Legion Go Vs The Ally and Steam Deck! Which is worth your money?

and in the studio tonight I finally got my hands on the legion go and ever since steam released the first steam deck a couple of years ago now I've absolutely loved these little gaming devices now steam was amazing but one of the problems at the time a lot my games weren't compatible with it with Steam OS so Aus launched the Rog Ally the first mainstream Windows gaming device and this thing was a real game changer for me I've had this ever since release day and I absolutely love it and use it an absolute ton and when Lenovo held the press release for this Legion go I was really blown away and on paper the specs of this machine is absolutely amazing with its 8.8 in high DPI screen the removable grips an FPS mode with one of the grips a kickstand which makes it easier to actually put on a desk this thing looks an absolute winner of an actual handheld device so of course I ordered one the second they went up for sale well with the actual Legion go finally here will it live up to the marketing hype so in tonight's video we're going to put it head-to-head with the original steam deck and also the isus Rog Ally to hopefully help you decide which one is best for you so before we start putting the actual units head-to-head what I want to quickly discuss is what you get with each of these products so we'll start with the first one that I've received we got the steam deck now the steam deck came with a USBC power adapter it also came with a really handy travel carrying case to keep it safe and put it in your bag which something I do appreciate you don't want to be damaged ing the screen or smashing your device and it also came with a nice branded cleaning cloth nice bit of Kit now the legion go just like the steam deck comes with a carry case and this carry case is really nice as well because it also has a nice little tab at the bottom so you can actually pop in your USBC cable to charge it once it's in the case and it also comes with this little widget here which can be used with one of the actual triggers to create a vertical Mouse plus you get the USBC power brick but not one to be outdone Aus had to try and go and one up everybody with this Rog Ally not only did it come boxed with its USBC charger and I decided they weren't going to give you just a case nope instead they're going to give you the premium portable stand made out of cardboard nice worker Zeus so obviously if you're going to buy the Rog Ally you're probably going to want to buy yourself a nice little case for it as well which is something you need to figure in which leads me neatly on to the price now the difficulty comparing the prices it may be different region to region the legion go is the most expensive device and comes in in the UK at £699 now when I bought the Rog Ally that was also £699 but since the release of this Legion go Aus have actually dropped the price in the UK to £5.99 making it1 cheaper so you don't get obviously as many premium features which we discussed in a minute but it is now a cheaper device now the steam deck this is difficult because it did come in with a different range of configurations but this probably comes in as the cheapest the original steam deck now especially if you get one of the lower tiers of SSD and upgrade it yourself but there is a refresh version of the steam deck coming which now comes with an OLED screen which could be a great option so if you want the steam deck and you like the fact it's got the Steam OS that can be a big selling point the new steam Deck with OLED display is going to be an absolute winner better battery life better screen with HDR and obviously OLED goodness so that could be something you consider we'll talk about that later so with the price out of the way we're going to talk about the actual size of these devices and this Legion go is absolutely massive if we look at the handheld uh and the steam deck was already quite a big device you can see straight away in fact I'm going to use the top cam to really kind of do it justice this Legion go uh it's a little bit wider it's quite a big difference uh more so when you pick them up in person this does feel like a very chunky device now the reason that it is so chunky is because of the 8.8 in screen now the original steam deck and the Rog Ally both only have a 7in screen so this gets a whole 1.8 in larger screen and it really does show there's a massive difference in screen size so I just put the screen on there so you can actually see the screen so the Rog Ally is the smallest device of the three and I will put all three against each other in a second but here you can see the 7in display on the Rog Ally versus this Legion go now not only is the display size a lot smaller on the Rog Ally it's only 1080p 120 HZ whereas the legion go is 2560 x600 at 144 HZ and the original steam deck this is also a 7in screen so you can see the screens together but the differen is being the actual steam deck is a 16 by 10 just like the legion go 7 in but 1280 by 800 so by far the lowest resolution of the three displays the Aus is a 16x9 so 1920 X10 hpce 16x9 screen better for movies and for a lot of games but I do prefer the 16 X10 screens on these handheld devices now although the steam deck is only 1200 by 800p I never found that an issue if I'm honest because with the steam deck you boot straight into Steam OS I only ever launch a game and play a game on this device I don't do anything else with it and these devices you're going be running a lot of the games at its 800p resolution because these are only integrated graphics and you're going to probably want that 800p and higher frame rate for a lot of the games obviously if you're running an indie title you can run them at high resolution but it looks great on a tiny screen like this 800p is fine now the actual Rog Ally because I'm often running it in Windows and desktop mode and everything else I actually do prefer the higher resolution on this panel over the steam deck and then more so now that I've got this actual Legion going with this huge 8.8 in and if I put them again side by side you can just see how massively difference it is in size now Gary and I have spent a lot of time playing games on both of these two machines side by side to get a feel for this new panel I was worried at first this was going to be too heavy and too big but having used it hasn't been an issue at all and we will talk about this more in the ergonomics later on but I've just been blown away by how good this screen is and the good thing with both the isus and this Legion go is when you switch them down to a lower resolution the panels scale really well running them both at the lowest it's like 800p res and 720p res on the Ally both panels look great and I do appreciate the high frame rate that you can put on some of the lower powered titles especially some of the Esports or Indie titles so I want to just mention one other thing about these screens which is quite important I know this going thing it's going to annoy a lot of people the Rog Ally did come with freey and that does make a big difference when you're not running at a consistently High frames per seconds the legion go doesn't have that free sync and I know that has upset a lot of people and I think if you are running a game that's struggling to get consistent frames you will notice more jerkiness on the legion go than you would on this rag Ally a real shame that they you know Lenovo didn't they put so much effort into this game's console to not put freesync in here is a shame now you can put your own sort of frame cap on an MSI after bur or another piece of software but it would just so much nice if it had have had that built in to this panel right so here we go so just put them all side by side so you can see the difference in size if you're looking for the smallest for portability then clearly the Rog allly is your choice you can see it's nice and compact little unit then we've got the steam deck and then finally the legion go but as I say there that massive 8.8 screen is a good reason for that so that now leads us on to the features of each of these devices so now the steam deck is the original it's got an awful lot going for it valve made an amazing job creating this console which is why there's so much hype and so much interest in this handheld we got two touch pads we got two decent sticks the layout everything works really well on this machine the Steam OS is integrated so well with a handheld because it was created for it um that it's just a seamless experience with great High ation and you stopping in the middle of a game everything works well when you're just gaming the downside being that unfortunately you are sort of stuck with Steam OS and a Linux sort of subsystem if you want to go for this the desktop mode which doesn't work as well as Windows for my personal experience certain games don't run with the steam deck or don't run very well whereas with a windows-based handheld you can just plug in a keyboard or mouse or something else and actually run any game it doesn't have to be on Steam it could be any platform and it will work perfectly and that's the reason I particularly wanted the Rog Ally in the first place so this was the original I still love it and I still love playing a lot of my games especially cuz the battery life is so great on this device but we do just get obviously you know the handheld with one USBC uh and the headset Jack and that's about it so then there was the Rog Ally one of the biggest features obviously is this is a Windows based consoles with some of the problems that come with that obviously the Sleep issues and the SD Card issues that have plagued this model since it's been released but it's got a lot of positives it is very compact I can plug this into a dock and have a window setup up and running in seconds and run a lot of my games through a keyboard mouse and monitor it is truly fantastic and I have done that an awful lot it's quite a potent little beast in here not only that but we get to say the SD card as was mentioned which does can cause problems but we get a USBC and the XG mobile Port so if you get an XG mobile external graphics card you can plug into this here and have a full pretty much desktop experience and you get an amazing PCI throughput from this device then to say an external monitor with a keyboard and mouse plugged into your XD mobile and it is pretty much like a full desktop experience now the only downside to that is the cable isn't the greatest cable that fits in here it's very short stiff and not an easy sort of cable to use and also it's very very expensive and that's something that obviously trying to get a hold of one in the UK it's ridiculous money to the point where I could go and buy a desktop for the price of the XG mobile so I won't be doing that so then on to the legion go now this has to be the most feat feature packed console that's been released to date now Legion of obviously had the advantage of having a lot of time looking at the competitors before releasing this console and I'm really glad they have CU they've put a lot into this little machine not only you get this amazing highdefinition 8.8 in display we get something which I've really wanted with the Rog Aly and didn't get a kickstand now as I mentioned earlier we did get the premium sort of portable stand for the Rog Ally and that has serviced okay whilst I've had it although it is looking quite battered already probably more so now it's been shot across my office but a kickstand is just so handy you can pop this down in your desk grab an Xbox controller or a keyboard and mouse and you're set up and it's it's just brilliant also when you just want to put it down on your desk somewhere I'd much rather put it down on a kickstand than I'd would just lying it flat on a desk especially if you want to use it for watching a movie or listen to music or something you might want to do with a device like this which isn't easy when it's lying on your desk not only do we get the kickstand we get the SD card slot like the others but we get two USB C's on this model one on the top and one on the bottom now this can be very handy not only the fact that you get two USBS so you could plug some peripherals in and a power bank which is always very handy but if you're sort of you know you got this in your lap and you're using it you can put your power adapter into the bottom and the cables then just trailing out the bottom rather than trying to stick it in the top and have it hanging out the top of the actual console so that's something I do really love you got two options with this which is really really useful not only that on this model the USB four as well so in theory and I will test this you should be able to plug this in to an egpu and get a pretty good desktop experience another amazing feature is the fact that just like a switch you can pop these controllers off and then use them over Bluetooth now this can be really handy say with a kickstand you can put it down on a desk maybe run a a platform game or an indie title or something and just sit it there pop your controllers in your hand and sit and play comfortably on your sofa and it is a really great experience not only that as I mentioned earlier on we get the actual vertical Mouse mode so if you take off the right controller and on the bottom you enable FPS mode you'll see there's a little mouse sensor pop the controller into this magnetic stand and you've got a nice little vertical Mouse so hopefully you can see that on the screen this could be really handy it's like obviously if you're playing a firstperson shooter or something you can have your movement in one hand and then you're aiming crosshairs and you're shooting in this hand just like you would with a mouse and keyboard really neat little idea that Lenovo didn't have to make the effort to do this they would have sold on its own without this it's a lovely little feature that they've added so now we looked around these devices we're going to check out the speakers on all three uh to see which has got the best sign of speakers because that is quite important when you're playing games in your lap you don't want to always have to plug in a headset so let's have the speaker test speaker tests all of the actual handhelds are at 80% volume starting with the steam deck [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Ally and lastly the [Music] go wow well I think we can easily say that's an easy easy easy win for the Rog Ally okay so now I want to quickly talk about the performance on these devices now obviously the steam deck was released first with some custom silicon that is a fair bit older than the new Z1 extreme chipsets that we've got in both the Ally and the legion go now the steam deck launched with a four core eight thread CPU and eight compute units for the GPU and it's also limited to 15 watts whereas the newer ze1 extreme devices now they can go up to 30 watts and also they come with an 8 core 16 thread CPU and 12 compute un unit GPU so that is quite a lot of difference but that will also affect your battery life when you're running at 30 wats as opposed to just the 15 so in order to try and Benchmark this fairly I used Shadow the Tomb Radar on all three devices and I put them all at 1280 by 800 so even the Ally which is a 16x9 screen so I can get a same result across all three cuz unfortunately I can't run things like time spy on the steam deck now when we completed those tests in the maximum performance mode so 15 watts and Turbo Modes on both of these both of the actual zed1 extreme came very close to each other just a couple of frames per second and they were about 40% higher than that original steam deck so you do get a lot more performance in these newer devices at the expense of obviously higher wattage and with that said when I compared both of these two devices I ran time spy CU obviously we're in Windows and both of these came at pretty much identical performance on their Turbo Modes that's really quite impressive now all three of these are customizable you can have different profiles on both the Alli and the legion go and you can switch between the silent balanced and performance mode on both of these and you can change the profil with their inbuilt menus they both got a button dedicated to bringing up their relevant menu systems where you can adjust plenty of the actual screen brightness volumes performance profiles resolution really handy buttons that you need to have on these handheld devices they also both have a custom mode where you can set the TDP yourself and in the steam again we've got our own customizable menu where you can change that TDP and you can go a lot lower with the steam deck than you're capable of going with these newer devices cuz obviously it's a more cut down chip so when it comes to the battery life of these devices obviously the steam deck is going to win but you're not running as powerful a chip in here you're not going be running as powerful of games on the steam deck as you would be potentially on the actual Z1 extreme consoles so the battery life does have to go to the steam deck the newer consoles on a good day with a lot of tweaking you can maybe eek out about 4 hours on some sort of Indie titles whereas you could go up to seven or eight on a steam deck but if you're running something like a AAA title that you man to get running on one of these if you get an hour and a half it's a good day so none of these devices are going to replace a switch when it comes to something like battery life but the advantage with these obviously being USBC is that you can get yourself together like a PD a power bank stuck to the back of your device or just literally run a cable because your R very often could be cabled if you're running some High powerered games on all these devices so now I want to just quickly talk about the ergonomics of these devices cuz that is something incredibly important if you're buying a handheld now I had the steam deck and I used this for a long time I think Val spent a lot of time perfecting the ergonomics and of the three of these when using it as a handheld I think I do prefer the ergonomics layout of the steam deck it's very comfortable everything's an easy reach I'm not misclicking anything it's just a really good layout plus we've got the extra two pads that you get with the steam deck the legion go gets one and you don't get any with the Ally everything the buttons The Joy pads they all feel great it's just a really well-designed device now the Ally which was released second they've done a good job here it's very comfortable I love the actual joysticks they got a lovely rubber which grips well with your thumbs it works very very naturally but I wasn't very keen on the rear buttons I did accid keep M hitting those rear buttons to a point where I just disable their functions in Windows other than that it's been a great device the triggers are great uh the d-pad is brilliant I really love using it plus you've got the touch screen even though you don't have have the actual trackpad on this model now the legion go again we get the touch screen with like you do with all of these we get one trackpad is Handy to have I do like the thumb sticks but they're a little bit slippery so I probably would want to put something on the top of that but they actually perform very well there's a little bit of a dead zone with these models but Lenova have been very vocal in the actual communities and are planning to increase the performance on those actual sticks as well as the device itself one of the things I'm not very impressed with on the actual Legion go is the d-pad it works okay but it's so recessed into the actual controller I don't find it useful at all when I'm playing sort of like the street fight or Mortal Kombat where games where natur be using a d-pad you can't really rock it around to perform all those finishing moves so I do end up just using the actual thumb stick which I'm not as keen on for sort of fighting games but the legion go does get the massive benefit remove both of these control pads on either side and using them away from the device while this is in the kickstand and this has to be the absolute killer feet Fe of the Legion go you can pop this on the table on its own kickstand and then sit back and use the controllers just like you would maybe a switch plus you get the FPS mode if you put the grip in the actual base that's provided in the actual carry case and that works way better than I was expecting to not sure if I would actually use it personally I probably just get a Bluetooth mouse if I was going to do that but it's nice to be able to have that to take the small package out and still use it like a mouse and something else I want to mention that when it comes to the actual touchscreen on the devices this isn't as big a deal on the steam deck because the steam deck is so welld designed with a menu system in the actual steam itself it's a Steam OS it works brilliantly and you don't find you need the intricacies of a touchpad or touchcreen like you would like in Windows now because these are windows consoles and you're not always in Steam you're going to do other bits and pieces with it having the touch screen is incredibly handy you're going to need it and this is an area where the legion go has been massively massively better than the Rog allly just cuz the size of the screen not only is it sort of 16 by 10 but it's 8.8 in is and that extra screen real estate although it looks great on the eyes also makes touch so much easier now what I've been using these devices for the last week now regularly when I'm copying things off and on to different removable drives getting things ready for these reviews in bits and pieces this is really easy to work with whereas the rug Ally can often be a bit of frustration cuz it's so tiny trying to like touch things with your finger and copy things it's a real pain so if you're planning on using the console for more than just gaming this is definitely an absolute winner with this massive screen now obviously you could just plug in an external monitor keyboard and mouse and use it like a desktop and do it that way and that is a great way of doing it and I have done that in the past and if you had a 10 HP screen onto one of these devices you'd be amazed what you can actually play on an external display and we did also create a video on that for the Rog Ally and I'm going to link that in the description down below just in case you missed that now just the one last thing I want to discuss before we move through to the conclusion it's just the actual fan noise of these devices now when the steam deck came out it came with a couple of visions of fans and if you got a steam de with a good fan you were happy but a lot of people got those nasty fans and I know that caused a lot of issues in the community I happen to get a decent fan with this model I've never had a problem when playing with the steam deck now when I got the Ally this has got a twin fan system in and it is sort of whisper quiet and idle and not that noisy when you're actually gaming on the device and I love the sound profile of the actual fan noise of the actual Ally now unfortunately I don't know if I've gotten lucky whether I've got a bad fan in this model or whether it's just that one fan that they've used in the legion go but the fan noise is got quite a whiny high pitch sound um and it is not the most Pleasant now I've got used to it and I can put up with it and if you're gaming it doesn't bother me CU you got the game sounds coming out of it but where it bothers me the most is if I'm using this on a desk for a bit of desktop user or playing around with it and not gaming the fan spins up regularly because there's only one fan in here and it is got that horrible high pitch noise and that is quite annoying now hopefully this is something that they may be able to resolve in an actual bios maybe reduce the fan noise in idle so you're not getting the whiny sort of frequency but I would like to be able to maybe get one with either a two fan system in here or a better fan that's not got that horrible high pitch sound so that leads me through to the conclusion and you know if you're picking up one of these devices I think no matter which one you choose you're going to be happy these are some amazing handheld gaming devices and if you're going to choose between the three and obviously not got the OLED version of the steam Deb which could be a winner I would say if you just want to game within Steam and you don't want too much hassle and you want the like the fluidity and the extra battery life the steam deck is still an absolute winner and the OLED one has even better battery life and obviously an OLED screen so that could be the absolute win if that's your priorities but if you want something that's a bit more customizable has Windows you can plug in a monitor keyboard and mouse then that's where these sort of windows-based handhelds come into play and they are absolutely excellent I've been using this allly now for for probably four or five months and I've really loved using it I'm always Blown Away with just how well I can play games on this device but since using this Legion go other than the fan noise everything else has pretty much been better about this Legion go than the Rog Ally and I can pretty much understand now why they've reduced this by100 seeing this come on the market the fact it's got a kickstand an amazing large screen detachable controllers USB 4 for Thunderbolt use an extra USBC at the bottom so you can actually have power supply from the top or bottom or extra peripherals it's just absolutely absolutely a fantastic package they really have gone above and beyond here now the only downside I would to say is a the fan noise and B the software that you use for this device is probably the worst of the three um it's a bit slow this Legion space station whatever it is it's a bit slow to load up and it just comes with this online store which is pretty rubbish but if I'm honest I probably won't use it the actual inbuilt menu system is excellent and I'm sure it will get updated CU this is early days with this product but overall I think of the three of my time using them now this Legion go is definitely been my favorite and this is the one that I will be keeping for me personally going forward now as always I'd love to know what you guys think drop your comments down below and I will get back to you and if you got any suggestions what you'd like to see on these devices also let me know cuz I am producing plenty more content on these devices and as always thanks for watching

Channel: Mash IT

Views: 75,469

Keywords: mash it

Id: IS2_HNPO36c

Length: 23min 49sec (1429 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2023