It’s become almost cliche to complain about rising prices in 2025, but the Lenovo Legion Go 2 takes things to an entirely different level. Because while the original Legion Go launched for $699 in late 2023, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 starts at $1,099 and only goes up from there, all the way up to $1,479 for the highest-end model. The model I reviewed is priced at $1,349.
Now, there are certain things that the Legion Go 2 does much better than its predecessor – it has a beautiful and fast OLED display and largely adopts the Legion Go S’s superior button layout. But is that worth the sharply increased price? That answer is obviously going to be different for everyone, but it’s a hard sell, especially considering the Xbox Ally X launches only two weeks after this handheld gaming PC.
Design
At first glance, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 looks a lot like the original Legion Go, but as you look closer the differences are striking. Just like the Legion Go S, Lenovo moved the ‘start’ and ‘select’ buttons below the Legion buttons on the upper right and left of the chassis – they were below the left analog stick on the original device. In their place, Lenovo added a couple of shortcut buttons, one of which activates Task View, and another brings up the Windows Desktop.
These are very useful shortcuts to have immediate access to, and does go a long way to alleviating the pain of using Windows on a handheld – at least until the Xbox Full Screen Experience launches for third-party devices early next year.
Lenovo also expanded the power button significantly in order to add a fingerprint reader, like the ROG Ally X. This fingerprint reader worked quickly most of the time, though because of its awkward placement, it meant I had to contort my hands to unlock the device. That’s probably because I have smaller hands, so it might not be as much of an issue depending on your hand size. Instead, I found simply entering my PIN to be less awkward every time I went to unlock the device.
What hasn’t changed from the Legion Go is arguably the best part of the device: the large touch pad on the right controller. This makes navigating Windows much easier, and is probably the part of the device I interacted with most when I was setting things up. Then there’s a slew of buttons and paddles on the back and sides of the device. These are going to be divisive, especially those on the right side – but they’re there for a specific purpose.
One thing you do need to keep in mind, though, is that while the Legion Go 2 is technically a handheld, it’s very large. This thing is 11.64 inches long, 5.4 inches tall and more than two inches thick – and it weighs a bit more than two pounds. This is a huge device, and it can definitely start to weigh you down over longer gaming sessions. Luckily, there is a way around it, thanks to the Legion Go’s approach to controllers.
Just like the first generation, the Legion Go 2 has removable controllers, kind of like a sci-fi Nintendo Switch 2. And just like the Switch 2, one of the removable controllers can act as a mouse in what Lenovo calls “First Person Mode”. To activate this, you hit a little switch on the bottom of the controller, and it turns the controller into a kind of vertical mouse, with the two buttons on the side acting as the left and right mouse buttons – left on top and right on bottom.
This is definitely a cool feature, and useful for an operating system that for all of Microsoft’s effort is still best experienced with a mouse and keyboard. Still, you’ll need to pack your own keyboard to really get the most out of the Legion Go 2 in “First Person Mode”. Luckily, there are plenty of super-portable keyboards out there these days.
But if you enable FPS Mode, you’re obviously not going to be holding up the handheld in your hands anymore, which makes the stand on the back come in handy. Just like the original, this is a hinged kickstand that is nearly as long as the tablet in the center of the device. It is remarkably sturdy, and makes for a great way to play games if you just want to prop it up on a table somewhere with the controllers removed. Lenovo does sell an accessory that lets you slot the controllers into a more traditional form-factor, but it makes for a gamepad that is almost as large as the notoriously beefy Xbox Duke.
All told, there are twenty seven buttons on the Legion Go 2, with most of them being programmable in the Legion Space software. You can also save different button layouts as templates in the software and assign them to gamepad mode or FPS mode. This was super helpful for me, because it let me run my benchmarking software in the background without needing to plug in a keyboard, like I usually need to do.
On the bottom of the Legion Go 2, you’ll find three ports: USB-C, a MicroSD card reader, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Then, at the top, you’ll find an additional USB-C port. I like this configuration, because it allows you to charge the device in a way that’ll be comfortable no matter how you’re using it, rather than something like the MSI Claw 8 AI+, which just has its ports at the top of the device.
The top of the Legion Go 2 is also packed with ventilation, with six stretched out hexagons that spit hot air out of the device. For intake, the Legion Go 2 sucks in cool air through the back, through more of those stretched out hexagonal cutouts. This ventilation method is very effective, with the GPU not reaching above 65°C throughout my testing.
Next to the vents on the top are two speaker grilles, one on either side of the device. For a handheld, these get pretty loud, but they can struggle to overpower the vents. That said, you can adjust the fan curve through the Legion Space software to mitigate this problem.
Display
The real star of the Lenovo Legion Go 2 is the display. The original Legion Go had a beautiful 1600p display, but it frequently ran into trouble whenever you tried to run games at that native resolution. With the Legion Go 2, however, Lenovo scaled down the resolution to 1920 x 1200, and swapped out the LCD panel to OLED, which makes for a substantial display upgrade, even though it has a lower resolution.
Across the board, games looked better, with brighter colors and more accurate black levels, but it’s more than just how it looks. The OLED display is also fast, with a 144Hz refresh rate that supports VRR (variable refresh rate) technology. In games that can run that fast on an integrated graphics chip – looking at you Silksong – motion is fluid and screen tearing is basically a thing of the past.
Other than the Steam Deck OLED, the Legion Go 2 is the first handheld PC that has an OLED screen, and even then, the Steam Deck’s display was limited to 90Hz, which is substantially slower. For OLED faithfuls that have been aching for an OLED handheld, this is going to be the one to get, even if it comes with a substantial price increase. It might just be worth it if a non-OLED display is a deal-breaker. I’m not quite there, but after using the Legion Go 2 for about a week, I can definitely see the appeal.
Performance
The Lenovo Legion Go 2 is one of the first handhelds to hit the market with the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme – at least here in the US. It does deliver a sizable performance boost over the last-generation Z1 Extreme, but you should go in with tempered expectations.
I tested the Legion Go 2 against the original Legion Go at 1200p and the Asus ROG Ally X at 1080p, and while Lenovo’s new handheld is a huge upgrade over the company’s first handheld, the performance lead narrows significantly against a similarly specced device.
For instance, in Call of Duty Black Ops 7, the Legion Go 2 gets 39 fps at 1200p with the Extreme preset and FSR set to “Quality”. With those same settings, the original Legion Go falls behind, only getting 20 fps in the same benchmark with its stock settings. At first glance, that’s extremely promising for the Legion Go 2, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Running the Asus ROG Ally X (the last-gen handheld powered by the Z1 Extreme – not the upcoming Z2 Extreme-powered Xbox Ally X, to be clear) with the same settings, the handheld gets 32 fps in the same test with the same settings, albeit at a lower 1080p resolution. That makes for about a 20% difference in raw performance, though because 1200p has about 11% more pixels than 1080p, it’s probably closer to a 25-30% performance lead. That’s still a promising number, though much lower than the Go 2’s lead over the original Go.
The most extreme example of this is in Forza Horizon 5, where the Lenovo Legion Go 2 gets 65 fps compared to 42 fps from the original Legion Go, but the Ally X sits even with the new Legion at 65 fps. Again, that is at a slightly lower resolution, but it’s not like you can notice the difference between 1080p and 1200p by just looking at it.
You can see this dichotomy in 3DMark, too, which doesn’t rely on display resolution. In Time Spy, the Legion Go 2 clocks in at 3,936 points, compared to 2,811 points from the original Go and 3,517 points for the Ally X. The latter two devices both use the same Z1 Extreme chipset, but there’s a massive delta between their performance – and that comes down to the RAM configuration.
The original Legion Go, you see, shipped with just 16GB of memory, compared to 24GB on the Ally X. Lenovo was shy with its memory allocation, as well, meaning that by default just 3GB of memory is dedicated to the GPU. That’s why the Ally X was so huge when it came out last Summer, as it had enough RAM to actually feed the Z1 Extreme – allowing for some huge performance jumps.
Lenovo seems to have learned its lesson there, as the Legion Go 2 it sent me for review has 32GB of RAM. In fact, you can’t even get the Z2 Extreme model with less than 32GB of memory, probably because it would lead to sub-standard performance. However, there is a model with the less-powerful AMD Z2 APU that comes with 16GB of memory. Don’t buy that one – I haven’t tested that one personally yet, but I can’t imagine it will do anything to justify its $1,099 starting price.
With that in mind, looking at the leveled playing field (that is, not being hamstrung by an inadequate RAM configuration), it’s disappointing to see such a small gap in performance between the Legion Go 2 and the last-gen Ally X. That said, the Z2E does theoretically have room to stretch its performance a little further. After all, in my test suite, the Ally X with its Z1 Extreme will jump to 95°C, where the Legion Go 2 peaks at 65°C in the same workloads. Perhaps a firmware update, or some custom overclocking, will unlock more impressive numbers from the Legion Go 2. Otherwise, I’m sure there will be a handheld that’ll push this chip further, we’ll just have to wait for it.
Battery Life
Any device that’s playing PC games on a battery is going to struggle to last more than a couple of hours before you have to plug it in. And while the Legion Go 2 is no different, it’s surprising just how long it can last, even in demanding games.
I started a timer and started up Cyberpunk 2077 on high settings to see how long I could play, and I was surprised to see it lasted a little over two hours seventeen minutes. For comparison, the Legion Go S – running on the more efficient SteamOS – lasted just over an hour and a half in Baldur’s Gate 3, a similarly demanding game.
I also ran the device through the PCMark10 battery life test, to see how long it will last in office applications – even though I don’t think it’s likely many people are going to use it for Zoom calls or Excel spreadsheets. In that test, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 lasted 10 hours and 52 minutes, surpassing even the Ally X’s 9 hours and 53 minutes in the same test. That means, at least according to my data, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 now has the longest battery life in a handheld gaming PC.
There’s a couple of reasons for this. For one, OLED is much more power-efficient than LCD displays, as it can just turn off pixels in dark scenes. But a lot of it comes down to the Z2 Extreme. AMD’s new handheld APU features RDNA 3.5 graphics cores, and while they’re similar to the RDNA 3 cores found in the Z1 Extreme, these cores were enhanced for AI laptops to boost power efficiency without losing performance. It’s not enough to double your battery life automatically, of course, but a more efficient chipset goes a long way to boosting battery life, especially in demanding workloads.
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