Basically, right now the legion go s is on a great sale:
449$:Z2 go, 16gb RAM,512gb storage, steam os
649$:z1 extreme, 32gb ram, 1tb storage, steam os
So what kind of performance gap should there be between them, trying to choose my spec, looking not only at current performance but also future proofing(the shoes dilemma)
Well, as somebody who has the Steam Deck OLED and skipped over the Z1 Extreme for the Z2 Extreme, I still can tell you a lot about the differences.
First, the Z2 Go is similar in performance or slightly better (though not by much) than the Steam Deck OLED. The Z1 Extreme is a lot better than even the Steam Deck OLED, especially at higher wattages. Obviously the Z2 & Z2 Extreme are even better but are very pricey.
Personally, I would go for the Z1 Extreme Legion Go S because it is more future proof, as the APU is better, there’s more RAM, and you get double the internal storage.
I know what I should expect from the Z2 extreme since I have the laptop with basically the same processor with more CPU cores My question is about how much the CPU core count the RAM size and the GPU generation in between RDNA 2and RDNA 3 mattress for the actual performance and in terms of long-term future-proofing
With more RAM, you can dedicate more system RAM to vRAM, which is something modern AAA games need a lot of.
Also, RDNA 3 was a pretty big boost from RDNA 2. Unfortunately, RDNA 4 would be king because of FSR 4 support, but RDNA 4 seems non existent outside of desktop dGPUs. There is not a single non Nvidia laptop dGPU released in 2025.
Well thanks for the information just wanted to fix a couple of minor incorrect details that you shared, firstly, steamos has dynamically allocated video memory similarly to what Mac OS has so you don’t have to worry that much about memory especially since it’s running steam OS and not windows .
secondly ,I would like to add that actually based on resent leaks from Moore’s laws dead we are going to get on RDNA 3 and 3.5 FSR4, and even redstone.
…Steam OS has dynamically allocated video memory similarly to what macOS has so you don’t have to worry that much about memory especially since it’s running Steam OS and not Windows [11].
Really? I actually didn’t know that! I’ll have to fix that on my Legion Go 2’s UEFI! (I’m acually running Bazzite on it because I can’t stand Windows 11, especially on a handheld.)
Also, the leaks of FSR 4 support for RDNA 3/3.5 are still in question. Yes, the upcoming Steam Machine also uses RDNA 3, but we’ll have to see what AMD officially does because I have had mixed results with enabling FSR 4 on my Legion Go 2 in some games that support FSR and DLSS (which obviously doesn’t work on a handheld).