Lenovo Legion Go S (Windows) review

The Lenovo Legion Go S is a peculiar beast. I don’t think I can remember the last time I’ve enjoyed using a product so much that I’ve found so hard to recommend. But that’s what you get when you muck up your pricing in the wider market segment, and on this front Lenovo does really seem to have overslept by about a week and missed the first, second, and third boats.

That’s because the 32 GB version that I tested is going for $730 and yet you can get much better-performing handhelds for around that price. And the cheaper 16 GB version (£600, or £550 on offer) is outweighed by the Steam Deck OLED which many will prefer.

In addition to this strange pricing, the Legion Go S is also peculiar because compared to the original Legion Go it features an upgraded design, it looks and feels more premium, and yet it packs in a substantially worse processor. All for… about the same price as the original Legion Go is currently going for.

I call all this ‘peculiar’ rather than ‘bad’, though, because we really shouldn’t underestimate the value of a good, comfortable design for a handheld. After all, a handheld is basically part controller, and comfort and ergonomics are two of the most important things to consider when buying a controller. And on these fronts the Legion Go S does nail it.

This might not come across from a distance or through the screen, though. I’d seen plenty of images of the Legion Go S before I got my hands on one myself, and I must say, as a Legion Go Mk 1 user, I wasn’t very excited. From the limited information I had, it seemed like the Legion Go S was a stripped-back, mainstreamified handheld that might even be a little less premium than the original. I was expecting a moderately negative take: ‘Decent handheld, but removed what made the Legion Go special.’

But when I unboxed and held the Legion Go S for the first time, I was pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong… Well, almost wrong. The Legion Go S is stripped back and mainstreamified, so I wasn’t entirely off-base with my initial reaction. However, focusing just on looks and feel, to my eyes and hands, it’s the more premium product of the two, not to mention the more comfortable one.

The difference in comfort is an immediately noticeable change. Compared to the original Go, the grips on the Go S fit much more comfortably in my hand, the buttons are easier to reach and press, and the handheld is slimmer and lighter and less cumbersome overall.

This comfort has even made me reconsider the original Legion Go’s detachable controllers. I thought I enjoyed the Legion Go’s Switch-inspired pop-off cons because they allow me to use the handheld in lots of different ways. And that was true, to an extent. I did use the original one in lots of different places—kickstanded up on my desk, table, bed, or even just my legs, while I would sit back with the controllers detached, all loosey goosey.

What the Legion Go S has made me realise, however, is that the real reason why I did that, at least some of the time, was because of how cumbersome and heavy and uncomfortable I found the Legion Go to use for anything other than short sessions. I didn’t really realise this until trying the Legion Go S—as soon as I did, though, the scales lifted and I realised: ‘Oh, this is what I’ve been missing’.

It’s not just a comfort thing, either—the controls are just much more enjoyable to use, too. That’s because they offer a splendid array of clicks, clacks, and satisfying clonks. The original Legion Go didn’t exactly feel bad to use (setting aside the sharp edges that dig into your palms and the cumbersome size and weight), but it wasn’t exactly delightful.

The Legion Go S, however, is delightful to use. I especially love how its triggers sound and feel, and doubly so its D-pad. The latter, in fact, is I think better than any I’ve used on any controller, by my own subjective tastes. A lot of premium controllers go for a very clicky sound and feel, even when they have that Xbox-rollable design—the Scuf Valor Pro, for instance. Not so with the Legion Go S. The D-Pad has the perfect depth to the timbre and tactile feedback of its ‘clack’, at least to my ears and fingertips.

That might seem a small thing, but it’s really not, for a handheld. Performance is important—and we’ll get to that—but when it comes to handhelds, how the controls feel is important.

Put simply, Lenovo has nailed it across the board on the design and comfort front. That includes the little trackpad nubbet underneath the right-hand analog stick, too. While it might not be for everyone, I’ve found myself using this pretty frequently to use the cursor when I don’t want to take my hands off the grips to use the device’s touchscreen functionality.

Despite any initial worries I might have had, I haven’t struggled at all with its size: it’s easy to scroll around and make quick changes using the nubbet, though of course you lack the full ease and precision of a full Steam Deck-like touchpad. In my opinion it’s a worthy sacrifice, because this way you get room for nice front-facing speakers (another notable upgrade from the first Legion Go) and comfortable control layout. You can’t have everything, and the small nubbet seems like a good compromise—after all, you can always use the touchscreen when you need, too.

I think Lenovo’s struck the balance right here. Much as it has done fairly consistently over the years with its portable devices—just ask the nipple (sorry, ‘trackpoint’) on my ancient ThinkPad T420.

The Legion Go S feels like a move in the direction of a controller-first design, rather than something that tries to do everything perfectly and fails to do anything well. The original Legion Go experimented with FPS mode (ie, mouse mode) on a detachable Switch-like controller and a bigger trackpad, but the Legion Go S has made me realise this was unnecessary and cumbersome when the small nubbet does just as well and takes up barely any room.

The only design choice that isn’t so great is the slidey switches that turn the triggers from the traditional squeezy affair into clicky mouse button replicas. The slide-latch mechanism works but it just feels a little too flimsy for my liking, though I’ve probably been spoiled by the Scuf Valor Pro controller’s gorgeously clicky mechanism that does the same thing.

Overall, though, the Legion Go S has impressed me to almost no end on the design and comfort front, and it still retains all that I loved about the original Legion Go, such as a stunning display (which is admittedly slightly smaller and 120 Hz rather than 144 Hz—but who’s counting?). And that’s why I’ve found myself turning to it every time instead of the more powerful original Legion Go.

And yes, I did say more powerful. While every other aspect of the Legion Go S is an upgrade by my reckoning, it’s actually chucked an older and worse chip in there (boooo).

The Lenovo Legion Go S (at least in its current form) features an AMD Ryzen Z2 Go chip, which is essentially the same as the Rembrandt-R (Zen 3+) Ryzen 3 7335U: 4 cores and a boost clock of up to 4.3 GHz. That’s significantly less powerful than the 8-core, 5.1 GHz boost Z1 Extreme chip in the original Legion Go. Its GPU is, of course, also an older 600M-series one (presumably something like a 680M compared to the Z1 Extreme’s 780M).

The newer Legion Go S also has slower LPDDR5 RAM—6,400 MT/s vs the original’s 7,500 MT/s. 6,400 MT/s might seem fast (and it is) but LPDDR5 is lower bandwidth than DDR5. And don’t forget that this memory is shared with the GPU as its pseudo-VRAM because we’re dealing with a unified memory architecture (UMA) here.

All this does indeed make for a slower chip in practice, as I found when putting the Legion Go S through the PC Gamer handheld testing gauntlet. As you can see from the 1080p benchmarks, at default BIOS settings but set to Performance in the software, the Legion Go S performs significantly worse than the other current-gen handheld gaming PCs and also worse than the original Legion Go.

In fact, in demanding titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth Wukong, the game isn’t really playable on this handheld even with upscaling enabled, so if you’re looking to play these kinds of games at 1080p on Medium settings or better, look elsewhere.

On the other hand, some games (check F1 24 and Horizon Zero Dawn) are more than playable at Medium settings with the help of upscaling. And outside of these benchmarks, I found many of the games that I like to play on handheld—Diablo IV, Path of Exile 2, Rocket League, It Takes Two, to name a few—to run an absolute charm.

The story also gets a little more complicated when we throw UMA Frame Buffer into the mix. Changing this setting in the BIOS allows you to manually adjust how much of the handheld’s unified memory is reserved for the GPU (at the same time fencing this off from use by the CPU).

With the Legion Go S, by default this is set to ‘Auto’ which allows software to request and figure out what’s needed (with the original Legion Go, although there is an ‘Auto’ option, it defaults to 3 GB). But AMD explains, “in some situations increasing the UMA frame buffer size may help improve graphics performance in some games.”

I wasn’t expecting too much by changing this, but as you can see from the chart above, it made such a difference that the Legion Go S almost catches up to the Legion Go. The delta is quite big at default settings, but not so when both are at 4 GB or 8 GB. Just bear in mind that the amount of memory you set as the UMA Buffer will be ringfenced from the CPU, which might detract from CPU performance too much if you’re using a 16 GB rather than 32 GB version of the handheld.

There’s also the fact that you’ll obviously detract from battery life if you give the GPU more memory to pump through like this—which would be a shame because this is one area where the Legion Go S does really well, no doubt due to its less hefty processor. It stayed alive for over two hours in the PCMark 10 gaming battery life test, far surpassing the original Legion Go’s approximate 1 hr 30 and sitting just shy of the Asus ROG Ally X and MSI Claw 8 AI+.

You can also manually boost the Legion Go S up to 40 W, and I did find that this gave it an extra frame or two here or there, but the extra fan power (not to mention fan noise) required to keep it cool and resultant battery drain isn’t really worth it.

The other end of the spectrum is Quiet mode, which limits power draw and fan speed, and this should net you a ton of extra battery life. When I ran the PCMark test in this mode, it lasted a whopping 3 hours and 34 minutes, and no doubt would last longer in games less graphically demanding than the PCMark test loop. I’d be surprised if you didn’t get five or six hours out of it in Quiet mode in graphically light titles.

And when it’s finally depleted, this badboy charges back up to full in about an hour and a half (and gets to about 50% after just 30 minutes).

Why am I banging the battery life and light graphics drum so much? Well, because that’s the only scenario and use case where I think this handheld makes sense (and even then, only if you love Windows).

You might be thinking all the above sounds great for a cheap handheld—fantastic design, great battery life, good speakers, lovely screen, comfortable grips, good performance in less graphically light games and decent performance even in some more demanding titles when the UMA Buffer’s ramped up.

The problem is that this isn’t exactly a cheap handheld—especially not the 32 GB version that I’ve been testing. The 32 GB memory version costs $730. That’s only a little less than a ROG Ally X—the current best handheld gaming PC and one that beats the performance of the Legion Go S by far—also feels very comfy to use, and has great battery life. For that price, despite its numerous design improvements, the Legion Go S just isn’t worth it.

Then we get to the cheaper 16 GB version, which currently only seems like it’s available in the UK for about £600 (or £550 on offer). But this is smack-bang in the realm of the Steam Deck OLED, which should perform about the same if not a little better than the Go S and not suffer from the many annoyances of using a Windows handheld.

Heck, you can even pick up the original Legion Go for about that much, making the Go S quite literally a sidegrade—better design, worse performance, same price.

There unfortunately doesn’t seem to be a good place for the Legion Go S at its launch price point—if you’re considering the 32 GB version you might as well get an Ally X, and most people considering the 16 GB version will probably prefer a Steam Deck OLED. The one use case where it makes sense is if you really want a cheaper Windows handheld for some lighter gaming. Perhaps there is a market for that, for instance for those who like to use products tied into some of Microsoft’s ecosystem.

And for such people, joy really does await: the handheld feels fantastic to actually play on compared to the original Legion Go. The fact is, I have both the Legion Go and the Legion Go S here and I’m consistently choosing to pick up the newer one rather than the original, despite its worse performance. Admittedly that’s because I don’t tend to play very demanding games on a handheld, but I’d bet plenty of gamers are similar there.

That’s why it’s so sad that it simply costs too much for what you’re getting. And this is especially true given that there’s meant to be another SteamOS version coming out before too long that will cost even less.

Ultimately, this version of the Legion Go S feels like somewhat of a placeholder for the SteamOS version. While it’s a joy to use and so it pains me to say this, unless you absolutely must have Windows on your entry-level handheld, there are better options out there for the price.