Handheld gaming PCs have come a long, long way since the initial days of the Atom-powered mini PCs. Newer iterations are almost all AMD (even if Intel offerings do still exist) and are wildly more powerful, being capable of running almost all modern releases with relative ease.

That being said, there’s always been one aspect that’s often been ignored — their ability to serve as complete desktop replacements. Now, while the CPU is certainly up to the task, the iGPU is woefully inadequate for any gaming at higher resolutions. Unless you happen to have an eGPU lying around, which completely changes the game. I hooked up an RX 9070 via the Legion Go’s USB 4 port and was pleasantly surprised to see it mostly work, delivering near-desktop-level performance. At first, anyway, after which I quickly reached the limits of this particular setup.

A quick look at the eGPU setup

A desktop RX 9070 connected to a Legion Go over USB 4

The setup might be a bit overkill, but it works and removes the GPU as the bottleneck entirely, which makes identifying other “issues” a lot easier. Going back to the setup, it’s a first-generation Lenovo Legion Go, armed with 16 gigabytes of built-in, soldered LPDDR5X RAM and an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor.

It’s the same chip as the one in the higher-tier original ROG Ally and is aging remarkably well. The iGPU is perfectly capable of blazing through most games, and in certain cases even day-one AAA releases (depending on the level of optimization). It’s also a very capable CPU that can deliver real numbers if needed, with its 8 cores and 16 threads.

As for the eGPU, it’s an Acasis G4Pro that uses Thunderbolt 3 as its connection basis. I have an RX 9070 (non-XT) hooked up to it, and it uses a standard Thunderbolt cable to connect to one of the two ports of the Legion Go. This particular dock also provides power delivery, so I don’t need to bring a charger.

My Legion Go is running the latest version of Bazzite, with a few tweaks to get the eGPU working correctly. Since this is an all-AMD system, I didn’t need to sideload the RX 9070’s drivers as I do on Windows. In other words, it was plug-and-play after a one-time setup.

Higher frame rates and a true plug-and-play setup

Let’s focus on desktop usage first. This was perhaps the most transformative one, and I was left impressed by how well the Legion Go handled it, leveraging the RX 9070 to control three whole additional monitors (including one ultrawide display!). The desktop also felt much snappier, compared to my previous attempt to run the Legion Go on its own, without an eGPU.

Still, numbers speak for themselves, and I ran a few games at 1920×1080 to test things out. The eGPU handled everything I threw at it — provided I used some amount of FSR and stuck to saner defaults that weren’t too taxing on RAM or CPU.

Some games also managed to run at playable frame rates with light ray tracing applied, but make no mistake: this is not going to handle native 4K in modern games either.

Here were the results of the benchmarks:

• Batman Arkham Knight: 135 FPS/85 FPS 1% low
• Doom The Dark Ages: 95 FPS/72 FPS 1% low
• Doom (2016): 180 FPS/125 FPS 1% low
• The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt: 140 FPS/95 FPS 1% low

We are bottlenecked by the Legion Go and the bandwidth of the USB4/Thunderbolt 3 connection, so expect diminishing returns past a point. It’s still a remarkable upgrade and certainly viable. It’s just a shame that hardware prices are the way they are right now, and I can’t recommend this as is.

That said, there is one thing I’ve skipped: the plug-and-play features. I could just use my handheld as a proper handheld and dock it onto an eGPU to transform it into a full-fledged desktop, and it handled it beautifully.

Hot plug and unplug work like a charm, and KDE Plasma is smart enough to handle it without major issues, assuming you’ve updated your installation. You could likely make this into a secondary living room gaming PC with the eGPU, and Bazzite handles the full-screen experience with zero issues. Once you’re done gaming, just unplug the console and be on your merry way.

I wouldn’t recommend making this a true desktop replacement

The Z1 Extreme, for all its glory, is still a mobile CPU and has limits. It will bottleneck the RX 9070, or anything beyond a mid-range GPU like an RTX 5060, and your gains will be very limited past a certain point.

There’s also the fact that this iteration of the Legion Go has only 16GB of system RAM, a part of which is used by the iGPU, making RAM constraints very real. You’ll start to chew away into swap space, especially if you plan to multitask heavily on this thing.

You might have noticed I didn’t mention Nvidia, and that’s for a reason. Nvidia support on Bazzite exists, but it is not as flawless as AMD’s, and this is a recurring theme you’ll come to notice with Linux and Nvidia cards.

All things considered, this experiment proved to me that I really can’t rely on just my handheld as a reliable desktop replacement, and that is quite a shame. I would still like to try to recommend using it as a dockable console PC — much like what the Nintendo Switch 2 can do. Until then, I’ll be using my laptop for the same purpose instead.