If you’re stuck between the Lenovo Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS and the Steam Deck OLED, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve broken down how these two handheld SteamOS devices compare.
Lenovo released two identical handheld gaming devices at CES 2025: the Legion Go S and the Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS. The only difference between these two devices (besides their colours) is the operating systems they’re based on, with the Legion Go S running on Windows and the Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS running on, well, SteamOS.
The Lenovo Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS is the first officially licensed handheld to run on SteamOS outside of Valve’s own Steam Deck line. This begs the question: how do the two compare?
Keep reading to discover all the major differences between the Lenovo Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS and the Steam Deck OLED.
Price
The Lenovo Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS, was announced in January 2025 with a release date set for May 2025. The handheld PC will carry a starting price of $499.99 (about £405). This is actually $100 cheaper than the lowest configuration of the Windows-powered Legion Go S.
The Steam Deck OLED was released in November 2023 with prices starting at $549/£479 for the 512GB model or $649/£569 for the 1TB configuration.
The Steam Deck OLED has a brighter OLED display
When it comes to displays, the Steam Deck OLED takes advantage of a 7.4-inch OLED touchscreen. This display boasts a 1280 x 800 resolution and an up to 90Hz refresh rate.
The OLED display technology means you can expect high clarity as well as great contrast and pure blacks, with the contrast ratio being greater than 1,000,000:1. The display also covers 110% of the P3 colour gamut, up to 1000 nits of peak brightness with HDR enabled and delivers a response time of less than 0.1ms.
The Lenovo Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS, meanwhile, features a slightly larger 8-inch LCD touch display. While Lenovo has opted for LCD over OLED, this display does offer a sharper 1920 x 1200 resolution, a smoother 44-120Hz refresh rate and Lenovo’s PureSight display technology. The brightness is limited to 500 nits, but the display does cover 100% of sRGB colours.
The Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS has a faster processor
Perhaps the biggest reason to opt for the Lenovo Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS over the Steam Deck OLED is for sheer performance power.
The Lenovo Legion Go S is equipped with either the Lenovo Legion Go AMD Ryzen Z2 Go processor or the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme 3.3GHz processor, with the latter featuring 8 cores and 16 threads. The chipset also includes an integrated GPU up to the AMD Radeon 700M Series, up to 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 1TB SSD storage.
The Steam Deck OLED, meanwhile, is powered by its own custom APU, including the Zen 2 2.4-3.5GHz CPU and RDNA 2 GPU. The Steam Deck comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and up to 1TB of NVMe SSD storage. Both the Legion Go S and the Steam Deck OLED also include a microSD card slot.
While the Legion Go S looks better on paper, you’ll have to wait for our review of the handheld PC to read how the performance compares to that of the Steam Deck OLED.
The Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS has a larger battery
Finally, the Lenovo Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS packs a larger 55.5Whr battery compared to the 50Whr battery in the Steam Deck OLED which offers anywhere from 3 to 12 hours of gameplay depending on factors like the frame rate, brightness and volume.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Legion Go S will offer a longer battery life, as this will also depend on the specs and display found on each device.
Again, you’ll want to visit back when we share our review of the Legion Go S to hear how these two devices compare when it comes to battery endurance.
Early verdict
It’s difficult to compare these two handheld PCs based on specs alone.
Its great that SteamOS fans now have a third-party option that offers more flexibility when investing in hardware. However, you may want to wait for our final review of the Lenovo Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS before making any final decisions.
