Over the last five years or so, handheld gaming PCs have become one of my favorite ways to play games. And, it helps that they\u2019ve been getting better pretty much every year, thanks both to more powerful hardware \u2013 shout out to the Intel Arc G3 Extreme \u2013 and both Microsoft and Valve improving their respective operating systems. <\/p>\n
If I was able to totally ignore costs, I\u2019d straight up just say that the handhelds that have come out in the last year are incredible, almost across the board. The Xbox Ally X brought a controller-friendly UI to Windows for the first time and the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, thanks to its incredible innards, is able to play games at higher than minimum settings with a framerate that doesn\u2019t give me motion sickness. <\/p>\n
But I can\u2019t ignore the price, can I? Even though the Xbox Ally X somehow hasn\u2019t gone up in price (yet), the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ will set you back $1,799. And for that price, the calculus gets really <\/em>hard to justify. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Let\u2019s go back in time a little bit. Before the Steam Deck came out, I dabbled with the Nintendo Switch a little bit, but for some reason, most of Nintendo\u2019s games have never really clicked with me. So most of the time I\u2019d buy games I already owned on Steam, like Shovel Knight and Stardew Valley, just for the privilege of taking them on the go with me. <\/p>\n The Steam Deck changed everything. Yeah, it was a little bulkier, but that made it more comfortable in my hands, and I no longer had to re-buy my favorite games just to play them on a handheld. The only real problem was that if I wanted to play a graphics-intense AAA game, I\u2019d have to scale down the resolution and the settings to the bottom, while still living with 30-40 fps a lot of the time. <\/p>\n It was still worth taking my indie games with me, and it even led to me just playing more indies in general, because I could be more flexible with how and when I was playing them. But as time went on, new handhelds to rival the Steam Deck started hitting the market. The original ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go made 1080p gaming a bit more viable, but they were still based on the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme. And while that chip had more graphics cores than the Steam Deck, it was still built on the RDNA 3 graphics architecture, which was already a year old when the Z1 Extreme first came out. <\/p>\n Then, at CES 2025, Lenovo showed off the Legion Go S, which would end up being the first non-Valve handheld officially powered by SteamOS. At Lenovo\u2019s booth, I crossed paths with Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais, who told me for the first time that Valve was waiting for a \u201ctrue next-generation\u201d chip for the Steam Deck 2. At the time I thought the Z2 Extreme would have been it, but that certainly didn\u2019t end up being the case. <\/p>\n <\/p>\nLenovo Legion Go S (SteamOS) \u2013 Photos<\/h3>\n