Legion Go Performance Review, This FAST Hand-Held Has An Edge Over The Rest

The New Lenovo Legion Go: A Solid Handheld Gaming Device

The new Lenovo Legion Go is a handheld gaming device that has been generating a lot of buzz in the tech community. This device comes with a 7-inch AMOLED display, powered by an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor, and is equipped with a range of features that make it perfect for playing games on the go.

One of the standout features of the Lenovo Legion Go is its ability to use FPS mode, which allows it to function as a handheld gaming controller. This feature was first introduced by Lenovo, and some people may have been skeptical about its potential usefulness. However, after testing the device for an extended period, I can confidently say that FPS mode is actually really fun, especially when paired with a big screen.

The Lenovo Legion Go features a range of buttons on the right-hand side, including M1 and M2, which can be used to control gameplay. The device also comes equipped with a built-in scroll wheel, which makes navigating menus and other interfaces a breeze. The trackpad is another feature that sets this device apart from its competitors, providing a precise way to interact with the device.

In terms of performance, the Lenovo Legion Go is capable of delivering smooth and seamless gameplay, even at high settings. I was able to play After Burner at 1200p low settings, achieving an average frame rate of around 78 FPS. This is comparable to other handheld devices on the market, but the Lenovo Legion Go's custom performance profiles and ability to adjust power consumption make it stand out from the crowd.

Battery Life: A Key Consideration

One of the most important factors to consider when choosing a handheld device for gaming is battery life. The Lenovo Legion Go has a 49.2 hour battery, which may seem impressive at first glance, but it's actually quite reasonable given the device's power consumption. In quiet mode, the total system power draw is around 14.6 Watts, while balanced mode sees an increase to 24.5 Watts. This translates to around 203 minutes of gaming time, depending on the settings used.

To give you a better idea of what to expect from this device, I conducted some tests using After Burner. At 100% screen brightness and in quiet mode, the total system power draw was around 20 Watts, resulting in around 120 minutes of gameplay. However, when switching to performance mode, the power draw increased to 30.2 Watts, reducing gaming time to around 97 minutes.

Customization: A Key Feature

One of the things that sets the Lenovo Legion Go apart from its competitors is its ability to customize performance profiles. This allows users to tailor the device's settings to their specific needs, whether they're looking for maximum power consumption or minimum energy use. The device also comes equipped with a range of features, including a built-in cooling system and customizable TDP settings.

Conclusion

The Lenovo Legion Go is a solid handheld gaming device that offers a range of features and capabilities that make it perfect for playing games on the go. Its ability to function as a handheld controller, combined with its impressive performance and battery life, make it an excellent choice for anyone looking for a portable gaming solution. As more people get their hands on this device and provide feedback, we can expect to see even more features and capabilities added in future updates.

Future Updates and Possibilities

As I mentioned earlier, Lenovo has announced plans to release future updates and new features for the Legion Go. One of the things that I'm most excited about is the possibility of integrating an eGPU (external graphics processing unit) using one of the USB 4 ports. This would allow users to connect a high-end GPU to the device, potentially opening up a whole new world of gaming possibilities.

I'd also love to see some emulation showcases in future videos, as this could be a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of the Lenovo Legion Go. Additionally, I think it's worth exploring other ways that users can customize and modify their devices, such as installing custom ROMs or modifying the firmware.

Overall, the Lenovo Legion Go is an excellent handheld gaming device that offers a range of features and capabilities that make it perfect for playing games on the go. With its impressive performance, battery life, and customization options, this device has something to offer everyone who's looking for a portable gaming solution.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again the Lenovo Legion go is finally here and in this video we're going to be taking a look at some gameplay we're going to be running some benchmarks and just talking about the overall unit if you're interested in checking out my first look video I'll leave a link for that in the description we went over quite a lot in that I might recap some of that stuff in this video but I've had about a week to spend with the legion go and I'm really enjoying this new handheld gaming PC from Lenovo so if you're not familiar with the legion go basically what we have here is a big screen handheld gaming pc/ console this thing is awesome it's got an 8.8 in IPS display at 144 HZ and it's powered by the AMD ryzen Z1 extreme Apu with r dna3 Graphics out of the box this is running Windows but Lenovo has added Legion space and by the way at the time of making this video I'm on version 1.0.20 so if you take a look here you can see we've got a nice little interface here here we can kind of curate all of our games they do have a game store built in here you don't have to buy from here you can install basically anything you want after all it is a Windows PC and Legion SPAC is here to kind of just make everything really easy to access including performance modes I just went ahead and plugged in my game capture device so we could get a better look at everything and from within Legion space we're going to head to settings performance thermal mode we've got a few modes that we can mess with here quiet f Balan performance custom what I've noticed so far is quiet is around 10 watts balanced is 15 performance will jump up to 30 watts in some cases and then come right back down to around 20 and we've also got custom here we can adjust the TDP from 5 Watts up to 30 Watts but 30 watts is definitely going to give us some really great performance but with all of the gaming we're going to take a look at in this video I'm in performance mode so I'm not using that custom also got our OS power mode set to Performance we can set the fan up to go full speed and yeah I mean this does put out some air puts out a little bit of noise but you know without that enabled it's actually a really Qui and cool system actually pretty impressed with the thermals here now obviously Legion space has a lot more built in and this really allows us to kind of customize everything on the legion go and by the way from general settings you can easily check which version of Legion space you're running back up here and uh one of the things that I really wanted to show you guys were some benchmarks because this is actually putting out some really great performance but before we get into that I do want to give you a quick rundown on the specs one more time they're very similar to some of the other devices on the market right now but we are working with a little more here given the ram speed screen size refresh rate and everything like that for that Apu we've got the AMD ryzen Z1 extreme these cores are based on Zen 4 we've got eight cores 16 threads a base clock of 3.3 GHz and a boost up to 5.1 builtin Radeon rdna 3 IG puu with 12 cus 16 GB of LP ddr5x running at 7500 megat transfers per second right now they are offering two different storage variants of the go you can pick this up with either a 512 GB m.2 or a 1 tbte but both of them are using a pcie 4.0 nvme m.2 SSD micro SD card slot that supports up to a 2 tbte card a 144 her 8.8 in 16 by10 Lenovo pure sight QHD plus display it's got a resolution of 2560 x600 97% dcip 3 up to 500 nits of brightness Wi-Fi 6E 2x2 Bluetooth 5.2 a 49.2 WTH battery and this is running Windows 11 home right out of the box next thing we're going to be taking a look at are some benchmarks that I ran on this device and keep in mind we are in performance mode I didn't take up a custom TDP or anything and the first one here is geekbench 6 single core 2,148 multi 10,565 so yeah I mean we're definitely putting out some great single and multicore performance moving over to some GPU benchmarks using 3D Mark night raid 27,825 I also ran fire strike which netted us a 7,590 and finally time spy with a 3,346 now if you watch my channel you know I test a lot of apus this is one of the highest scores that I've seen out of an igpu so far and it's really coming down to this thing having that 7500 megga transfers per second ram a lot faster than some of the other handhelds on the market with this same chip but of course these are synthetic benchmarks and now I want to show you how this thing performs with real world gaming and the first one here is my favorite racing game one that I always test Forza Horizon 5 1200p medium settings no resolution scale we got an average of 91 FPS with this game at medium settings now I do believe that if we took this down to 800p we could run this at 120 htz we may need to take some of those mediums down the low but this display would definitely handle it being that it maxes out at 144 but I mean either way you look at it this is running on an igpu integrated graphics and this is some outstanding performance next one here is Spider-Man Miles Morales and this game is always hit or miss on these igpus right now we're at 800p low settings but we're seeing some great performance I mean we're over 60 and usually I do like locking this down at 60 FPS I've got vsync on here and the screen goes up to 144 we're not going to hit 144 with this but we did have an average of 74 FPS Ratchet and Clank Rift apart 800p low settings we got an average of 72 FPS this is looking really good and you know we definitely tested this on a lot of other handheld this is some of the best performance we've seen so far and with all of these games I personally like doing 60 or over even though we're on a handheld keep in mind I mean we could up the resolution set this at 30 FPS and play it all day at medium settings I also wanted to throw one fighting game in here so I went with Mortal Kombat 1 with this we are at 1200p low settings but I do have FSR set to Performance here so it's FSR 2.2 and it really helps out other wise you definitely have to take this down to 800p but when it comes to fighting games on this igpu you should have a really good time with it Street Fighter 6 also runs at full speed you want to do some injustice too not a problem I also wanted to test out Red Dead 2 so I just used the built-in Benchmark we're at 800p low settings and I do have power plugged in just to show you that that TDP does go up a little bit you can see we're at 32 and you know the benchmark's been running for a little while when I started it up it was sitting there at 35 but we're seeing some great performance we actually netted an average of 81 FPS with Red Dead 2 on an igpu so one of the standout features of the new Legion go are the detachable controllers and what they're calling FPS mode we've got these little lock mechanisms around back just put a little pressure on them we're going to pull them off now these are automatically going to reconnect to the legion go and we can use them wirelessly just like this if we want to but taking a look at the rightand controller we've got a scroll wheel right here we've got a few extra buttons M1 M2 and on the bottom you'll see we've got a little Optical sensor with a switch we're going to put this in fps mode we'll grab the FPS dock by the way this magnetically attaches to the controller and now we can use the right-and joystick or the right-and controller as a mouse it's got that built-in scroll wheel we've got that M1 and M2 button so Mouse one Mouse 2 left click right click whatever you want to call it and while this is setting up on the desk with the built-in stand it makes it really easy to play your favorite firstperson shooter games and of course we had to test out FPS mode so I went with cyberpunk 277 we're at 1200p low settings FSR is set to perform we can get an average of around 78 FPS which has fallen right in line with some of the other handhelds on The Mark with a very similar chip but FPS mode is actually really fun when Lenovo first announced this someone saw FPS mode I thought yeah that's cool I might not use it much but after messing around with this for about a week I've actually fallen in love with FPS mode lot of fun and it's even more fun when you have this connected to a big screen but I wanted to show you everything running on this build 10 8.8 in display I haven't adjusted any of the settings at all maybe turning up the sensitivity would help out for some people but yeah this is really cool I also wanted to give you an idea of what kind of battery life we can get out of the Legion go so I did some testing here and uh in After Burner you can see that our CPU package power is 20 wats but that's not the total story because right underneath there we've actually got total system power draw from the battery since we know the exact size of the battery in the legion go we can do some simple math here at all of these power profiles and get an idea of what kind of battery life we're going to get out of this the legion go has a 49.2 hour battery with all of my testing I did have the screen brightness at 100% in quiet mode total battery draw is around 14 .6 Watts that should net us around 203 minutes balanced mode battery draw is 24.5 Watts around 120 Minutes in performance mode it jumps up to 30.2 around 97 minutes and a custom base 30 Watts across the board 38.3 Watts around 75 minutes keep in mind this is just an estimated battery life given what we know all it takes is a little bit of math we know the size of the battery and total system draw from the battery at these different performance levels so yeah overall I think the new Lenovo Legion go is a solid handheld love the fact that we've got this trackpad over here and it does have some haptics built in really easy to navigate windows but again Lenovo gave us Legion space and you know if you just wanted to game on this all you need to really do is stay in Legion space go to your games come right back here the AMD ryzen Z1 extreme is a great performer we do have a lot of customizability here when it comes to T DP different performance profiles that we can choose from and of course in a future video we're going to see how far we can really take this device but I wanted to give you a look at it in its stock form factor and the way it comes set up out of the box putting it in performance mode really does turn this into an awesome gaming machine and I'm sure as more people get their hands on these and give Lenovo some feedback we'll see more features in Legion space but this is a really nice handheld and I think Lenovo has done a bang up job now I will have a couple more videos coming we definitely want to test an egpu using one of those USB 4 ports let me know in the comments below What GPU you'd like to see paired up with this I mean we could go up to the RTX 4090 if you want or we could take it easy with something a little lower in I'll also have a full emulation Showcase Video coming up soon and if there's anything else you want to see tested on this let me know in the comments below but that's going to wrap it up for this one if you're interested in learning a little more or maybe picking up the new Lenovo Legion go I'll leave some links in the description you can head over to lenovo's website or Best Buy both of those will be down below but that's it for this one like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again the Lenovo Legion go is finally here and in this video we're going to be taking a look at some gameplay we're going to be running some benchmarks and just talking about the overall unit if you're interested in checking out my first look video I'll leave a link for that in the description we went over quite a lot in that I might recap some of that stuff in this video but I've had about a week to spend with the legion go and I'm really enjoying this new handheld gaming PC from Lenovo so if you're not familiar with the legion go basically what we have here is a big screen handheld gaming pc/ console this thing is awesome it's got an 8.8 in IPS display at 144 HZ and it's powered by the AMD ryzen Z1 extreme Apu with r dna3 Graphics out of the box this is running Windows but Lenovo has added Legion space and by the way at the time of making this video I'm on version 1.0.20 so if you take a look here you can see we've got a nice little interface here here we can kind of curate all of our games they do have a game store built in here you don't have to buy from here you can install basically anything you want after all it is a Windows PC and Legion SPAC is here to kind of just make everything really easy to access including performance modes I just went ahead and plugged in my game capture device so we could get a better look at everything and from within Legion space we're going to head to settings performance thermal mode we've got a few modes that we can mess with here quiet f Balan performance custom what I've noticed so far is quiet is around 10 watts balanced is 15 performance will jump up to 30 watts in some cases and then come right back down to around 20 and we've also got custom here we can adjust the TDP from 5 Watts up to 30 Watts but 30 watts is definitely going to give us some really great performance but with all of the gaming we're going to take a look at in this video I'm in performance mode so I'm not using that custom also got our OS power mode set to Performance we can set the fan up to go full speed and yeah I mean this does put out some air puts out a little bit of noise but you know without that enabled it's actually a really Qui and cool system actually pretty impressed with the thermals here now obviously Legion space has a lot more built in and this really allows us to kind of customize everything on the legion go and by the way from general settings you can easily check which version of Legion space you're running back up here and uh one of the things that I really wanted to show you guys were some benchmarks because this is actually putting out some really great performance but before we get into that I do want to give you a quick rundown on the specs one more time they're very similar to some of the other devices on the market right now but we are working with a little more here given the ram speed screen size refresh rate and everything like that for that Apu we've got the AMD ryzen Z1 extreme these cores are based on Zen 4 we've got eight cores 16 threads a base clock of 3.3 GHz and a boost up to 5.1 builtin Radeon rdna 3 IG puu with 12 cus 16 GB of LP ddr5x running at 7500 megat transfers per second right now they are offering two different storage variants of the go you can pick this up with either a 512 GB m.2 or a 1 tbte but both of them are using a pcie 4.0 nvme m.2 SSD micro SD card slot that supports up to a 2 tbte card a 144 her 8.8 in 16 by10 Lenovo pure sight QHD plus display it's got a resolution of 2560 x600 97% dcip 3 up to 500 nits of brightness Wi-Fi 6E 2x2 Bluetooth 5.2 a 49.2 WTH battery and this is running Windows 11 home right out of the box next thing we're going to be taking a look at are some benchmarks that I ran on this device and keep in mind we are in performance mode I didn't take up a custom TDP or anything and the first one here is geekbench 6 single core 2,148 multi 10,565 so yeah I mean we're definitely putting out some great single and multicore performance moving over to some GPU benchmarks using 3D Mark night raid 27,825 I also ran fire strike which netted us a 7,590 and finally time spy with a 3,346 now if you watch my channel you know I test a lot of apus this is one of the highest scores that I've seen out of an igpu so far and it's really coming down to this thing having that 7500 megga transfers per second ram a lot faster than some of the other handhelds on the market with this same chip but of course these are synthetic benchmarks and now I want to show you how this thing performs with real world gaming and the first one here is my favorite racing game one that I always test Forza Horizon 5 1200p medium settings no resolution scale we got an average of 91 FPS with this game at medium settings now I do believe that if we took this down to 800p we could run this at 120 htz we may need to take some of those mediums down the low but this display would definitely handle it being that it maxes out at 144 but I mean either way you look at it this is running on an igpu integrated graphics and this is some outstanding performance next one here is Spider-Man Miles Morales and this game is always hit or miss on these igpus right now we're at 800p low settings but we're seeing some great performance I mean we're over 60 and usually I do like locking this down at 60 FPS I've got vsync on here and the screen goes up to 144 we're not going to hit 144 with this but we did have an average of 74 FPS Ratchet and Clank Rift apart 800p low settings we got an average of 72 FPS this is looking really good and you know we definitely tested this on a lot of other handheld this is some of the best performance we've seen so far and with all of these games I personally like doing 60 or over even though we're on a handheld keep in mind I mean we could up the resolution set this at 30 FPS and play it all day at medium settings I also wanted to throw one fighting game in here so I went with Mortal Kombat 1 with this we are at 1200p low settings but I do have FSR set to Performance here so it's FSR 2.2 and it really helps out other wise you definitely have to take this down to 800p but when it comes to fighting games on this igpu you should have a really good time with it Street Fighter 6 also runs at full speed you want to do some injustice too not a problem I also wanted to test out Red Dead 2 so I just used the built-in Benchmark we're at 800p low settings and I do have power plugged in just to show you that that TDP does go up a little bit you can see we're at 32 and you know the benchmark's been running for a little while when I started it up it was sitting there at 35 but we're seeing some great performance we actually netted an average of 81 FPS with Red Dead 2 on an igpu so one of the standout features of the new Legion go are the detachable controllers and what they're calling FPS mode we've got these little lock mechanisms around back just put a little pressure on them we're going to pull them off now these are automatically going to reconnect to the legion go and we can use them wirelessly just like this if we want to but taking a look at the rightand controller we've got a scroll wheel right here we've got a few extra buttons M1 M2 and on the bottom you'll see we've got a little Optical sensor with a switch we're going to put this in fps mode we'll grab the FPS dock by the way this magnetically attaches to the controller and now we can use the right-and joystick or the right-and controller as a mouse it's got that built-in scroll wheel we've got that M1 and M2 button so Mouse one Mouse 2 left click right click whatever you want to call it and while this is setting up on the desk with the built-in stand it makes it really easy to play your favorite firstperson shooter games and of course we had to test out FPS mode so I went with cyberpunk 277 we're at 1200p low settings FSR is set to perform we can get an average of around 78 FPS which has fallen right in line with some of the other handhelds on The Mark with a very similar chip but FPS mode is actually really fun when Lenovo first announced this someone saw FPS mode I thought yeah that's cool I might not use it much but after messing around with this for about a week I've actually fallen in love with FPS mode lot of fun and it's even more fun when you have this connected to a big screen but I wanted to show you everything running on this build 10 8.8 in display I haven't adjusted any of the settings at all maybe turning up the sensitivity would help out for some people but yeah this is really cool I also wanted to give you an idea of what kind of battery life we can get out of the Legion go so I did some testing here and uh in After Burner you can see that our CPU package power is 20 wats but that's not the total story because right underneath there we've actually got total system power draw from the battery since we know the exact size of the battery in the legion go we can do some simple math here at all of these power profiles and get an idea of what kind of battery life we're going to get out of this the legion go has a 49.2 hour battery with all of my testing I did have the screen brightness at 100% in quiet mode total battery draw is around 14 .6 Watts that should net us around 203 minutes balanced mode battery draw is 24.5 Watts around 120 Minutes in performance mode it jumps up to 30.2 around 97 minutes and a custom base 30 Watts across the board 38.3 Watts around 75 minutes keep in mind this is just an estimated battery life given what we know all it takes is a little bit of math we know the size of the battery and total system draw from the battery at these different performance levels so yeah overall I think the new Lenovo Legion go is a solid handheld love the fact that we've got this trackpad over here and it does have some haptics built in really easy to navigate windows but again Lenovo gave us Legion space and you know if you just wanted to game on this all you need to really do is stay in Legion space go to your games come right back here the AMD ryzen Z1 extreme is a great performer we do have a lot of customizability here when it comes to T DP different performance profiles that we can choose from and of course in a future video we're going to see how far we can really take this device but I wanted to give you a look at it in its stock form factor and the way it comes set up out of the box putting it in performance mode really does turn this into an awesome gaming machine and I'm sure as more people get their hands on these and give Lenovo some feedback we'll see more features in Legion space but this is a really nice handheld and I think Lenovo has done a bang up job now I will have a couple more videos coming we definitely want to test an egpu using one of those USB 4 ports let me know in the comments below What GPU you'd like to see paired up with this I mean we could go up to the RTX 4090 if you want or we could take it easy with something a little lower in I'll also have a full emulation Showcase Video coming up soon and if there's anything else you want to see tested on this let me know in the comments below but that's going to wrap it up for this one if you're interested in learning a little more or maybe picking up the new Lenovo Legion go I'll leave some links in the description you can head over to lenovo's website or Best Buy both of those will be down below but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching\n"