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A good handheld gaming PC feels like a game changer. Just last night, I was tucked up in bed playing Elden Ring on one, and realised just how far gaming has come in the last few decades.
But with the memory crisis bringing up the price of the Steam Deck (the cheapest model is currently $789), the budget end of the market has more or less dropped out. Thus, I suggest picking up a Lenovo Legion Go S and its Ryzen Z2 Go chip instead of a Steam Deck if you plan on buying one any time soon. Down to $731 at Amazon, it’s a solid choice.
This gaming handheld, with this specific configuration, started with a retail price of $650, which honestly makes this quite a good deal given the state of the memory crisis. We reviewed this model last year (though with bigger storage and memory) and found it to be comfortable in the hand and to have a strong battery life. For gaming handhelds, that battery life is very important.
At the time, we said it was too expensive (oh, those were the days) and had poorer performance than current-gen handhelds, but the ROG Ally X and OneXPlayer we compared it to at the time will fetch you a lot more. So, for what’s on the market, this is genuinely quite a good deal, and a real Steam Deck beater for less.
In fairness, the cheapest Steam Deck does come with an OLED screen, but I’d be picking the Go S, and it’s somewhat inferior IPS panel when you consider the greater performance and lower cost.
(Image credit: Future, Grinding Gear Games)
With a hand from upscaling tools, you can get decent performance on Medium quality in F1, and Horizon Zero Dawn. Even with upscaling, though, Black Myth Wukong and Cyberpunk on Medium are tough to run on the Legion Go S.
Naturally, you have to make some performance compromises when trying to run games on a handheld, and the Legion Go S is still a capable machine that is made comparably better by its competitors and their ever-inflating prices.
One thing worth noting here is that this is the Windows model, and therefore there’s some performance overhead in running the OS. You can swap over to SteamOS to get a little bit of a performance bump, though Windows handhelds do offer their own unique benefits. For instance, Linux OSes don’t play nicely with many anti-cheats, making the Go S a solid Fortnite machine.
Another thing worth noting is that the 512 GB of storage is pretty minuscule. You will struggle to cram in a whole bunch of games here without having to make extra space.
If you’re looking for more space, and a different chip, the 1 TB SSD, 32 GB of RAM Legion Go S with its Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip is available for $1,000 at Best Buy and comes with SteamOS built-in. If you gotta buy a handheld in the next couple of years, these two are both well worth considering.
Best handheld PC 2026
