Valve has officially discontinued the LCD Steam Deck, so if you're looking for a powerful handheld gaming PC that isn't going to break the bank, then this Lenovo Legion Go S is your answer. Amazon have dropped the price of this Lenovo handheld back to under $600, offering better specs, along with Valve's very own SteamOS to rival Windows 11.
Priced at just $589.99 right now, this Lenovo handheld is one of the more affordable ways to play your Steam library on-the-go. You can use handhelds like this as an alternative to a console, as well as to bulkier, more expensive PCs and laptops. You can, if you're very quick, still pick up this handheld in time for delivery ahead of Christmas, saving you 14% on Amazon's list price in the process.
As far specs go, we've put this Lenovo Legion Go S portable on our best handheld gaming PCs guide as one of the more powerful alternatives to the now-aging Steam Deck. The Legion Go S currently comes in two hardware variants, but this is the cheaper model, featuring the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go APU.
Save 14% ($95.72) Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS (AMD Ryzen Z2 Go): was $685.71 now $589.99 at Amazon The Lenovo Legion Go S is a budget-friendly handheld gaming PC. This model features the AMD Ryzen Z2 Go APU, with four CPU cores, along with an RDNA 2-based AMD Radeon GPU with 12 compute units. It has 16GB of LPDDR5X-6400 RAM, a 1TB SSD with Gen 4 speeds, as well as an 8-inch IPS display with a 120Hz refresh rate, along with VRR support.
This processor is one of the few physical hardware differences that you'll find between the two models currently on sale. The AMD Ryzen Z2 Go is a Zen 3+ processor, fitted with four CPU cores and eight threads, along with a boost clock speed up to 4.3 GHz. The built-in Radeon GPU it includes is RDNA 2-based with 12 compute units and a TDP of between 15 and 30W. Compare and contrast to the Steam Deck, which uses a Zen 2-based, custom-designed Van Gogh APU, which features only four CPU cores, along with an RDNA 2 GPU with only eight compute units.
When we put this handheld to the test in our Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS review, this Z2 Go variant proved to be less powerful than the more expensive Z1 Extreme model, but the gulf between them isn't huge, and running SteamOS is certainly a better option for gamers than running it with Windows 11. Frame rates remained playable in several intensive games that we tested, including the notorious CPU-heavy Cyberpunk 2077 at 800p, which was able to maintain 50fps on average. The same handheld with Windows 11 installed, meanwhile, was only able to manage 32fps.
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Coupled with this AMD processor is 16GB of LPDDR5X-6400 RAM and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD for storage. You're also getting an 8-inch IPS display, which features a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,200, along with a variable refresh rate of 120 Hz. This means that you can game at 1200p, even using the Z2 Go APU, but you'll find that better frame rates in the most resource-heavy games are available if you drop down to 800p or less.
The decision by Valve to discontinue the most affordable Steam Deck makes this Lenovo Legion Go S handheld even better value. This device doesn't feature an OLED panel like the similarly-priced Steam Deck OLED, but it does have a bigger screen (8-inch vs 7.4), along with a higher native resolution and VRR support, coupled with the already-mentioned superior gaming performance.
The Lenovo Legion Go S also features a bigger 55.5 Whr battery which we found in our review to last for around two hours while using the device's power-saving profile. You're also getting double the storage capacity (1TB vs 512GB) against the soon-to-be entry-level Steam Deck OLED for only $40 more.
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