Steam Deck OLED vs ROG Ally vs Legion GO - Which device is right for you?

hey there Gamers today's video is one I've been trying to do for a while and I failed miserably never quite managing to nail uh all the points that I wanted to get across but I keep seeing video after video where they take one device and it could be the L uh Lenovo Legion go the steam deck or the r Ali and they take it they they show you all the wonderful things about it and then they dump on another type of device saying how bad it is in various areas and then they come to the conclusion that the device that is their favorite is a favorite for everyone else out there and what they're forgetting is that everybody's different everybody wants different things from their device so the approach I'm going to try today is to take each device in turn um the steam deck the r Ali and the Lenovo Legion go and say some things that I like about them some things that I don't like about them and where the things that I don't like can be mitigated by something else um I'll mention that and I'm going to try and be as unbiased about it to be honest if you said to me right I'm going to give you a steam deck or an Rog Ally or a Lenovo Legion go and that's the only device you can have I'm going to be perfectly happy it's like I will change the types of games that I need to play but you know I'm not going to complain cuz all three and this is something you won't hear from most other people all three are fantastic devices so let's start with a steam Deco and if you excuse me there may be some rustling as I consult my notes now one of the biggest reasons for picking this is say you're a non teie or you're coming from a console background and you don't know anything about Windows you don't want to learn anything about Windows you just want a device that you can turn on get straight to the games and play and have a fantastic time and that's what this device offers it's got its own OS Steam OS which is built on Linux or Linux I never know the correct way to pronounce it um and it's a very conso like experience now that's not to say that you can't do more stuff but to do that you'd have to switch into desktop mode so if you're never going to do anything but Play Steam games on this device you're never going to need to go to desktop the mode so that's probably one of its top selling features um this particular one is the OLED um device it's just the the sort of like mid mid season um Refresh on the steam deck I will say if You' got a steam deck probably not worth upgrading to this unless you can sell your old steam deck and get a decent amount um but all the features that they've Incorporated in this all the quality of life changes I absolutely love this device and the biggest one that they've come up with is the OLED screen and oh boy uh weirdly when I was comparing it to the the LED I was looking at you know I was looking at um looking at when it was browsing the games and I wasn't seeing a huge amount of difference but over time I've been playing it and the games look fantastic especially ones with uh deep blacks in them and also it's a HDR display and to me to me I never understood what HDR offered um when I did put some games on that supposedly had HDR I didn't think the change really uh made a difference but then I played a certain game called ay and The Willow The Wisp and my goodness it looks amazing compared to um the game played on a normal steam deck it's like the blacks are really black the main character is white but seems to Glow you know it's just beautiful and I'll maybe do a video showing gameplay of AI just to see you know in another video so that's the second major benefit of this is a beautiful screen it's very good good um I would say it's in normal sort of games I'd say it's probably marginally better than the r Ali and and the Lenovo Legion go but where you've got games that are very dark and broody I think um the steam deck will look even better another positive for this is they've refreshed it with a 50w hour battery and that has really made a difference to battery lives it's something in the order of 30 to 50% battery uh increase um it you know it can make the difference between playing an extra hour two hours and for for lower TDP games it's like multiple hours I think um I started playing Vampire survivors on here and it was literally from a full battery I think it was talking about seven or eight hours at least um playing that that game which is um you know pretty impressive to begin with um sorry I'm okay so why else would you want to play this uh you have this device if most of your games are on Steam um this is perfect for you um just be aware if you have games on other um PC game stores like EA blizzard um and the Ubisoft then you would have to go into desktop mode and and install those launchers there are sort of like um programs now that combine them into one to make it really easy to do but you know you would have to do that if you want to try and get those games running um so who would I recommend this for if you play a lot of Indie Games if you play a lot of 2D games um and you you like playing um some Tria that it can handle um it can handle a fair few but there's some that just seem to be a little bit beyond it um then this is the device for you now that's all the positives and I know I've been gushing about this device I do love them all as I say why wouldn't you want this compatibility okay so when you go to the store you'll see you've got a filter under here and you got well um let's go to so you can have games here and it'll tell you which ones are great on deck and when you go to the store if I pop over to the store here when you're browsing through um the games it will have little icons that tell you if a game is even playable on um the seam deck so see this little green verified tick and for the most part you can kind of trust that but there are the odd games even though they have a green tick I wouldn't say that they're um playable but they're very few and far between and then you've got things like this orange information which means it's probably playable but there's a few things that might make it a bit more difficult like small text um need to interact with the keyboard that sort of thing so um that's one compatibility issue the other is if you like to play online games such as Call of Duty um I think fortnite that have anti-che in them this device will struggle uh basically this device isn't uh running Windows it's running Linux as I said before and one of the things the antiche is looking for is a Windows system and so the second it sees hold on this is Linux this shouldn't be running it it'll kick you out so it won't let you play um online games now that's not to say that the other devices are great at playing them they should be able to but these uh anti-cheats sometimes see um the overlays that you use for modifying TDP and various settings as being a cheap program so I found myself on Call of Duty in the shadow Lobby Shadow band and playing in a Lobby there taking ages to get a game purely because um my TDP setting changed so um it's not all Rosy out there but um you you stand a much better chance of playing those multiplayer games on either the r Al or the Lenovo Legion go uh let me consult my notes again so if performance um bothers you I.E if knowing that this device isn't as powerful as the roggli or the Lenovo Legion go if you want to try and run things at the the the maximum frames per second you can get on a handheld device um if you want to try and run them at higher resolutions um or or just with higher quality detail then again this is probably not the device for you um to to counteract that or counterbalance it I should say the 800p screen is beautiful it hides a lot of sort of um a lot of issues that you might have with games um you can get some really stunning looking games on it and to be honest I've been playing some games recently on the Lenovo Legion go the one with the biggest screen green at 800p and absolutely loving it so you know there are there are sort of reasons um not to be too bothered about screen size and and also frames per second it seems like we're more tolerant on the steam deck of playing games at 30 frames per second locked and um I've had this snobbery on the RG and the the legion go that you know I don't want to play games GES at less than 40 frames per second and yet when I play on this device with it fixed at 30 it's perfectly playable and in fact it's not that long ago a couple of years ago where consoles you'd be playing at 30 frames per second fixed anyway so um I'm not sure what my point here is I think I lost it so I do apologize okay so what I'm going to do is pause the video set up the rli and talk over that device welcome back here we have the rogg Ally um this is the device I picked up after my initial LED steam deck and I absolutely loved it um for me it was close to Perfection um possibly just needed a bigger screen but let's talk over the strengths so again we're going to go with strength of the screen so okay it's not OLED and I'd say in terms of color depth and and and and um just beauty of image it's like the steam deck has it beat but then um what this does have is 1080p it's a native landscape screen so one thing I didn't mention is that the steam deck and the Lenovo leging go are portrait screens so essentially screens that should be like that um can't really show it on the camera um that have been tricked in software to then rotate through 90° so that it becomes a um landscape screen and um that has various issues I won't go into them I want to keep this as brief as possible um so this is native landscape so there are some issues that you might have on a Lenovo Legion Go Changing drivers that you wouldn't have on this device um but the biggest thing is vrr now to me vrr has never been a big deal um but there's a lot of people probably with um high-end gaming PCs and very high refresh rates and and monitors with vrr that will notice if the screen is tearing U not performing optimally so what vrr does or variable refresh rate is when um a game is is U varying wildly in the frames per second that it's putting out vrr adjusts the refresh rate and so it it has the effect of of smoothing um those frames and I think I think it's something like there's less tearing so it's it's a much better experience now having said that I um the steam deck never had VR vrr and I think never really was an issue because what we were doing on the steam deck was fixing frames per second to lower than it could go at maximum but meaning that we would would having like a steady um refresh rate that the uh that the device could play the game at and it just meant that it was going to be less tearing and so a much better experience and this is something I'm starting to investigate doing on the legion go as well just to have um sorry it's it's timing out so um just to have that that smoothness of play but honestly um even without uh the the the um smoothing and running at full frames per second the Lenovo Legion go I never really noticed the the the vrr issues that's not to say other people don't now what else can I say about this device it's in my opinion the best speakers of the three it's it's the one device that when I've been playing the others I pick up and go into a game and the the sound always catches me you know it's it's like it's it's deeper it's it's got got more depth to it I'd say um just sounds better but going with the counterargument a lot of the time when if you're playing these devices on the go you're not going to be sitting there with speakers you're going to annoy everyone on the bus on the train on the plane you know you're going to have headphones in there and when you've got headphones in there the quality is pretty much of a muchness so it's great if you can sit there and play with the speakers booming out but um it's never been an issue for me what else is good about this it's the lightest of the three and it's the smallest of the three although it's not weirdly I've sort of measured in it it's not as small as you think it is when I've had it where I've I've put the steam deck from this side and put a book there to line them up and there's not that much of a a difference in the Gap there I Feel The Styling cues on this hide a lot of you know seem to hide a lot of the the size and also just a cut out here but um yeah it's it's definitely the lightest and if you do care about wielding something around you're going to have it in your backpack along with other stuff then this is probably the device that's going to be best suited to you in that respect another reason compatibility this is running Windows it's a Windows PC handheld um so it's going to be compatible with the most games um more games even than this the steam deck there will be issues um with drivers and things that's kind of a given for the PC gaming industry in general you certain driver versions of um are incompatible cause issues but overall if it there's a game out for the PC this can run it unless obviously it's like you know only for topof the range PCS with a 49 graphics card um in which case you'll struggle I mean one game that that I think this device struggles with in fact um they all do would be um Avatar frontiers of Pandera and I think that's just like a memory issue um these have 16 gig all of them have 16 gig memory I definitely think newer devices should be made with 32 gig of standard um just because we're we're also stealing uh memory away from uh the the that 16 gigs for the the video card there isn't a video card but for the video memory when in a desktop PC you would actually have dedicated video memory and still have 16 gig left so I would like to see especially on the refresh say the Rog li2 it come in with 32 gig um why would you want this you can play multiplayer games with anti cheet um however as I said in the steam deck section I kind of get put into you know Shadow band because of the overlay maybe if I played multiplayer games more I I would be more conscious of that and wouldn't pop up the overlay at all in the game perhaps I'd shut down Armory crate um before starting the game and that would help I've certainly seen people playing Call of Duty um on the Lenovo Legion go quite happily and on the R GLI so it's you know it's just something to be aware of if you do like that type of game also it's a lot easier to play games from other stores um because you're in Windows it's you know you can do everything in there without swapping out to a desktop mode you're in desktop mode and people hate a lot on Windows it's probably because I'm a a PC Gamer I'm also like a software engineer so I've spent a lot of time working with Windows professionally as well um and Linux Etc but it's not a problem for me I I feel people exaggerate the number of interruptions and problems and you have yes it's a bit of a pain to get started but that's you know when you get this fresh out the box and have to do all the updates there are issues with upd dating drivers from time to time but um these devices um are now getting well the R's had it for some time where it'll tell you about driver updates the Legion goes just had an an update that allows you to check if there's any drivers that you need to update so that's improving things but honestly I'm s I'm sitting there I'm in a game I rarely get interrupted at all now that's the good things what about the bad things the biggest gripe I have about the r Ali is it runs too hot and that doesn't bother me most of the time for for gaming um I don't feel that heat in my hands but the side effect of that heat if you look up here this is kind of the exhaust fans for the heat um that the CPU generates and what we've got here is the SD card slot so um what I've had happen uh is that the S the SD card I've destroyed about three um in this device just through heat alone and I was aware of it and I was being very careful so I turned off the turbo mode um I I was not running it at 25 watts most of the time I was on 18 Watts I was doing everything I I could to avoid um the SD card reader burnout and I managed to avoid the SD card reader burnout it still supposedly works but an SD card will stop functioning after it's been in there for a while with with the heat that this device generates having said that apparently revision 8 of nine uh rate eight and nine of these devices have fixed this problem but how you tell that you're going to get an eight or nine revision I don't know I've also seen that if you do have this issue and RMA it back in recent months they'll they'll send it back and it it will have the whatever fix they've applied um maybe it's some heat shielding or whatever that essentially they don't tend to burn out again so I guess worst is you know if it does burn out RM R it which is returning it to to be fixed and then it shouldn't happen anymore but that's that's a bit of a pain so that's probably the the biggest reason I would say not to get it um don't get it if you hate Windows it seems silly to have to say it but it's a windows-based handheld gaming PC if you don't like Windows avoid it like the plague unless it's important to you that you play multiplayer games or that you like the extra power the extra frames per second and the compatibility it's it's that Balancing Act battery life worst of the three um I'd say it was sort of on par with a a steam deck LED unless you were running that um steam deck on games that were where you had the TDP turned right down um it's a 40w battery it does eat that power um and it will run out even quicker than the the legion go um I've seen various tests and it's it's very much the LED and the Rog ali uh the LED steam deck and the Rog Ali tend to run out of battery first then it's the legion go and then the steam uh steam deck OLED um has very degrees of uh time after the legion goes run out where it will keep going so battery life is another issue however all of these devices I would recommend getting a power bank and that's just you can just extend your game time the only reason to do it um i' i' I'd thorough thoroughly recommend one um there's a basus 65 W one I got from Amazon I've used it on all three devices it it it's wonderful um the other reason the more recent thing about not buying one of these apparently this year there's going to be a a 2024 refresh to this model so maybe you would want to hold off until that that comes and then you might have a slightly better defi device it might have a lot lot better features um it's meant have been I think it was mentioned by um asus's head of in India so um is someone in Asus hopefully it's accurate but you know your decision do you want to hold off or do you want to have the benefit of playing on this device right now and that's everything I wanted to cover for the r Ali so I'm going to pause the video get the Lenovo Legion in and uh do the same so here we have the big boy boy um and it really is a big boy but we'll cover that so Consulting my notes a lot of the same reasons for getting this coincide with the same reasons for the rli but I'm going to restate them anyway so what's the biggest reason for this the the one reason I bought this is for the larger screen no other reason um it's 1600p screen um you have 800p uh 1200p and 1600p and a lot of people thought that there wouldn't be any games that you could run at 12200 or 1,600 um it's true that there's a lot of games that won't run at that res but it's when you find the ones that can it makes all the difference also just being able to have like more screen real estate I just find Windows less clunky to use on this device and on the r Al you know I can you know the cursor I I can type on the keyboard I find the the keyboard restrictive on the Ally so it just makes it a more usable device from that perspective um now the color I I personally think that the color is slightly ever so slightly better than the rli the green to me a little bit Greener likewise the red but tiny tiny amount in it and I I wouldn't you know I wouldn't pick a device based on the color difference on that I'd be happy with either one again the steam deck best screen of the three but um you know not as powerful as this um another thing I love two USBS it seems simple seems seems odd that that would be something I got excited about but you could literally plug in a charger plug in an external SSD so you got more dis space or you can plug in other devices and still have charging without buying a dock um one of the big ones which I failed to mention the rli if you're in the market for an external GPU um so I think GPD make one um uh another company has just come on the market and they're selling uh external gpus that would bring a bit more like desktop power not completely but you know much better graphics if you were in a a docked mode um this device has a USB 4 um so you can you can plug those in and get that extra grunt for your graphics it's it's expensive um but if you were to try that on the the Rog Ali what they've got I'll I'll just bring it in shortly briefly is they've got a custom you can't really see it no so this little bit along here that's all blurry is um the XG something um interface and so they've got a proprietary infa interface which means if you want to pay for an egpu an external GPU you're going to get hit with a premium I mean they were I'm sure it was in the region of 1,400 compared to about 500 for the um the other externals um you know it's that it was that order when I was looking at them do your own research if you are thinking about buying one but it will cost you more for the rli one without a doubt um with that being said personally I wouldn't buy an egpu I would you know I have a gaming lap laptop but I think even if I didn't I would probably be more tempted to get a cloud gaming service um like GeForce now and and rent out a 4090 or something like that you know and and just stream to the device um from there and and that works really well I have done that and you can pay for an awful lot of streaming um of this it was something like $99 for6 months or £99 for 6 months it's I you know that's quite a few years you could pay for that without getting to the point of the uh price of an external GPU um another thing I love simple but the built-in kickstand it just makes it nice when you've got a surface to rest on you put it on there and in fact now it's like I can't live without a kickstand of some sort on any of my devices so I've got something like this so I can you know just put put the Rog Ally down I've clipped something to my steam deck um so that I can just have that stand so that was really nice it comes you know with the device um again similar to the Rog Ally maximum com compatibility so most of the games should be able to run unless it's just uh too demanding a game for the hardware but um all the sort of like the other stores you can easily in download and install on here without having to go to a separate desktop mode um one thing it it was kind of Brave of them to do something different is Lenovo has detachable controllers so you know these things uncp you know just small switch and I do this so rarely that oh there we go so both both of the controllers come off you can use it as a tablet so if you don't have a tablet you can do that yeah so anyway um so you know you you clip them back on you've got the same on this side and this one actually can sit in um to a little um holder that comes with the device and it becomes like an an upright Mouse so you would grip it in that you know vertically and it works like a mouse it's meant to be for FPS mode but I think it's it's really good for real-time strategy games um to be honest I don't use this feature if I wanted to play games with a mouse and a keyboard I would just plug them in I've got I've got a dock I could use the USB port you know it's not something that really excited me it's not why I bought the device um but for some people that might be a nice feature um that they want to make use of so let's get to the ne negatives this is a heavy unit this is a big boy it's um thick and beefy you you know when you're holding it you know you're holding it um it's by far the heaviest of the three um it what more can be said they've they've packed a lot in here you've got to bear in mind it's got a battery in either controllers it's got a battery in here but um yes if you were standing there and holding it for any length of time it would be like a military boot camp you know where they they're forced to hold their their rifle out um as a punishment it would be a bit like that now having said that I don't have a problem with the weight because I never ever stand there supporting you know play the device unsupported it's either on a desk or if I'm satting sat in a chair it's like my knees are resting sorry my elbows are resting on my knees supporting the weight through through that um if I'm sort of laid out on the chair I can always find a position where at least one elbow's supported and you know I never have the full weight going down through my my hands so weight just isn't an issue for me but again I guess if you're going to carry it around in a backpack and have a load of other stuff it may be more of an issue for you now I just spoke about the controllers and it being a brave um decision I think this right controller because of the way they're using as a mouse has been compromised and the reason I'm saying that so if we look so on this controller and this is like all the other devices well um the r the r only has one back button but on the steam deck you have two vertical buttons and your fingers just sort of like um sit on them naturally but on the vertical Mouse side the buttons are horizontal and what that results in is my fingers still sit on here and here but if I would use back buttons it's like I would have to move that finger back there so it just feels a bit clunky you know that I have to use a different hand movement to trigger the buttons on this right controller um and here's the counter measure to that I haven't used a single game um with a back button it's like all the games I've played I've never felt the need to have a back button um that's a lie um I have done where I've been streaming from the PlayStation 5 down to um to my steam deck or this device no uh mainly the steam deck um I have mapped the two back buttons to be the PlayStation button and and you know the tap on on this the sort of like little touchpad area of the Dual sense controller so that's the one time I've used those back buttons I never map them I never use them so to me it is compromised but I don't care because I never use it but you might another thing the sound on this device um worst of the three uh it's got because and this is where I that these have compromised the device because the these are detachable you can't really have the speakers in them so what they've done is they've loaded up the speakers on the top of the device and so those speakers are blast well not blasting either um they're they're sending off that sound up upwards rather than at you um also out of the box this the speakers are really weak it's just it's a a volume thing um I found I couldn't you know I would have it up to near Vol full volume to get a decent level of sound um so if you do have one of these device devices go on to the Microsoft App Store and download FX sound and then put it to the gaming preset and honestly it's like it fixed that weakness of the sound so I I feel like the the volume is now decent enough but it's still it still doesn't take away from the fact that this is probably the worst sounding of the three devices and then um to argue the other side like I said earlier it's like I'm going to plug headphones in if I'm ever playing this out and about and if I if I decide you know what I really feel like the sound adds to the atmosphere of the game I'm going to plug headphones in um I don't care too much about the sound so long as I can I can hear it um but it it it is also very noticeable when I switch to the Rog Ali how much the sound is better again another reason for not for not liking this um don't if you don't like Windows don't buy a Windows gaming PC unless you're willing to learn simples and then what else battery life again it's better battery life than rli um but you're never going to if you if you're running a AAA game it's like you're never going to play it for long enough well that's not true for me I can get I can play in sessions of two hours and be quite happy but you know if I was going on a long haul flight um and wanted to play I I'm going to be taking the steam Deck with me just for the battery life but I have done medium length flights and this plus a power bank that I mentioned earlier um more than enough gaming for me but it's it's going to be a weakness um on all these devices uh PE people don't understand or just don't know that the technology for these devices it's it's kind of maxing out right now there's some you know we we need new technology when you know and there's some new battery technologies that are coming along but the the big problem we have is more powerful CPUs they put out more heat which requires more cooling which requires fan noise which we don't like um and you've got to dissipate that heat otherwise your your your device is going to throttle and or burn so these are are compromised devices and I'm just amazed that we can play what we can on them so I have spoken for ages hopefully um you've not all fallen asleep I will put chapters in at least for where I'm talk you know start talking about each of the devices so I I hope this proves helpful for you if you're wanting to decide on one of these devices um please leave a comment in the in in the bottom uh underneath the video if it's proven helpful if you hate it can you can you put there what you hate about it but please be civil that's all I ask um I I would love to to to learn how to improve my presentation um what people are wanting from a video so all feedback is good feedback so long as you just bear in mind we're all human beings let's let's be civil so thank you all for listening and I'll speak to you again soon

Channel: Handheld Gaming Fan

Views: 1,471

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Id: ydRieyfALuA

Length: 38min 33sec (2313 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2024