It wasn't very long ago that handheld PCs were hulking devices, sporting processors far too slow for gaming. That's definitely not the case anymore and the best handheld gaming PCs are fantastic little machines. Lenovo's first entry into this market is a tad late to the party but it's come in with all guns blazing.
The first thing you'll notice is the screen: At 8.8 inches in size, it's one of the biggest out there and the 1600p 144Hz panel is gorgeous to look at and use. It does make the Legion Go somewhat of a bulky affair and it's certainly not as portable as an Ayaneo Air 1S or even the Valve Steam Deck.
But this is where the Legion Go plays its ace card. Detach the controllers, set the chassis on its integrated stand, and then sit back to enjoy a great gaming experience. The right hand one can even work as a basic mouse, though you'll be better off using a proper one.
Lenovo packed a lot of top-spec hardware inside, with AMD's Ryzen Z1 Extreme handling all of the processing duties, and 16GB of fast LPDDR5x-7500 memory to back it up. The base models comes with a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD but you can get a 1TB version for an extra $50.
The Legion Go and most other handheld PCs are best suited to indie-style games or ones that just aren't heavy on the graphics. The GPU inside the Z1 Extreme is an RDNA 3-powered Radeon 780M, with 768 shaders.
That's not powerful enough for AAA games at 1600p, even at Low settings, as Jacob discovered in his Legion Go review. It's just too many pixels for the little Radeon to handle, so just knock it down to 1080p, enable FSR upscaling if it's supported, and you'll be fine.
These hardware specs would typically command a very high price but Lenovo is pitched it just right, at a cent under $700 for the 512GB model. So with the current $50 on both models, you're getting a seriously good machine for a really nice price.
