What is THE BEST handheld for 2024? | In-Depth Comparison

hey my name is Joseph and it's finally time to get our own Hands-On impressions of the steam deck but not just any old steam deck the steam deck olid but as you may see from the title this is not just a review of the steam de goad but rather a comprehensive recap of the big three handhelds as well as my updated thoughts to tell you why everyone and I mean everyone should have a handheld like these which one will it be and for what reason is there a definitive winner or does it depend let's answer that over the course of this video okay so first a few disclaimers first those of you that saw the legion Go video may remember me saying that I don't want to be a handheld review Channel but at the same time I felt like we couldn't end the handheld review Saga without finishing on the one and only steam deck OLED and trilogies are always cooler right let me tell you I'm really happy that we got to end on this one but stick around to find out why second this video is not sponsored no valve get that money out of here you ignored my email first we're going to be as unbiased as possible right this is my money on the line just as it has been with the legion go and The Rock Ally and finally we're only going to be doing a mini review of the steam deck then comparing all three devices at a surface level you day one folks know that I don't do much of the technical stuff like talk about how many Hot Pockets you get per square nanometer or how many grams lighter the steam deck is than a bag of Coca that stuff gets talked about to death and I just want to share my very consumer nerd based personal experience I take these out of the box and I fill with them for a few days but I'm still just someone that wants the game first and foremost so before I tell you if the steam deck OLED lives up to my wild the streams let me give you a recap in under a minute of the last year of handhelds flashback hm steam deck Neo GPT win steam deck oh no I can't play Destiny 2 not that I wanted to many months later ooh Rog Ally 1080p 120 htz it's running Windows and I just walked in the Best Buy to get one nice oh no my SD card D my battery life several months later later W big screen 1600p 144 HZ two USBC ports a big battery joycons oh so it's broken cool okay um well there couldn't possibly be another handheld device coming out too soon right 298 Frozen patties later oh holy end of flashback if you want more detail then pause the video and go watch the other reviews then come back the ra Aly V will give you my personal history with handhelds before the actual review and the legion go will give you a slightly more in-depth analysis of the Legion Go versus the Ally now let's quickly recap updates for these devices since launch for reference all these devices are using an AMD chipset but the steam deck is using a custom van go processor which I just want to point out cuz that's a kind of cool name on the other hand the legion and the Ally are using the C1 extreme chip which is basically the standard in handheld devices right now in terms of using each device and keeping them updated here's what a day in the life of each device looks like time to do my daily update check of the Legion ghost subreddit uh oh hey Ben Myers posted from Lenovo oh sweet new drivers just launched all right time to go to this link press download click on the file let it do its thing okay maybe do a restart did it work uh let's check the version number and test it out okay yeah looks like it works good coffee huh I should check a new Rog Ally updates out oh nice there it is download install restart yeah I trust it it's worked before huh it's been a week since I last updated my steam deck let's do a quick check here huh nothing yet I guess now don't get me wrong you could be the kind of person that never updates their device for some reason or always updates it no matter what but what I'm getting at is if you're going to want the most out of your device then sometimes that means doing your homework and each device comes with its own level of effort granted it could be that all three of the devices in the coming months become a sort of set and forget device where the updates are easy and trustworthy but right now I see many people that want to roll back their drivers on the Rong Ally when there's a change in thermals or performance and a lot of users on the legion side foaming at the mouth for any Chinese beta drivers to give them even a slight boost let's talk about the updates on the rag Ally Asus has been pretty consistent with their bios updates and currently they have the AMD drivers from October 16th sure it is December now but keep that in mind when we talk about the legion go the Allies latest bios update had two big features number one being gyro and not a lot to say here they're cool you can set a button on a per game profile in the Armory crate then usually that's going to be the left trigger the legion go has gyrados but not the option to trigger as far as I know so it's just kind of on all the time and the steam deck has gyro and you can use it in a much more manageable steam controller input part of the controller configuration the next interesting thing though is the CPU boost toggle and playing a super light game like the KFC dating Sim you don't need a CPU running at max power to quote Spider-Man 2 that'd be like using a shotgun for a haircut in most circumstances frame rate will be unaffected and you'll just get a lower TDP and slightly better battery life however in my testing with a few big games like Elden ring or cyber Punk it does basically nothing and there's no real performance difference the CPU will still run at the speed it needs since these games are already demanding other than those updates the rest is basically simple stuff like controller calibration or incremental performance upgrades now as for the Le AG go I'm kind of glad I waited to do this video since a few updates here have come that are pretty substantial for example the handheld Community has deemed that 6 Gigabytes of vram is much better than four and five is kind of a sweet spot right now the Rog Ally lets you set anywhere from 1 to 8 or just do auto but Auto isn't always perfect so just stick with five or six the legion go just this month patched in six right between 4 and 8 so that closes the Gap a little bit in terms of prime performance hey cha from the future here maybe the past for you I don't know anyways back home for the holiday is so please excuse a slightly different my quality long story short I want to talk about 6 GB of vram you may have games crashing on you and you may not know why and what happened to me is that when you set the 6 GB of vram setting you're going to take up more of your RAM so you'll have less RAM and what's going to happen is that if you don't have enough RAM to run a game then your system is going to go to your SSD storage to just get any storage you can and cashing textures and all that what happened to me is that I had only like 3 GB of storage left long story short I just deleted a few games and bada boing Bada Boom games stop crashing if you want more details leave a comment and I'll tell you about it if your game's crashing on 6 GB of vram setting then that might be the solution this never happened to me on 4 GB so you know that's probably a big reason why this is a memory issue but yeah just something to keep in mind basically the device steals the extra memory from the RAM and uses it as vram so it's like if you're using two notebooks to study and you're ripping out pages from one notebook because your other notebook's getting full you don't want to rip out more pages than you need otherwise now your other notebook's full and you're you're going to fail the class and your parents are going to send you back to the motherland to be honest that's basically it there are other settings like memory speed and something called stamp but for those of you that want to do that do your homework on that unless you want to copy me because these settings are kind of what I settled on hey Joseph from back home again and I have to update you on this because as of December 22nd very close to Christmas Lenovo has actually released new AMD drivers and these AMD drivers are from November 17th more or less it's actually pretty groundbreaking because these are actually now newer than the drivers on the Rock Ali and also groundbreaking because on this part of the video I was going to complain about how the Lenovo was running on September AMD drivers when this thing came out in November so doing a way better job here on the driver side and yeah it brings up performance a little bit more close to the Ally and yeah really good update and we'll talk about more in the performance section moving on to the deck of the hour if you were keeping an ear out then you know it released a high praise for improving on almost everything that made the LCD version the less appealing option but I never had an LCD steam deck so I'm coming into this completely fresh and blinded to any real upgrades with that being said my Mini review can boil down to the following I really like the OLED screen but I don't love the resolution I'll talk more about that in the comparisons but at night the inky blacks on this display are really impressive it's almost like it Blends into the rest of the device I also like the ergonomics of this device when I hold all three of these the steam deck almost fits in my hands like a glove moreover the battery life on this thing is insane but again more on that later using Steam OS and Linux is not as bad as I thought it would be I got my UL and launchers working just fine thanks to all the work that has been done to support the deck from valve and folks over at the heroic launcher and shiak and even mu deck still when people say that the deck feels the most like a console they're right this has been the most painless setup for a device I've had so far but I acknowledge that at this point the device is over a year old so it's not exactly a fair comparison however I also love the way that I can set TDP on the peratt level pretty easily and set my balance between performance and battery life but I'm a bit sad that it does max out out at 15 watts when I've been used to the other devices still basically I love everything about this device other than the relatively low TDP settings and the low display resolution I hate to say that I don't really have all that much to say about the steam deck that hasn't been praised and recorded a dozen times over by other reviewers but yeah one year in it works awesome and I don't really have much to say about it good job valve that's that's it really with that in mind how do the other two devices do compared to the deck well starting off with something I already mentioned that is displays I'm very much display person like on any device huge bezels and low color accuracy are my biggest pet peeves that being said the thing I like least on the steam de OLED is that it's still 800p now don't be mad I get why it's 800p and that on a display this size anything higher is not that noticeable and it even will help your performance but would it really hurt to at least give us the option like on some of these windows devices the legion go has no business being 1600p but it can and it looks crisp in some of my 2D games I ran a poll on the legion go subreddit and found that most people will run most of their games at 800p to get better frame rates blurry pixelation be damned but for me if my game is running at 80 FPS at 800p and I can do 1200p to get a solid 60 still I'll take the hit it's kind of my preference there on the topic of frame rates I also want to add that both the steam deck and the legion do not support variable refresh rate on the steam deck I don't mind cuz you can set your own refresh rate literally by the digit so if you know you're averaging 40 FPS then just drag that sucker down to smooth things out on the legion go it's disappointing cuz we don't get another option sure 144 HZ is supposed to make those drw frames feel less frequent but sometimes it still bites you right in the eyes my but even if you do get a highres high refresh rate display you won't often get to use all of it if your dream is to run Red Dead Redemption 2 at 144 FPS and 1600p on the legion go then your best bet is to go to sleep and keep dreaming plain and simple if you care a lot about a spect out display then give a point to the legion if you care a lot about OLED HDR and color accuracy then give it to the steam deck and if you don't care about your display size and you just want a smooth experience with options then give it to the Ally since it has vrr and it has a standard 16x9 display that will be less prone to issues with games or emulator stretching on the topic of issues with games I used to think that Linux would be a limiting factor for the steam deck but actually that hasn't been the case at least for me the only thing that I haven't been able to get running on deck that these other two devices can run is Xbox game pass and a few games on Steam Deck with antiche on the steam deck the only way I found to play game pass games is to stream them over the edge browser that's pretty whack if you're someone who mostly plays on Game Pass and maybe can't rely on a stable internet connection other than that emulators and other PC launchers have found a way to basically run flawlessly on Deck give or take a few workarounds this is super easy on all devices so there's arguably no real difference and effort the only limitation you'll deal with on the steam deck are just the games that aren't really optimized you can easily tell with this little badge that valve gives to games on the steam store and most games games run fine but check on the ones you plan to play and make sure that some of those run and now that we talked about what Will and won't run let's talk about how well they run and for how long as far as battery life it's no competition the steam deck takes this one easily it has the biggest battery uses less power and has the power savings from OLED so it's no question the legion has the second biggest battery of the three devices and the Ally comes in last for capacity as a benchmark let's use Persona 5 since that is my go-to game I play on planes on the ra Ally I can get an hour maybe an hour and a half of battery life on the legion go I can get 2 hours of battery life and on the steam deck I can get 3 hours of battery life but using TDP limiter and the FPS limiter get closer to 6 hours battery life I took the Ally on a 3-hour plane ride and I was getting kind of worried when the outlets on the plane didn't work with the OLED I could do a round trip on one charge and as far as performance goes I'm going to give you the details you need and if you want more in depth then go look at some other videos basically up to 10 wats the steam deck is the most efficient device these other two windows devices will slow to a relative crawl on anything below 10 watts but the steam deck can live there comfortably at 15 watts hey what do you do how do you know um anyways it's me again and I'm here because again talking about those AMD drivers that just came out they changed basically the whole section about performance and I'll keep it short because I think after the legion goes update the legion can come ahead by up to 5 or 10 frames there are a few configurations to keep in mind in the bios for the legion to get it to this point but after that it really just comes down to all the other factors about this device to really see what you want they're both using the A and bc1 extreme chip so maybe in a few months they'll be so well optimized that it's not going to matter and right now it barely matters again you're seeing the comparisons on screen here and it varies wildly depending on the game and optimization depending on the water setting sometimes the Ally comes ahead it used to be really different but now it doesn't really matter keeping this in mind for the rest of the video um make your own choice based on other fact and now we're going to get into the emulation section and keep in mind what I just said that performance may have affected this slightly but it's pretty neconn now and also the legion has some pretty interesting behavior that doesn't go away keep that in mind when you watch this next section speaking of that emulation the deck can do emulation just fine but when you get to the PS3 on the switch you're kind of going to wish you had those extra 5 watts to get you into higher frame rates some games like Mario Bros Wonder run great but tears of the Kingdom might not be up to par even Lollipop Chainsaw on the PS3 emulator runs great on Steam deck but you don't have enough of that wattage to get to a full 60 FPS I mentioned in the legion video that the reason the Ali tends to run better at 15 wats is because it tends to push above its set TDP and that kind of does it on its own 15 watts on the legion is 15 watts period but on the Ally 15 watts is sometimes 15 sometimes 20 same for the other power modes again if you want to see more of that then go look at the legion video the last thing I want to mention is custom TDP modes and each device does these differently the steam deck is the easiest where you can set it and forget it any time through the quick access menu and the legion go does almost the same thing but it's more clunky and it's kind of bugged at the moment in my testing you can customize it reliably in most games up to 20 watts and afterwards it kind of depends cuz games like Elden ring for example when I set at 2 23 Watts the wattage will just shoot up to the 30s and never come down the same thing happens in other games but at different thresholds in tears of the Kingdom with Yuzu however was kind of weird depending on the OS power mode down here the only system that has this by the way I can get more or less the wattage I asked for and boost performance the rag Ally has this too don't worry but it's tucked away in the Armory crate settings you don't need to restart so you can technically keep this open and you can even set your own fan curves which is good because I mentioned in the legion C comparison that this device runs hot like 90° cus hot sometimes but in my experience if you set your fan curve right then you can worry a little bit less for a little bit more noise so to summarize hey future me again and that whole conclusion is updated after the legion go update but basically the legion go is performing better than the steam deck right now but who's to say that the rag Ally won't perform better in a future update also the steam deck is obviously the king of battery life but it's not that performant so it kind of comes down to your preference on what you want performance or better battery life technically the legion go is performant and has better battery life than the Ally but it's still way less battery than the steam deck so seriously at this point it's preference now onto the ergonomics section ergonomics I'll keep to a minimum since it's mostly a personal feeling based on the shape of your hands but for me I have shorter fingers and wider Palms so it's mostly about how well I can grip the device in my opinion the most comfortable device is the steam deck I also just like the fact that the joysticks are at the same height but that may not matter to you you get two trackpads on the steam deck one on the legion and none on the Ally usually for me the left track pad is just for scrolling but the legion go has a scroll wheel in the back of the right controller which I use pretty often the steam deck has tons of haptic feedback so if that's your thing then go nuts and the Ally uses a desktop mode controller mapping where your right stick is your mouse and your triggers are clicking and it works maybe it's a bit sensitive but it works and yes all of these devices have a touchcreen if you need it on joysticks to my understanding the Ally and the deck both use electromagnetic joysticks but the legion has has hall effect joysticks if that means nothing to you then don't sweat it just know that the hall effect is a premium for some people me I like the ones on the deck more since they're a little tighter and they're at the same level again compared to the offset for these other two as far as buttons I got to say that to me I prefer the buttons on the legion a clicky d-pad strong face buttons and the triggers feel pretty good next in line is the deck and this is perfectly fine membrane on every button except for clicky bumpers and a cushy cross shape d-pad in dead last is the rck Ally these buttons are the most mushy and the omnidirectional d-pad while good for fighting games and Platformers is also mushy which I don't like decent triggers nice bumpers and oh yeah these macro buttons on the back each device has these steam deck and Legion go have four and the Ally has two but personally I don't really use these but your mileage may vary the only quirky device here is the legion which is giving you the option to take the controllers off like if it was a Nintendo switch if you want more detail on that go look at the legion Go video but the gist of it is it's a bit of a gimmick but if you really like the Legion go for firstperson shooter games or as a switch substitute then it's a cool feature to have these are pretty light so if you have weak wrists then just attach him and put the tablet down and you're good to go the last thing here is portability I can usually fit the Ally in a sling bag no problem which is nice when I want to go somewhere and not take my whole backpack the legion is the biggest and the heaviest and it comes with a case if you need it but the controllers do come off which make transporting that thing this much easier the loser here is the steam deck while this thing is light and thin it's also long so you basically have to get a bag that is made for it or use the included case and throw that in a backpack give your point here based on preference the last thing I want to talk to you about is pricing the steam deck OLED is the cheapest option brand new at about $600 after shipping in taxes for the base version if you need something even cheaper then you can shop around for an LCD deck online meanwhile the C1 extreme Rog Ally started at $700 but if you want to take a gamble you can get an open box or used one from Best Buy I say it's a gamble because a number of things could be wrong with it like the SD card reader which again is famous for frying SD cards and finally the Lenovo Legion go hasn't seen a price cut yet but you can find some open box units close to 600 and when you compare both the 1 terb Legion Go versus the 1 tbte OLED deck the legion go is more expensive but you can actually get it for cheaper than the deck if you go open BX again your mileage may vary okay so congratulations you made it to the end but let's say that even with knowing the intricacies of each device you're still not sure of which one's for you then let me decide for you in front of me I have four people that may be the target audience for these devices listen along and see who you align yourself with more sinette here is a really technical guy but he's also just usually pretty busy with work or his other Hobbies he knows he wants an easy to use device but also a device that's performant and he's looking to play his biggest games in these short bursts of time he has he also wants a decent display and doesn't mind paying a few dollars to get what he want in this case I think sinette should get the roong Ally since battery life comes second to Performance and and hey maybe sinat has a portable charger laying around that he doesn't mind carrying Sophia here is looking for something that can do most things well but wants to have a device that is both very nice to look at and good to play Shooters on and crank performance with in this delicate Balancing Act Sophia may want to go with the Lenovo Legion go since the FPS mode will help her with her Shooters plus the second biggest battery will keep her happy just a little bit longer William here is looking for the best all-around device plain and simple if everything was taken into account William wants a device that can play most of his PC games and maybe replace his Nintendo switch as his main handheld that just works he plans to travel a lot but gaming is his main hobby he also wants the nicest screen to look at if he can somehow get that in his slightly Thrifty budget in that case William needs to get the steam deck it's not really a question at that point now Han is our last person and we're out of handheld so what should Han do well luckily Han doesn't give a Fu about these big three devices they're way too expensive no matter how you slice it and she only really plays a few games here and there so for Han there's a world of Alternatives Han can get a small device like the amber bernick RG 35xx and play tons of retro games or hey almost everyone has a phone hell nowadays you can really do most of your gaming on your phone if you really wanted to from streaming services like Xbox game pass or more local options like PS remote play or even native stuff like Resident Evil games that are coming to iPhone 15 or emulators on Android there's really a ton you can do already have a folding phone that's basically a Nintendo DS before these handhelds I would use this backbone controller and my iPhone 12 Pro Max place stuff over Wi-Fi or cellular I even beat all of Hi-Fi rush and high on life just streaming them through Xbox game pass seriously and yes you could also buy any of these big three devices and use it for a deluxe streaming device when you're at home to save on battery or splurge on luxury oh and I guess you could buy a switch or something I don't know the possibilities are already endless as long as you do your research so that being said what can we expect for the future of handhelds well we live in a world of upgrades even the steam deck needed a substantial upgrade on only a year and a half later to keep up with the competition but that's without even releasing a steam deck 2 which is surely at least just another 2 years away and who's to say that Lenovo and Asus won't also come out and release their own OLED models or the rck Ally 2 or the legion go Plus or something ultimately while I do think everyone should have a handheld device I think that when you do get that device you end up going with then do the following install the games you want to play and if they run great then this one small trick will keep your device running better than all the rest ready okay here it goes turn off your frame rate monitor and just play the damn game seriously as PC Gamers we often fall prey to the numbers game of specs and frame rate and we end up in this rat race of comparisons where no one's allowed to be happy my biggest takea away from testing all three of these devices is that in total isolation all of these devices are perfect for what you want to do if I didn't have the FPS counter turned on in all these tests then I would have gone with a device that has the nicest screen or the longest battery life and hot take but while OLED is l to look at when I have the oler deck by itself and the Legion by itself I can kind of barely tell that it's missing what I'm getting at is get the device that feels best for you and then shut out all of the noise after trust your gut and don't worry about upgrading as long as your device runs fine when games start chugging or your battery only works when you're plugged in then you can start shopping around again it took me three devices to learn that lesson so I'm just trying to pass my teachings on to you you're probably wondering which is the device I'm going with I mean I already have all these three but which is my favorite which one's the one I reach for the most and be honest you might not like it for me the device I tend to reach for the most is the Lenovo Legion go it's Charming you know in a way it's not like as great as the steam deck in terms of most things but when I'm at home I tend to reach for the legion go it's just something about the big screen and the detachable controllers that just gets me you know on the last trip I took my rag Ally over my Legion go because it was more performant and the flight was kind of short on that trip though I really missed the legion go and the big screen and everything else on it even though the performance was a little worse I just kind of missed having it you know I don't really reach for my Ally that often which is kind of sad but the legion go is again my go-to device at home but and this is an even bigger but the next time I go on a trip I'm going to take the OLED deck it's just much better at that whole battery life thing and OLED does look great so I know I complained about the legion go at some points in this video not working the way it's intended to work or working in weird ways but when I get it to work in the ways that I want it to it's really fulfilling and I don't know maybe that's just me being weird like falling into this sunk time cost fallacy but but no yeah seriously I really like the legion go and when it works well and I don't have to think about things I just enjoy the whole experience yeah those are my preferences thanks so much for listening if this video helped you out in any way then do me a favor and hit the like button if you liked what I had to say or you like the way we roll here then hit subscribe to hear more from me at this point I'm kind of fully stepping away from the handheld device review scene and I'm going to start with game reviews and clearing my backlog in 2024 so stick around for that Journey if it interests you but until then thanks again for listening and have a damn good rest of your Year see [Music] you

Channel: Joseph

Views: 19,344

Keywords: steam deck, steam deck oled, rog ally, asus rog ally, lenovo legion go, legion go, handheld gaming, handheld, portable gaming, handheld device, gaming

Id: 3EFqYeM-VUQ

Length: 25min 13sec (1513 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023