Lenovo Legion Go, GO GO!

[Music] this is a Windows tablet first with built-in controllers and it says Legion on the back now as far as introductions go I know that's a pretty lousy one but I a good reason for it but I'll get into that in a bit a portable device like this on which you can play practically any PC game and to run your regular software applications on for close to $800 Canadian dollar including 150 discount is a remarkable achievement I've been waiting for such a device for a very very long time and I'm ver

y excited to finally get my hands on this however there's no running away from the fact that there is a little bit of a learning curve involved to those who are new to PC gaming since this does not have that fluid like console level user experience I fear many out there might get frustrated a short while after they start using the go because of that reason and I don't want that I really don't want that because we need devices like this to save and nurture the next generation of PC Gamers we're a

Dying Breed you know so I just want to set your expectations straight and avoid any buyers remorse but playing Forza Horizon 5 at 1080p near 60 frames a second at high settings on a handheld is crazy nice if you show this very cool Gadget sometime in patience I promise you you will find a great great gaming companion in here for [Music] you now before I proceed I have finally reached 1,000 subscribers thank you all very much I certainly appreciate all the support and encouragement so to celebra

te I'll be sending a small gift to one of you who helped me reach 1,000 subscribers just comment below by tell me which of the current handheld gaming devices on the market right now you're most interested in and after 2 weeks of release of this video I will reach out to the randomly selected winner those of you who are new to the channel and are Teek and gaming and find my content to be useful please to consider liking and subscribing now at this point the internals of the Legion go are not muc

h of a mystery it is an all AMD CPU with rdna2 integrated Graphics it comes with 16 GB of lpddr 5x fast Ram dealing frequencies up to 7500 MHz I have 512 gigs of storage in here plus a Micro SD slot for expansion and an 8.8 in QD plus display getting 3 months of Xbox game pass is also pretty sweet it means you can get right into playing your games from a very large library of popular titles from the get-go at the time of my review during February 2024 the go has been discounted to $799 Canadian

dollar not so sure if that might be the case now I think that's pretty amazing considering the competition the Asus Ali at the time of the recording was $900 Canadian and it's not even as well endowed as a go for a similar price though you could get a Lenovo lock gaming laptop with an RTX 3050 and an AMD CPU I will do a comparison between those two devices to also let you know what what is better value for money so get subscribed for that upcoming review I personally found that 512 gigs of stora

ge was not enough for me to carry around enough of my games so I ordered a 1 TB drive from Amazon it had to be Gen 4 and the 2242 format this is a configuration that I found rather difficult to find at this time but you could also get the 2230 variant but you need an adapter for it whatever you do just make sure you've got the right prying tools and take your time to unwrap the shielding around the current SSD in here because I messed up mine you could also get a Micro SD card instead but know t

hat games running off the micro SD might take twice as long as to load between different scenes and it also might suffer from random stuttering so you might notice that unless it's a low resource game one tur I think it's pretty sufficient for you to carry a collection of light and heavy games I got an unfamiliar brand for the SSD it's called Kings speec however I was very surprised I got very good speeds on it compared to the Western Digital Drive that I got on this originally from Lenovo hones

tly my advice is if you're getting the one tab version in your region just get that one and try not to save money on it just get that one and Skip all of this drama my gaming experience on this far exceeded my expectations I really didn't think I'd get this level of quality and performance on a handheld where is the pixelation where are the jagged edges we really have come quite far so well done AMD I think this is a big leap from my original experience with the steam deck that I had gotten last

year I mean I'm playing Starfield on this add an acceptable visual quality and acceptable frame rates sure on AAA titles my average visual quality settings was mostly around mediumish to low and sometimes even high unlike the ultra Max settings that I'm usually used to on my high performance gaming laptops but here's the thing on a screen of this size somehow that lack of extra detail or quality is just not that very noticeable in fact I don't even know how to explain this but even frame rates

they don't seem as low as they actually are like I would notice like a dip below 60 frames per second on my gaming laptop easily but here it's like 30 40 frames a second still feel like 60 frames per second I know that sounds ridiculous but that's just how our perception changes when we go from a bigger screen to a small screen you should be seeing on screen right now the average performance results that I got from benchmarks from within the games that I usually play just to give you a sense of

the wrong numbers I ran all these benchmarks at the full HD resolution so 1200p or 1080p as you want to call it even though the screen supports QD plus well the reason for that I think QD is a bit of an overkill on a screen size like this like my Legion right next to me has QD and you can tell the difference between 1080P and QD on this for sure but on a screen like this sure it adds a bit more sharpness to it but the tradeoff with frames per second it just didn't make sense to me but for Less d

emanding titles like rocket League you can easily enjoy the extra crisp resolution on this it is nice that Legion has given us that option over the competition but uh 1080p is more than enough for me also I kept the device in its performance mode throughout the benchmarks as well I do maintain however these figures really don't mean much at least to me because of that smaller screen everything just looks nice nicer than they actually would on a bigger screen on this by the way the buttons on the

se controllers they kind of feel nice I like the tactility of it it's got a nice clicky feel to it we've got hall effect joysticks in here that can eliminate stick drift if you play a AAA title on this on its Max performance mode you should be getting around 90 to 120 minutes per charge I know that doesn't sound good but it sure it's better compared to your gaming laptops also gaming laptops need to remain plugged in to give you like that level of performance naturally less demanding games would

give you more battery time also about that use a power delivery 3.1 compliant charger that comes with it just so that you can charge it up from 0 to 100 in close to 60 Minutes I also plugged in the goat into my TV using a hub and added an extra SSD as well just so that I can extend the library of games when I'm connected to a TV I stuck to the 1200p resolution and things still look pretty good on the big screen but even at 4K the go was actually doing better than I expected I ran Forza ryen 5 o

n this and I got run 30 frames a second on medium settings but like I said on the big screen 30 frames a second was very noticeable so I immediately Lally went back to 1200p but this isn't just about the latest and greatest you can properly enjoy older titles that you may have missed for example I'm personally looking forward to playing this on on this Fallout New Vegas these will look great on the go with awesome frame rates and maxed out settings and thanks to Game Pass I could download them r

ight away and get right into it other than the games that I benchmarked I also really enjoyed playing sefue on this it's a classic beat him up in a third person format and it did not require Precision aim because personally I am pretty bad at using a game pad for you know first person shooters I'm a Mouse kind of guy now that is interesting because that is exactly what the go aimed to overcome you see there's a switch at the bottom of the right controller and you can flip it and this very vertic

al object becomes a mouse that to me sounded pretty crazy and yes the controllers on both sides are also removable and I find it pretty easy to remove as well Legion really did put on their thinking hats to set themselves apart from the competition and surprisingly in a way they kind of pulled it off because I went into it thinking that this is kind of gimmicky you also get like a little base in the packaging that magnetically attaches to the bottom so that it could stand on its own but I found

it easy to use without it as well just so you know you don't have to Lug it around everywhere I actually tested how much my aiming accuracy is getting affected using this very strange Mouse it took a bit of getting used to but eventually I was able to match the score that I had made using my Razor Mouse on the steel series aim trainer app and I think that's a big achievement clearly I'm not good with the mouse either but hey with a bit of practice you can get good at this I only gripe with this

is when you switch into FPS mode your games will think that there's now a keyboard and mouse connected and obviously this does not have a lot of the buttons that a keyboard does Legion has provided some extra buttons on the back to overcome that but there's still not as much there's a default key mapping in the software that you can tune later as to what each of these keys do and if you're serious about this you may have to spend some time sort of mapping out what each of these buttons can do bu

t I think you might hit a dead in for example the abxy keys get disabled uh you can't use those So eventually I just got myself a pH portable keyboard this could still be a mouse and I could do the rest of my keys from here now that is not the only reason why you would get a portable keyboard with the go you see Windows as an operating system requires a bit of Polish when it comes to its touch interface now it is impossible for you to reach this touchcreen keyboard even if you do have freakishly

long monkeys fingers or thumbs so you'll have to hold it in one hand and type on this one key at a time like your grandparents or your parents depending on how old you are and it's not like this is a light device this weighs 860 G RS though I think despite that I kind of managed the weight fine in all sort of position that I could play this in you can use this mini version of this keyboard and stick it to one side so that you can sort of reach out with one thumb to type out whatever you want to

it is for this reason that you should familiarize yourself with some of the shortcuts that Legion has built in here using the Legion Key and the B shortcut you can force the keyboard to come up and that is useful because when you press an empty text field the keyboard sometime does not show up so there is also a shortcut for control all delete for you to manage through your task manager using the legion and a shortcut but there's no shortcut for say windows D or All 4 those you can access with

the side drawer that you can have from the settings key on the top right and then going into the wrench icon and you'll find some other quick settings in there as well I do wish you could customize this in the drawer and also the combination of keys as well and this is just the start of your problems unlike a console you can't just buy this and just get right to business using Windows as Legion goes operating system is its biggest weakness and also its biggest strength on one hand you'll have to

go through some housekeeping like you do for any Windows device so that includes doing your updates making sure your drivers are installed and working making sure the applications in your store are all updated as well and a bunch of other things and also doing some troubleshooting from time to time and on the other hand you have access to a huge library of your games across all the different various platforms like Steam and epic and Ubisoft and Battlenet your custom emulators and even your regu

lar productivity apps like office or even video editing so to make the best of these application it made sense to me to just get a keyboard actually I think Legion should introduce like a Microsoft Surface type keyboard that you can just flip up and that could also protect the screen there is a type-c port underneath just a little quick tip on the Windows front you could enable hibernate mode from the power settings because Windows 11 has this thing called modern standby which is really dumb and

what it does is it basically keeps the device on you the screen will only turn off and what happened to me was I pressed the power button and and I threw it in my bag and a few hours later when I pulled it out it was boiling hot because it kept running in a closed environment uh so that's not healthy and B I had no battery left by the time I took it out so hinet mode really does put it in an off State and then consumes uh little to no power now to make the best of this device on its own you sho

uld be comfortable with switching between its performance settings Legion offers you three presets you can run it in quiet mode or its auto mode or the balance mode and its performance mode basically this will impact three things the amount of fan noise the amount of performance of the frames per second that you get and the battery life so in performance mode you get the highest frame rate possible but you'll get the lowest amount of battery life and you'll get the highest amount of fan noise as

well now for the fan noise I have to admit even in Max fan speed mode the sound is whooshy and it's not tinny and I don't mind it it's not very loud now if you're new to PC gaming the term thermal mode with TDP and brackets already might sound a little bit unnecessarily technical I mean why a legion should make more efforts to explain this a little bit better and B should the system not automatically adjust the settings based on whatever application that you're running there should be such an o

ption but Legion is again targeting your typical PC Gamers here who usually want the facility of being able to cap the amount of performance you can get so this can be useful if you're okay with getting lower frame rates but getting a longer battery life for example if you're traveling for a long time so that's fine there's also another thing called rsr or radon super resolution and it's just a switch no explanation as to what this does and even I had to look it up and what it does basically thi

s has to do with upscaling which is also difficult to explain when switched on you can get a better frame rates with a little bit of a hit on the visual quality and this is at a driver level so this can be applied across all of the games or applications that you're running you also get a little bit of customization on the RGB on your controller you get do three settings it could either be a solid color or it could be breathing or it could be the circular motion that I have here you can also choo

se the color that you want these lights can also get pretty bright listen this video will be hours long if I start to go through all all the settings what I'm just trying to say is there may be again a little bit of a learning curve you'll have to be patient to go through with this now do not despair Legion has provided some Creature Comforts and it's not a half fast effort actually the detachable controllers being legion's party trick means that when you plug this into your TV you can just simp

ly walk back and sit on your couch and continue playing your game now this is nothing special since the Nintendo switch has already done this quite a while ago but this is a first for of Windows device okay now yes there is a bad news you can't just give One controller to a mate so that you can have like a couch goop or couch gaming session that is too bad but you can connect an Xbox adapter to this and get several of these controllers which are much more comfortable to use you can also connect

a keyboard and a mouse and wireless headphones whatever perfs you want thanks to the two typesy ports that you get here one at the top one at the bottom and both of them support display port 1.4 USB 4 and thunderboard 3 it's a Windows device anything's possible you can also just stick the screen on the table using its bullettin kickstand which is very sturdy and it means that your hands could be in any position with hdch controllers you can probably even try to play your games with your hands in

your pockets I mean that would look a little bit weird but you can still do it the right controller also has a trackpad so that you can control your mouse curer on screen there's also a scroll wheel on the back for that easy navigation but when it's connected to device it's very difficult to simultaneously use your thumb on the trackpad and your finger on the scroll wheel together if that is because of the FPS mode design with the controllers disconnected I can even shove the go in my pocket I'

ll be it in three pieces show m look a little bit silly but you can't do that with a regular Windows laptop now can you Legion has also developed an overlay for Windows to manage that complexities that I mentioned earlier so it can give you like that console like user experience but I found it to be a little bit sluggish and it's not very user friendly as well for you to choose between your games on that it's called Legion space you can bring it up using that Legion Key on the top left you have

your game library in there which could give you exclusive discounts for using a legion device you can use it to adjust things like the dead zone on your joysticks or the RGB settings or the performance mode the fan curves all of that good stuff it does feel a little bit sluggish and not very well integrated it can take like a second to bring up on screen which doesn't feel great hopefully with time they can fix that I have the three major complaints with the go at a hardware level so it's not an

AMD issue it's not a Microsoft issue it's a legion issue number one the speaker sound quality and volume is purely underwhelming just very flat I would always have to use headphones number two the hacks in this controller are probably borrowed from a smartwatch actually even this Huawei watch 4 has better hack I'll be reviewing this watch later by the way I mean these controllers they don't vibrate they Buzz there's no it's just plain annoying there are no atics in the triggers either so major

fail and third there is no fingerprint login on this like the Asus Ali has typing in passwords is very last decade now so I want to conclude if you're getting the legion go it should not be for its graphical prowess but it is the ability to virtually keep any PC game on hand with you with very acceptable quality and frame rates obviously its main focus is portability but it has all the potential to become your primary code to gaming device rather than being an extension to your gaming desktop or

laptop or console I love the legion go and it suits My Lifestyle currently very well when you have a spouse and a kid you need to be visible okay no matter where I am inside or outside the house I can just whip the legion go out and get a bit of game time in and that somehow makes it easier for me to stay connected with my games while staying relatively safe from the Judgment of being a child because I play video games not sure if there are others out there that can relate to this scenario but

I would love to hear from you on this the legion go is a great way to reach out to the uninitiated console Gamers or today's young teenagers and convert them to the religion of the PC Master race but Legion needs to calm down a bit on unloading technical scripture on them so that's it for for me thank you all very much for watching hope you found my content to be useful do like and subscribe until next time