Lenovo Legion Go Is Coming For ASUS ROG Ally's Lunch Money, Preorder Here
We first heard about the Legion Go back in August when rumors abounded about the oversized gaming device. Lenovo officially unveiled the Legion Go at the beginning of last month, and it's a doozy of a device. Where the Switch, Steam Deck, and ROG Ally all use 7" LCDs, the Legion Go is quite a bit larger at 8.8". Like the ROG Ally, its IPS LCD also refreshes at 144 Hz, but the screen is even higher-rez, at 2560×1600.
2560×1600 is also known as QHD+ resolution. This is exactly four times the resolution of the display in the Steam Deck. We expect that most players will want to run games in the Steam Deck's resolution and integer scale the output up to the higher resolution of the Legion Go's screen. This should still give satisfactory visuals while providing a sharper experience for non-gaming tasks on the system. Lightweight games, such as 2D titles like 30XX or Fortnite in its Performance mode, may actually be able to run at native resolution on the tablet.
Powering the Legion Go is the same Ryzen Z1 Extreme silicon as in the ROG Ally's more expensive model. If you're not familiar, this is an AMD "Phoenix" APU with eight Zen 4 CPU cores and a GPU based on AMD's latest RDNA 3 architecture with twelve compute units. It's a powerful piece of silicon, and we found it up to the task of playing current-generation AAA games in the ROG Ally, with appropriate settings. It'll be even more capable in the Legion Go, both because the larger size of the system means superior cooling, and also because it gets hooked up to faster DDR5-7500 memory.
Besides the larger screen, there are some other major differences between the Legion Go and its competitors. Where the controls are completely built-in and non-removable on the Steam Deck and ROG Ally, the Legion Go takes a cue from the Nintendo Switch and features removable wireless controls. In combination with the stand on the back of the machine, this could make the Legion Go a lot more comfortable to play, and it could make it possible for two people to play, too. It also means that the weight of the system—undoubtedly heavier than its competitors—is less relevant.
There are other innovations here, too. The Legion Go has several extra mappable buttons on its control surfaces, it uses Hall-effect joysticks, and it also includes a mouse wheel, which should make using the Go as a computer considerably more convenient. It still lacks the touchpads of the Steam Deck, but you do get a controller base that turns the right half of the gamepad into a vertical optical mouse. You also get a second USB Type-C port; both ports are capable of USB 4.0 connectivity, and there's a separate audio combo port as well as a MicroSD card reader, too.
Perhaps the most impressive part of the Legion Go is that it's not even that expensive. There have been similar devices from smaller manufacturers, but much as we said with the ROG Ally, those companies are likely finding it hard to compete with these larger OEMs that can take advantage of economies of scale and long-standing supply agreements. The Lenovo Legion Go will come in two variants: one with 512GB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage, and one with a full terabyte.
The Legion Go 512GB will run you just $699, the same price as the ROG Ally. Meanwhile, the 1TB version is just $50 more at $749.99. If you're feeling froggy, you can use those links to head over to Best Buy to reserve one, and they're supposed to start shipping on Halloween, October 31st.
