The Best Handheld Is… Steam Deck OLED Vs ROG Ally Vs Legion Go

hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again with the recent release of the steam deck OLED I've had a lot of people asking about kind of a comparison video between three of the most popular units on the market right now at least in the US we've got the steam deck OLED the Rog Ally and the Lenovo Legion go these are the three main ones that really keep popping up in the comments so I figured we'd go ahead and face them off against each other we're going to be taking a look at a lot of stuff here performance overall form factor battery life and by the end of this video I'll let you know exactly which one I prefer using more but with all that out of the way let's go ahead and take a look at the specs of all three of these units so obviously steam deck OLED is the newest one on the list and they're offering two different skews here you can get 52 GB of storage for 549 or 1 tby drive for $649 but remember all three of these units do support a Micro SD card usually I go up to 1 tbte definitely add some storage really easily to any of these a lot of you may know that there are two versions of the Rog Ally but we're only going to be talking about the good one the Z1 extreme and Asus only offers one storage skew here 512 GB for $6.99 I have seen this go on sale quite frequently around the holidays so definitely keep your eye out and finally the Lenovo Legion go 512 for $699 or a 1 tby unit for 749 and one thing to keep in mind with the legion go is this is the only one we're taking a look at that has detachable control rollers but it is a pretty hefty boy when you compare it to the rest on screen now I've got the specs for all three of these units and with the steam deck olad we've got a 6 nanometer custom AMD Apu the cores are based on Zen 2 we've got four of them with eight threads and this will do up the 3.5 GHz the Ally and the go both have the AMD ryzen Z1 extreme which is based on zen4 they also have eight cores and 16 threads with a boost up to 5.1 GHz and I'll tell you in raw CPU performance clock for clock the Z1 extreme trumps that custom AMD Apu and the steam deck OLED all day long I mean it's definitely a really powerful CPU given that we have eight cores and 16 threads based on Zen 4 for instance I recently ran geekbench 6 on the new steam deck olad single core 1,126 multi 3,918 it actually looks like we're getting a jump over the 7 nanometer chip that had in the LCD steam deck but it's still not a giant jump in performance and remember we can only go up to 15 watts in the steam deck the way it sits out of the box so on the Rog Ally set the TDP to 15 watts across the board we score a 1,644 8,068 I mean as you can see here giant jump in performance in single and multi but with that Z1 extreme we've got the option to take the wattage up even more and at 25 watts we're now at 2 440 on single 10,703 on Multi and totally maxed out we can get up into the 12,000 multi core with the Z1 extreme moving over to Graphics the steam deck olad has an rdna2 based 8 compute unit igpu running it up to, 1600 mahz the Z1 Extreme has an rdna 3 based igpu with 12 compute units up to 2700 MHz and yeah again kind of just like the CPU if we don't have to worry about battery life if we don't have to worry about Energy Efficiency this rdna 3 12C ipu will eat up the steam deck all day long but unfortunately battery life is something we need to worry about with these handhelds because they're portable gaming PCs all three of these handhelds have 16 GB of RAM and when it comes to the r Ally and the steam deck olad it's running at 6,400 megat transfers per second in the legion go it's 7500 it's actually using LP ddr5x so we do have faster Ram there and theoretically faster Ram should equate to better IG GPU performance because with integrated Graphics we are using system memory as vram with all three of these systems we do have the ability to get in there and upgrade our SSD but with the steam deck OLED we can opt to get 512 or 1 tbte straight out of the box with the Rog Ally it's locked right there at 512 that's the highest version we can get at the time of making this video and the legion go does offer 512 or 1 tbte but again we can upgrade this pretty easily in all three these handhelds one of the most important things for a handheld gaming PC is the display and I'm going to go ahead and say it right off the bat the steam deck OLED has the best display now they did an amazing job upgrading this to an OLED panel it's absolutely beautiful even though we have a maximum resolution of 800p I mean this thing really pops plus it supports HDR it's a 90 HZ OLED panel 600 nits of brightness standard but with HDR enabled it will do up to 1,000 nits and the viewing angles are miles ahead of both of these other handhelds the legion go and the Rog Ally it's just a really nice display they opted to use the Rog Ally has a 7in IPS display which looks absolutely amazing for an IPS viewing angles are pretty good there too but they really don't compare it to an OLED panel up to 120 HZ it is a 16x9 aspect ratio and 1080p plus we have free sync which is something I think should be in all of these handhelds at least going forward having that free sync enabled really does make a difference when you can't quite hit that 60fps Mark and you might work with a little bit of tearing free sync will totally alleviate any kind of tearing at all and in my opinion it really does make it feel like a smoother experience and finally for the screens the legion go does have a big boy it's an 8.8 in up to 144 Herz it's got a 16 by10 aspect ratio and a resolution of 2560 x600 which in my opinion is definitely a bit overkill for these handhelds but you know in kind of docked mode watching a video on it it's really great to be able to go up to that resolution and again it's an IPS it looks great but it just doesn't compare to an OLED panel they really just can 97% DCI 3 and a maximum brightness of 500 nits another nice little upgrade for the OLED steam deck is Wii 6E both of the other handhelds have always had WiFi 6E they've also got Bluetooth 5.2 but the steam deck does beat it out there with 5.3 really in my opinion doesn't make too much of a difference there but having that Wi-Fi 6 really increases those download speeds especially when you're downloading really really large games they also upgraded the battery to a 50w hour battery we've still got 45 wat fast charging with the steam deck OLED Rog allies coming in with a 40w hour battery 65 wat fast charging and the legion go 49.2 W hour with 65 W fast charging before we even move over to the battery life section of this video If if you're looking for the best battery life out of all three of these handhelds steam deck OLED is definitely where it's at the operating system on the steam deck is much different than the others also we've got Steam OS which is Linux and on the Ally and the legion go Windows 11 weight is another deciding factor for a lot of people steam deck OLED is coming in at 640 G they actually lowered this by 29 G versus the LCD the Rog Ally is coming in the lightest out of all three at 608 G and the Lenovo Legion go is coming in as the chunkiest boy at 854 G now that's with the controllers attached they do list it with and without but really I mean you're not going to be playing on it without those controllers attached in handheld mode so if it's on the table I really don't need to worry about the weight moving over to Performance now we do have to kind of make this Fair because the steam deck can only max out at up to 15 watts so I'm actually going to be running these against the steam deck at 15 watts and then we'll face them them off against each other at 30 Watts so we'll just kind of take it on up and see which one is coming out on top and with all of these tests I am working with an UNCA frame rate and with the built-in Benchmark for cyberpunk 2077 at 720p I had to connect this to my game capture defaults to 720 FSR set to performance at a 15 watt TDP the steam deck OLED managed 51.0 3 FPS the Lee and go only got 43.7 and the Rog Ally actually managed 51 02 and I'm kind of impressed here because uh Asus has been doing a lot of tweaking and tuning with the TDP presets it's actually pretty cool to see that we're getting real close at those lower wattages steam deck was always a winner when it came to lower wattages just due to the Apu it's using but we're getting real close here at 15 watts with the Rog Ally now if battery life isn't a concern going up to 30 Watts on the legion go will net you 64.4 7 and on the Rog Ally 6711 11 next up we've got a racing game Forza Horizon 5 and this is the steam version for all three of these handhelds 72p low settings FSR set to performance on the steam deck we netted 69 FPS nice on the legion go 76 and the Ally gave us 86 with the same exact settings across the board at 15 watts I also tested Mortal Kombat 1 and at 15 watts all three of them really didn't do a great job we can't hit full speed with this unless we take FSR to ultra performance and then I mean it just looks really bad even on a smaller display 720p low settings FSR set to Performance steam deck managed 51 FPS the legion go 56 and the Rog Ali 57 and at 30 Watts with that Z1 extreme we can do 60 FPS with it and the final game I tested was Horizon zero Dawn this is one of those games that actually performs really well on Lower in apus and on the steam dck at 720p medium settings FSR set to Performance we average 65 FPS on the legion go 68 and the Ally 75 and of course we can get much more out of the go and the Ally by taking that TDP up so it really looks like at that 15 watt TDP the OLED steam deck and the Ally are kind of trade and blows sometimes the Ally comes out on top at that lower wattage but most of the time the steam deck will I mean we're at 15 watts that's what we can do with with it now it's time to take a look at battery life and again I will mention it if you're looking for battery life the steam deck OLED is definitely where it's at it's actually got a significant gain over the other two and with all of the battery life test that I've run screen brightness is at 100% And I've disabled RGB on the other two but uh with the steam deck OLED we've got that 50w hour battery at a 5 wat TDP total draws 9.7 Watts you can expect around 309 minutes you can go down the list here but you know totally maxed out with the steam deck OLED at 15 watts total draw is 23.4 and this is with an UNCA frame rate in cyberpunk 2077 you can get around 130 minutes of run time now compare that to the Rog Ally which does have a smaller battery coming in at 40 wat hours at a 15 watt TDP total draw is 27.5 giving us around 87 minutes a run time and finally the legion go which has a 49.2 w battery it is coming ahead of the r G Ally but not by much because at a 15 wat TDP total draw from the battery there is 30.2 Watts which is quite a bit not exactly sure what's going on I guess it's all of the extra and the larger screen there but we're seeing around 96 Minutes of run time out of the Legion go valve really did go through and optimize all of the Power draw on the new OLED steam deck the uh screen itself pulls a lot less energy Ram also pulls less instead of using a quad Channel array it's using a dual Channel array much smaller chips and they shrunk that Apu die from 7 nanm down to 6 nanm so yeah I mean it's definitely the battery life King but keep in mind I mean 15 watts is the max there and that's all the performance you're going to get out of the steam dag and of course taking the wattage up on the Rog Ally and the legion go will decrease battery life significantly but it's definitely going to up performance on that ryzen Z1 extreme allowing you to play a lot of these AAA games much faster F than the steam deck can run them so in the end it's really up to you not taking in consideration any sales or discounts or anything like that at retail steam deck OLED does come in at the lowest price it's got the best screen best battery life and in my opinion the best low wat performance the legion go has a big high refresh rate display and I think it's a really good IPS panel that they chose here detachable controllers and great high watt performance which means over 15 watts yeah you're going to get some good performance set of this device and finally the Rog Ally awesome high watt performance because Armory crate we can actually take it way past 30 Watts now it's really up to you if you want to do that or not as we saw with the benchmarks we've got some pretty good low W performance and it has been getting better since the launch but it's not matching the OLED steam deck by any means across all of the games that I've been testing out and we've got a really nice 120 HZ free sync display so here's the deal at least for me recently my favorite has been the steam deck OLED and it really comes down to that screen being so beautiful and getting awesome battery life out of it we're kind of locked at the performance we're going to get out of this because we can't take it above 15 watts I mean without a bios mod or anything like that and even then at 15 watts we're basically maxing out the clocks on the CPU and GPU for that steam deck olad but my go-to for the longest time was the Rog Ally and I still go back to it because there are games that we just can't run at 60 FPS on the steam deck that really do need to be run at at 60 FPS in my opinion fighting games have to run at 60 like Mortal Kombat 1 and it's just not going to do it on the steam deck without a bunch of FSR enabled so if you're looking for the best battery life best screen go with the steam deck OLED if you're looking for a big screen device with those detachable controllers then obviously you'll need to go with the legion go and if you're looking for something with a really nice screen and the ability to kind of take that TDP up to really up the performance then the Rog Ally would definitely be where it's at but again in end it's really up to you you got to weigh all of your options but that's going to wrap it up for this video I really appreciate you watching if you're interested in learning a little more about any of these devices or maybe picking one up I'll leave links in the description and if you've got any questions let me know down below but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching

Channel: ETA PRIME

Views: 259,751

Keywords: etaprime, eta prime, steam deck oled vs rog ally, steam deck oled vs legion go, steam deck oled vs lcd, steam deck oled vs steam deck, steam deck oled vs switch oled, steam deck oled vs lcd performance, steam deck oled vs ally, rog ally vs, rog ally vs steam deck, rog ally vs legion go, rog ally vs steam deck oled, rog ally vs steam deck performance, legion go vs rog ally, legion go vs steam deck oled, legion go vs steam deck, legion go vs ally, best handheld gaming pc

Id: cQ9iJ5V1FU8

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2023