How To Setup The Lenovo Legion Go For Gaming

► Buy a Lenovo Legion Go (affiliate link): https://howl.me/ckXfpsf3XIM
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► Legion Go’s BIOS Update that now supports 6GB VRAM (updated after this video was filmed): https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/ds565491-bios-update-for-windows-11-64-bit-legion-go-8apu1

Timestamps
0:00 – Intro
0:15 – Initial Unboxing
1:30 – Device Overview – Buttons & Ports
3:03 – Controllers Overview
4:50 – Windows Initial Setup
7:18 – GPU Driver Update
7:44 – Lenovo Legion Space Setup
8:13 – Legion Space Overview & Quirks
9:33 – Legion Space Quick Settings Quirks
11:01 – Quick Settings Overview & Details
12:57 – Thermal Mode FPS Testing
13:57 – Power Profiles & The Lack Of
14:57 – Full Fan Speed Mode
15:52 – The Rest of the Settings
16:05 – Radeon Super Resolution
16:59 – BIOS VRAM Mod
18:43 – Conclusion

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Presenter: Brett Sticklemonster
Writer: Brett Sticklemonster
Videographer: Brett Sticklemonster
Editor: Catlin Stevenson & Brett Sticklemonster
Thumbnail Designer: Michael Pellow

If you just got your Lenovo Legion go or are planning to pick one up this will be the definitive guide on how to get it set up for gaming and we’ll show you how to enable the hidden setting that’ll unlock your FPS to make this thing run

Faster than it does straight out of the box so let’s jump into setup the large box that I got delivered from Best Buy has a few items for you to be aware of cutting it open reveals foam which holds a smaller box with all the legion branding on it and this amazing logo

That says leg inside the leg box you’ll find the travel case which bu s the legion go inside of it beneath a cardboard sheet you additionally will find Lenovo Services information warranty details and the 65 wat power adapter and this is where we start the Journey of bad documentation from Lenovo

On what the legion go is capable of or simple things like the length of the charger they don’t list it anywhere on their product page or with the retailers it’s 6 feet or 1.8 m long in case you’re trying to find those details moving on to the console itself the sleeve holds

Details on how to get going with Le and go it shows you that you must first plug in the device before booting it up for the first time even though it may have battery left on the device inside the carrying case there’s absolutely nowhere to put the charger because it’s fully

Packed to the brim with protective foam to safeguard your console you’ll have to pack the charger separately just like how Lenovo ships it in its actual box underneath the lid you’ll have your legion go in a plastic bag which warns you of whales now since this is the

First time you’ll get your hands on the handheld let’s take this time to familiarize ourselves with the layouts and all of the buttons all over this device because there’s a ton on top you can find the volume up and down buttons next to the USBC 4.0 Port which supports

Both power delivery 3.0 and display port output and speeds up to 40 gbits per second then there’s the micro SD card reader supporting up to 2 terabytes that’s followed by the vents for the internal fans a headphone mic combo port and then the power button that resembles

The legion Go Logo slightly behind all of this is the 2x two watt speakers for the the handheld then in the middle you’ll see the 8.8 in 2560 x600 IPS screen capable of 500 nits of brightness a 144 Herz refresh rate 97% of the dcip

3 color space and 10 fingers of touch on its Gorilla Glass 5 with 2 microphones at the very bottom of the display on the bottom of the device you’ll see another USBC 4.0 port with the same charging and display and speed capabilities as the one on top which helps with convenient

Cable positioning depending on how you want to hold or set up the device because on the back is where you’ll find the large kickstand that props the device up making the top USBC Port the most accessible above that you’ll find the intake vents for the fans all

Helping to keep your legion Go’s Z1 extreme processor very cool on either side of the Legion go you’ll find the connection section for the legion true strike controllers which adhere to the console with a quick push in and shove down to lock them in place on the bottom

Of each controller you’ll find the controller release button to take them off by sliding up and pulling out they’re set up in such a way that accidental Detachment isn’t likely to happen the controllers are asymmetrical in both joystick placement but also the rest of their buttons so they host very

Different capabilities but do happen to have six axis gyroscopes for the two games in the world that you’ll actually play they use that feature very convenient the left controller has on the front the legion left button for quick access to Lenovo software when you finally get this thing booted up then

There’s the left stick with RGB illumination a clicky d-pad a view button and a menu button up top you have the familiar left bumper and Trigger buttons but then there’s the customizable y1 and Y2 buttons in a vertical orientation that can be configured in the Lenovo Legion space

Software the right controller is where things go off the rails and Lenovo shows off a bunch of experimentation you start off with the typical Legion right button abxy buttons and a right RGB ring joystick but then there’s a trackpad similar to the steam deck but it’s recessed here instead of pronounced like

It is on valve’s device the back has a mouse wheel scroll which makes navigating web pages much easier and goes into their FPS mode which we’ll talk about in a bit and customizable M3 and Y3 buttons but in a horizontal orientation and on top you’ll have the familiar right bumper and Trigger

Buttons but then that continues into another customizable M1 button and a separated M2 button to again to configure in Lenovo software the bottom of the right joystick is where things get really experimental there’s a mouse sensor and an FPS mode switch which goes with the next thing we’ll unbox the base

For the right controller that allows you to hold it like a vertical Mouse and use it in firstperson Shooters to get the benefit of mouse level accuracy but controller level convenience and that’s also where the scroll wheel on the back comes in to help you play FPS games

That’s all that’s in the containers so now it’s time to get this thing actually up and running which we do by setting up Windows 11 which should be familiar if you’ve bought a laptop recently but do note that it does require you to have a connection to the internet and a

Microsoft account to move forward unless you know how to get around it in which case you probably aren’t watching this video you should probably set aside around 20 to 30 minutes to get everything up and running which is an unfortunate limitation of the Legion go running Windows instead of Linux I will

Be so happy the day that we actually get Steam OS on other handhelds I know there’s chiaki and a whole bunch of others this is just side rant Steam OS is one of the best things that valve has ever done and I want to see it on handhelds like great ones like the

Legion go here so moving on you’ll have to choose your location your keyboard layout your internet connection and at this point the device will restart then there’s a license agreement to agree to and now you can choose to name your device then you’ll be forced to log into

Your Microsoft account and depending on how long you’ve been using that account you can either restore other installs of Windows or start fresh moving on there are no Biometrics to be had here like on the rag allly so you’re just trying to set a pin for your device and log in

That way then next are the privacy settings that I personally always deactivate but that will be a preference for you you you have to answer do you want Microsoft to know where you are and to tailor Windows to you and if so you keep those things on next you can

Customize your Windows Experience and connect your Android device directly to it for sending messages and more you can choose to accept or decline a free trial of Microsoft 365 but even if you decline it stays installed on the device as bloatware then there’s more Microsoft shovelware and then it acts like it’s

Kindly setting up your room for your arrival and after 10 minutes if you’re quick you’re finally into Windows you’ll get a quick primer on how to use Windows 11 via finger and then from there typically you want to uninstall all of the apps you don’t want and that aren’t

Necessary from gaming but in this case most of the bloat wear comes from Microsoft themselves with office and Microsoft 365 but there’s shockingly little that’s added on by Lenovo themselves I was truly surprised typically with lenovo’s laptops and I’ve bought plenty you get a lot of shoveled

Blow Weare but the only extra app installed on the legion go is the I would argue necess Neary Legion space so from this point you should just set aside a long time to download all the windows 11 updates and the legion ghost specific updates that you find in the

Windows update tab the speed of this is going to be determined by the speed of your internet but even if you have a gigabit connection like I do this is probably a time where you’re going to want to walk away from the legion go while it does its thing now there may or

May not have been a GPU driver update in the Windows update section Lenovo did launch a brand new driver right after this handheld release that contains some bug fixes for games like starf there shouldn’t be many FPS games to be had from the driver update but if you’re

Struggling with how the legion go is playing your games be sure to check lenovo’s GPU driver page to see if you’re on the latest version because it is a separate Branch from the main GPU driver at this point you should boot into lenovo’s Legion space app because

That will give us the fine control that we want to have over this handheld it’ll require a small update but nothing too big but then it requires a bit more time to update the firmware on the controllers to make sure those are running as as effectively as possible

This does take a few minutes you’ll then be greeted by a quick start guide on how everything works in this app but there’s a few quirks that I’ll be detailing that you should be aware of and Lenovo should definitely fix so lenovo’s Legion space app feels a lot like steam’s Big Picture

Mode you can access everything from a centralized menu including your installed game Library a dedicated game store from games planet.com which I learned is an officially authorized game seller you can also have cloud gaming baked into the app that does not work as it should and access to all of the

Settings you can set up the M custom buttons in this app as well but it’s pretty limited because when you’re in Gamepad mode you can only choose from specific options that Lenovo sets instead of being able to customize it to whatever you want and then there’s also

Various FPS modes that are included with this it’s not the most robust feature I want to see just more customizability here it’ll also give you a quick install section to get all of the popular game launchers up and going most of them take take you to their respective web pages

But steam will start installing when you click on that one which is nice now the cloud gaming section is a nice idea but unfortunately as I’ll document in other ways the buttons on the controller interact with multiple sections at the same time so while you’re trying to input game commands it’ll also input

Commands to the legion space app and back you out of the game that you’re playing because the game is playing in the browser in the legion space app so you’re actually pressing two buttons at once affect effectively and it’s it’s just a right mess this also happens when

You get into the quick setting section of the Legion space app so when you press the legion R button on the right controller you’ll be greeted with a quick access menu to various places in the legion space app you then need to every single time press the legion R

Button again to close that out and then press it for a third time to finally get to the Quick Settings section oh and if you press that button too quickly to get to the Quick Settings faster it doesn’t register the inputs and you have to slow

Down but then when you’re in the quick settings apps potentially trying to actually utilize the features that Lenovo gives you but you happen to be in a game you pressing the game pad buttons in the legion space Quick Settings menu will then press buttons in the actual

Game it doesn’t override anything so you have to use your finger to touch the Quick Settings if you’re in a game if you’re in the legion space app everything works as it’s supposed to there’s no problems there but the Quick Settings is helpful so that’s why it’s

So frustrating I actually was using it quite a bit but it’s an immediately frustrating Adventure that I hope Lenovo fixes in an update making it so that the default setting on the buttons is to do one thing or the other so I don’t have to cycle through it it’s especially

Difficult when you click on a button in the quick access menu then that menu disappears so you want to bring it back up to press another one but then pressing the legion R button again will bring you to the settings menu before you get to the access menu again you

Can’t it doesn’t work as intuitively as I would want it to but let’s dive into the Quick Settings because there’s plenty here to get your legion go running as fast as possible but there’s also two really important options for higher FPS that Lenovo hides from you

That we’ll get to later on so the Quick Settings allow you to customize things like brightness volume Bluetooth Wi-Fi the resolution of the device with three different options being easily swapped between and then you can swap between 60 HZ and 144 HZ mode and then change the lighting effects change up the console

Key mapping if you have something else set between Gamepad and FPS mode setting it to 144 HZ is recommended because if you can hit that in some games like vampire survivors the gameplay look so much better than other handhelds there were some earlier reports that the legion go would support variable refresh

Rate to reduce screen tearing but it’s definitely not included however do note increasing it 244 HZ will decrease battery life cuz your screen is running over twice as much as 60 HZ but the second submenu in the Quick Settings is what you really want since this is the

Performance section it shows the battery status of the console and controllers and then performance metrics of the CPU GPU battery vram and RAM and you can choose to display those on a helpful overlay that Lenovo calls the frame monitor it can display just the FPS FPS

Plus CPU GPU and battery levels or all of those with vram ram fan speed and rsr Status added in we’ll talk about rsr in a second because it’s a way to unlock some extra performance but below that frame monitor we’ve got the real keys to power thermal modes which change how

Much power your Z1 extreme chip is using and makes games run faster there’s quiet balance perform an with a lower e and Custom Custom allows you to set it to anything from 5 watts to 30 watts and there was a rumor that the legion go would support up to 48 watts but there

Doesn’t appear to be any way to set that with lenovo’s own software right now the 30 W op option got me 60 FPS average in cyberpunk at 800p on the steam deck setting 55 FPS in performance mode 39 FPS in Balance mode and only 13 FPS in

Quiet mode I I would really stay away from quiet mode if you’re trying to play AAA games it might work for lighter titles but definitely not anything graphically demanding but unfortunately here’s another area where Lenovo doesn’t provide any documentation that I could find on the internet they don’t

Specifically State how many watts each mode uses now they may have provided this in a reviewer’s guide but since I bought mine retail I don’t have access to this based on my testing I’d say that quiet mode is using between 5 and 10 watts balance is using 20 to 22 Watts

Performance is using 25 watts so if you want to get the fastest possible gaming right out of the gate using the custom 30 watt option is the right move because it is slightly faster than performing and if you want to optimize for battery life instead you’ll have to tune the

Wattage to your own desires and it appears that there isn’t much performance pen penalty for switching from plugged in to battery mode FPS was roughly the same between the two in all of the modes if maybe a bit slower when on battery but the real problem here is that the software doesn’t actually

Change power profiles when you plug in the device or unplug it you can’t have it on balance mode when you’re on battery and on custom 30 wat mode when you’re plugged in as of right now based on how Lenovo has the software set up additionally there’s a setting in one of

The menus to apply game profile which I Zoom is to make it so that you can set custom game profiles with wattage and all of that like you can find on things like the Rogue Ally or on the steam deck but here it’s not in the Quick Settings

Menu which makes it very difficult to actually access and then it isn’t quite clear there’s no instructions that Lenovo provides here so I would suggest that you’re just staying in the quick settings and modifying per game right now while Lenovo allegedly is going to be fixing this in an upcoming patch to

The legion space app so then continuing on in the quick Quick Settings menu there’s windows power modes for performance balance or efficiency again hit performance for the most FPS here and then below that there’s a toggle for full fan speed that’ll ramp the fans up

To a Max of nearly 8,000 RPM let me let me show that to you so as mention I have to press once brings up the quick access twice to close it Thrice to bring up the Quick Settings now we go down into performance mode turn on full fan

Speed it’s significantly louder it is it is definitely a noticeable improvement over anything that’s happening in game but I found that it didn’t increase performance by much the fans kept everything cool enough at stock settings that adding the extra noise just didn’t seem to be worth the maybe half of an

FPS that you may get in the worst case scenarios but again it’s nice for Lenovo to include but in the rest of the submenus there’s the productivity mode toggle to make sure an external display is primary and the ability to toggle on on and off the touchpad that’s the gist

Of all that Lenova provides you from the outset but there’s still the matter of the couple of hidden features let’s start with rsr or Radeon super resolution it’s an IND driver upscaler that allows you to get faster frame rate for minimal quality loss it’s mostly for games that don’t have FSR already but

AMD claims you can see between 1.5 to 3.2 times performance gain just by having this feature turned on Lenovo hides this option not in the Quick Settings but in the settings of the Lenovo space app go into the performance section there and you’ll find the toggle for Radeon super resolution you can’t

Use it in games where you already have FSR active but when I tried having the toggle on for rsr and had FSR on in cyberpunk there was no real issue the FPS stayed the same since FSR was already working so keeping radon super resolution on by default can be a way to

Enable faster frame rate with very little penalty but rsr is something that can be enabled on any GPU device let’s talk about something Lenovo hid in the Bios to unlock faster FPS by default the Z1 extreme on the legion go only has access to 3 GB of dedicated video memory

This comes out of the 16 GB total that is on the device and the rest get shared to the system as regular Ram similar to how the Xbox or PS5 use their Ram but if you access the BIOS you can actually change this video memory amount to do

That easily without a keyboard you hold volume up and the power button while booting and entering the bio setup you go to more settings then configuration and then change the frame buffer size lenovo’s bios provides options of 3 gbt which is the default but also 4 gbt and

8 GB now you might be tempted to immediately ratchet it all the way up to 8 GB but remember this is coming at the cost of system memory if you use 8 GB of dedicated video memory you will only have 8 GB of regular Ram left in in my

Limited testing 8 GB of video memory did give me the highest FPS result in cyberpunk at 66 FPS a 10% increase from the 3 GB vram amount and up from the 63 FPS I got with the 4 GB of vram this won’t be the case in every game because

Some games might need more access to Ram some might need more access to vram so you’ll have to swap it in the Bios every time now I hope that Lenovo gives us a nice Middle Ground of 6 GB so that gives you 10 GB of RAM and or they just do

Make it easy to swap this in the legion space app instead of having to revert to the BIOS every single time and if you want to see me do more dedicated testing on this vrm amount in a bunch of different games on the legion go be sure

To leave a comment down below and we’ll consider it for a future video so that’s it you swap the memory amount in the Bios you turned on radiar on super resolution and enabled custom 30 watt profile on 144 Hertz so you should be up and running and ready to go with your

Legion go we will have a more in-depth review coming out in the next week or so so get subscribed if you’re interested in that happy gaming my friends