It was back in September that Lenovo announced plans to enter the portable gaming PC market, and now, two months later, the Legion Go is finally hitting Lenovo stores. Depending on where you live, there are two models available, both with large 8.8-inch screens, large amounts of RAM and storage, and a decent-sized battery there.

Like some of the handheld PCs already on the market, the Legion Go uses AMD's Z1 Extreme (virtually the same silicon as the Ryzen 7 7840U) APU to handle all CPU and GPU. This APU contains eight Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RNDA 3 GPU compute units, but Lenovo's UK landing page for the Legion Go suggests that some regions may offer models with lower-spec Z1 chips

However, the company has not yet announced the availability of the Z1 chip.

For US and UK gamers, however, they will get a full-fat chip with a clock speed of up to 5,100 MHz. Supporting this chip is 16GB of non-upgradable LPDDR5X-7500 and 512GB of base storage capacity in the form of PCIe 4.0 TLC SSDs. While only this configuration is available for purchase in the UK, a version with 1TB of storage is available in the US. [Competitors such as the Asus ROG Ally and Ayaneo Air 1S also boast the same configuration, albeit with somewhat different CPU branding. What Lenovo wants to make the Legion Go stand out is the screen. All models come with an 8.8-inch 2560 x 1600 144Hz IPS panel, the largest of any handheld, and even though it has a modest output of 500 nits and OLEDs have better color and response time, one cannot criticize the size of the screen you get for this money. There is no way to criticize the size of the screen you get for this amount of money.

And, come to think of it, the price tag is pretty decent, but it is towards the top end of all available handhelds. In the US, the 512GB model costs $699.99, while the 1TB version is $50 more; the UK price for the 512GB Legion Go alone is £700, considerably more expensive than the 512GB Steam Deck (currently £569), but you get a more powerful gaming PC It is possible to get a more powerful gaming PC.

The downside to the increased processing power is battery drain, and to offset this, Lenovo has used a twin-cell 49.2Wh lithium polymer battery. This is about 23% more power capacity than the battery used in the ROG Ally, which is great, but the downside is that the Legion Go is a bit lumpy. The base model weighs 650 g (1.41 lbs), more than twice the Switch's weight.

Lenovo also copied certain features of Nintendo's much-loved handheld gaming console, namely that the controller is completely removable. I get elbow pain when I play ROG Ally for long periods of time.

PC Gamer's hardware team was able to do some hands-on testing when Lenovo first announced the Legion Go. But as with all handheld PCs, it's really the operating environment that makes or breaks it, and we find the ROG Ally software to be quite a bit less user-friendly, especially when compared to the Steam Deck. Of course, we'll let you know when we get one for a thorough PC Gamer shakedown.