5 reasons why you should buy a Legion Go over a Steam Deck

the Lenovo Legion go and the valve steam deck are both fantastic devices and while they are both handhelds they're actually four two different audiences so here are five reasons why you should buy the Lenovo Legion go over the steam deck starting with number one is FPS mode if you have some game that you want to play on the go but you need a mouse something like Dota or League of Legends or Civ or basically any Twitchy shooter like Counter Strike or Rainbow Six Siege or anything like that you're really going to want a Mouse and The Legion goat has one built in with its detachable controllers where the right controller detaches and becomes a mouse and the left controller detaches and becomes basically a keyboard or at least you can use a lot of the buttons that will map to a keyboard layout before I got the legion go I thought this was going to be just a gimmick I thought they were putting it out this FPS mode but it was going to suck but after I've used it now for a while it is a fantastic feature I found myself seriously enjoying FPS mode on the legion go and while of course yes you could bring a Bluetooth bloo Mouse to connect to your steam deck that's one other thing that you have to carry all the time and it doesn't fit in your carrying case and it doesn't attach whereas this it's just always attached ready to go you can pop it off whenever you want a mouse and you might be thinking to yourself well if you just need a mouse why don't you use the trackpads and yeah both devices do have trackpads the steam deck has two one on the right and left and the legion go only has one on the right and both the trackpads work pretty much as expected I'd say they work perfectly fine I've used them both and they work great but at least for me personally I just can't get the same level of precision on a trackpad that I can get on something like a mouse so if you want to play games where you need or at the very least really want a mouse instead of controllers then the legion go is the best way to do it the second reason is Windows this runs Windows this runs Steam OS which is valve's proprietary software but it's based on Linux and look I'm going to be honest with you Windows has some pretty big pros and some pretty big cons so it's not like it's just an allout win but some of the pros for me on the legion go have been that you can play basically any game whereas there are some games you just cannot play on the steam deck mostly because of anti-che software that hasn't been allowed to run on the steam deck but there are several games that you totally can run on the steam deck but they won't allow you to run them because the steam deck can't run the anti-che that keeps those games safe or at least that's what they say but also there are just some games that aren't optimized for Steam OS whereas they're totally optimized for Windows and so those you can play on Windows all day long and you're going to have a good time so you're obviously going to get a lot larger of a games library on the legion Go versus the steam deck so if that's important to you there you go but Windows also gives you a ton of options like you could hook up an external GPU to this thing and then you have a super powerful relatively portable desktop and that's something you just can't do on here because you don't have the same USB 4 speeds that you kind of need to run an external GPU have people done it yeah I've seen where people go into the motherboard and then they do an ocul link port and they can do that but it's super invasive and not very many people are actually going to do that with the legion go you could legitimately go out and buy an external GPU plug it in and with a few driver and software updates you'd be good to go and you'd be gaming and while you're in Windows you can also be doing your Microsoft Word or Excel or Chrome or doing whatever regular computer tasks that you need to do and yes you can install Windows on the steam deck but that's another hoop you have to jump through it adds extra complication you have to partition your drivve so you're losing some of your storage that maybe you would have wanted for Steam OS and there are just some extra Hoops that you have to jump through that make it a less enjoyable experience whereas this Windows comes out of the box and number three we have better performance now I'm the type of person that I don't really think of performance as a ceiling I think of performance more as a floor so as long as it has enough performance to play the games that I want to play at reasonable enough settings that they look okay then I think performance doesn't really matter but the truth of the matter is there are quite a few games that while they do run on the steam deck they need a little bit more performance for them to be really fun to play on the steam deck and here's one example from my life I play this game all the time called World War Z it's one of my favorite games to play and it runs totally fine on the steam deck in my favorite mode to play which is The Horde mode you get around 30 to 40 FPS but then you'll have lag spikes when stuff loads in to maybe the teens and then it is pretty painful and you can really feel that ooh I just want a little bit more ump and again that's at the steam deck resolution the 1280 x 800 so if you wanted to play that on an external monitor you're probably going to want to play at something more like 1080p so while it is playable on the steam deck at 30 to 40 FPS it's not an ideal situation whereas if you play that same exact Game World War Z with the same settings on the legion go you're getting about double the frame rate at anywhere between 70 and 90 FPS and then your lag spikes when The Horde loads in are generally in the low 40s the difference in lag spikes from the 40s to the low routines is huge and it is so noticeable so there's an example where yes the game is totally playable on the steam deck and you can have fun and I've put in like a couple hundred hours on the steam deck playing it but as soon as I played it on the legion go I realized just what a little bit more performance could do for you but I want to be clear performance is only important if you need that extra performance so if you're only playing indie games or games that don't require a lot of horsepower then the steam deck is going to be great but if you're wanting to play more AAA style of game games then yeah that extra performance really does help and in my testing while there were some games that didn't see basically any performance increase from the steam deck to the legion go most of the games saw a pretty significant one I would say the legion go is averaging about 50% more performance with some games getting up to double the performance of the steam deck depending on the game that can make a huge difference it can mean you can either bump up your graphics settings bump up your resolution or just run it at a faster frame rate all of which are really nice things so if you have a steam deck and you have a game that barely runs at the FPS that you want or if you're looking at getting a steam deck and you're seeing that the games you want to play just barely can handle it the legion go really does have significantly more performance for you number four is the screen now the steam deck has a 7in screen and I find myself saying pretty regularly when I'm playing in handheld mode on the steam deck that man I wish this just had a little bit bigger of a screen so usually what I'll do is I'll just hook up the steam deck to an external monitor but then you're not gaming on the anymore now you're tied to a desk or a TV or whatever it is the legion go screen is 8.8 in whereas the steamex is seven and the steam deck OLED is 7.4 I believe and while 7 doesn't sound that much bigger than 8.8 when you do the math for the surface area it's actually 60% more surface area on the legion go screen versus the steam deck screen and that makes a dramatic difference with how big the screen actually looks and it's not just that it's a bigger screen it's also a higher resolution screen at 2560 x600 versus the steam deex 1280x 800 and it's a higher refresh rate screen at a 144 HZ versus the steam deck 60 HZ although again the steam deck OLED has 90 HZ but even that is slower than 144 Herz and so I found the bigger screen size makes me want to play more AAA games on the legion Go versus the steam deck cuz the steam deck just isn't quite big enough to see a lot of the AAA games but when you're playing AAA games you're not going to be getting a super high refresh rate definitely not going to be hitting 144 Herz so when I was reading the spec sheet for the legion go I thought well that's kind of wasted it's higher than you need but then by accident I found the exact use case that they're talking about I've been playing this game called dead cells it's a rogue light and it's super Twitchy and it really requires good reaction time and I've been playing it on both these devices I basically switch off which device I use every day so I'm getting a good feel for how each device plays it and I've noticed every time I switch back to the legion Go the game straight straight up feels easier like the movement is so fluid and everything feels buttery and it feels like my reaction time is better on the legion go and I think what that really is although it could be the screen size I think what it really is is that's playing at 144 FPS whereas this is only playing at 60 and I think that makes a pretty big difference with how fluid the game feels even with a little s scroller 2D game like dead cells the reason I'm bringing this up is because I had always had the preconceived notion that higher refresh rates were really important for things like FPS first- person shooter and so I didn't really think it mattered for indie games but now that I played something like dead cells I'm realizing oh the higher refresh rate is also really cool for indie games not just for FPS so yeah if a bigger brighter faster higher res more color accurate uh there's probably more stuff that I'm forgetting if that matters to you then the legion go has the better screen over the steam deck although again valve did just start shipping the steam deck OLED and I pre-ordered one so I'm hopeing going to have it here in a few days and the OLED should have a dramatically better screen all right and number five is versatility of course you can play games on both of these but on the legion go you could straight up just use it as a Windows tablet if you wanted to actually all you have to do is bring around a bluetoth keyboard and then you have yourself basically a Windows laptop right here cuz you just pull the right controller off use it as a mouse and you can do your normal productivity tasks and the screen while it is small it's big enough that I found when I Wasing doing stuff like checking my email it's totally fine and it's totally usable on the screen it sounds silly yes but if you were something like a college kid and you needed to have a laptop and but you wanted a legion go I really think you could actually use this instead of a laptop as long as you also get a Bluetooth keyboard it is that good and yes of course you can install Windows on the steam deck but you have to jump through some hoop it's a little bit difficult to do and then you're going to be spending more time tinkering which if that's fun for you then that's great but this already has windows installed so it just makes it easy I also found on the steam deck when I tried to like web browse and stuff the 7-in screen while it's serviceable and you can use it it's just not nearly as nice to use for productivity tasks as this and I think what probably makes even a bigger difference than the screen size for productivity which is mostly like text reading is the legion Go's higher resolution which just makes that small text look really sharp and crisp and you can read it easily whereas the steamex 1280x 800 makes the text a little bit blurrier and yeah I really think if you got yourself a monitor an external GPU and then a keyboard you can have yourself a full-blown Windows PC a docked setup for whenever you're at your desk and then you can play on your monitor maybe at higher resolutions or higher frame rates and then you can take it with you on the go take it to class and just bring a keyboard with you and that would actually work oh and this is just a little thing but man having a kickstand on the legion go it's such a tiny thing but it's really nice cuz I can just prop it up whereas the steam deck doesn't come with a kickstand yes of course you can get kickstand attachments but that's another thing you have to bu and have attached all the time so like here's an example where I wanted to just set them up and having a kickstand is just nice all right so those are my five reasons why you should buy a legion go over the steam deck if you want to see a video where I do the exact same comparison except five reasons why you should buy a steam deck over a legion go let me know in the comment section below and I'll get to work on that video okay that's going to do it for this one I'll see you guys in the next one peace

Channel: Sam.Alexander.Reviews

Views: 31,060

Keywords: lenovo legion go, legion go, handheld gaming, valve, steam deck, deck, handheld pc, elden ring, call of duty black ops 3, witcher 3, nintendo switch, switch oled, switch 2, steam deck 2, z1 extreme, z1, amd z1, amd z1 extreme, oled steam deck, deck OLED, witcher, world war z, world war z arizona

Id: 8n7VxoBnP5w

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 05 2023