool. The Asus and Lenovo PC gaming handhelds only have access to FSR, while the MSI model uses Intel’s XeSS.) Cyberpunk 2077 was basically unplayable, so don’t expect to play such robust games on this device without tweaking detail and resolution settings considerably and using FSR.
In most situations, the Z2 Go’s power and efficiency balance makes games playable, at least at 30 frames per second (fps). However, AMD’s FSR upscaling (before adjusting detail settings) is essential to make some games playable on such a processor.
Anecdotal Tests: A Wide Range of Games on the Go
As with my reviews of other handheld systems like this, I played some games on the Legion Go S to try to get a wider sense of real-world performance beyond the benchmarks. My rapid-fire observations covered popular classics and recent releases. The list includes Baldur’s Gate 3, Starfield, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Deep Rock Galactic, Marvel Rivals, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Bioshock Infinite.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Let’s start with some easy wins: 2011’s Bioshock Infinite ran flawlessly at Medium presets and 1080p resolution, averaging about 60fps. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk (2023) also performed as intended, looking sharp on the 8-inch screen. On the other hand, Deep Rock Galactic (2020) could barely maintain 60fps on Low presets. Dropping the quality creates a muddy image, but the vibrant visual design helps it pop. Wolfenstein 2 (2017) also held 60fps on Low presets, but I saw some visual glitches.
Moving to some low points, the Go S would not even start last year’s Indiana Jones game, suggesting the game doesn’t support the Z2 Go processor or that a forthcoming driver fix may be in order. Marvel Rivals, the latest multiplayer sensation, didn’t fare too well either, barely reaching 30fps on Low presets. Starfield maintained a shaky 30fps but was far more stable than when I played it on the original Lenovo Go.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The most impressive gains I observed were when playing Baldur’s Gate 3. Utilizing FSR 2.2 at 1200p, I observed high 50fps to 60fps while moving around the Druid Grove, one of the game’s early areas. Dropping the resolution down to 1,600 by 900 held 60fps more often than at full native resolution, and dropping the resolution further, to 720p, maintained 60fps most of the time, though the image quality plummeted.
But these are still better results than when we tested Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Lenovo Go, MSI Claw, and Steam Deck OLED. It’s a testament to what efficient upscaling can accomplish.
Battery Life Testing the Lenovo Legion Go S
We test each system’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We ensure the battery is fully charged, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off before the test. As with the Lenovo Go, I chose the quiet thermal mode (8W) and Balanced OS power mode preset for my testing.
Surprisingly, the Legion Go S lasted longer than the Legion Go—much longer. The Go S tapped out after less than 9 hours, nearly 4 hours longer. Chalk it up perhaps in part to the 55.5Whr battery (an improvement from the original Go’s 49.2WHr battery), but the Go S impressed. At least when it comes to video watching, the Go S is built to last. However, the 80WHr MSI Claw 8 AI+ outlasted the Lenovo by a vast margin.
In the real world, however, you use these devices mostly to play games, and battery life is determined by your game and the settings in use. I ran Cyberpunk 2077 at full 1200p resolution with Steam Deck presets enabled, fans on Smart mode, and console thermals set to Performance. I also used the same battery testing guidelines (airplane mode, Wi-Fi and RGB lighting off, and brightness at 50%), and I saw it last just 1 hour and 33 minutes of playtime before the console quit.
Verdict: A Decent Handheld, But Needs a Price Cut
Overall, the Lenovo Legion Go S isn’t a home-run first outing for the AMD Ryzen Z2 series, but it’s a solid base hit. While the performance gains are limited, it’s too early to write off the new Z2 processors without seeing what the full-fat versions can do. As a handheld, the Go S cures some of the first Go’s faults, but it doesn’t feel like a full step forward—more like a step to the side.
If you skipped the original Legion Go, or the Asus ROG Ally, the Go S is a tempting introduction to the world of Windows handhelds, but it’s not worth an upgrade if you already own one. And at $729, we might be tempted to wait for a cheaper option. Again, for just another $70, you can get the more potent and longer-lasting Asus ROG Ally X, which we recommend. (And, of course, the Steam Deck is always there.) Otherwise, wait for the Legion Go 2 model.
The Bottom Line
The Lenovo Legion Go S debuts AMD’s latest mobile gaming processor and boosts battery life over the past generation, but its performance ceiling is limited for the price.
About Zackery Cuevas
Analyst, Hardware
