Over the past few months I've acquired and played with the ROG Ally and Steam Deck OLED handhelds, and I ended up gearing rid of them both because I thought regardless of how well they ran games, I simply didn't need to specifically play those games while on the go.
More importantly I got them because they supposedly represented the best non-Apple SOC on the market. The Z1 Extreme is certainly the fastest but it's actually not great at 15w, where the Steam Deck OLED new 4nm custom chip is slightly stronger. However having used these devices I'm still not impressed by their power efficiency, especially not the Z1 Extreme. The reality is they only have high power efficiency while at maximum load, the idle times are still not great, so for example a Ryzen 7840u laptop may be able to run Cinebench R23 for just as long as a MacBook Air, it cannot let you browse Facebook for nearly as long, because more power is being wasted while idle, and for most people, even "heavy" work loads like photo/video editing have a significant idle portion.
What about games? If you look up these handhelds there's lots of praises on how powerful they are, however direct comparison between to Apple Silicon is extremely limited. I looked around there's only a couple direct comparisons on Notebookcheck.net with GFXbench but even I have to say that benchmark is not super convincing because everyone is running over 200fps, but the result is total victory for M2.
Just to satisfy my own curiosity, I downloaded and ran BG3, because it apparently has native code and is very new. I found a benchmark showcase on Youtube with FSR off:
My current device is a 15" air with 24GB, I have applied thermal pad mod for better cooling and I've been doing this since the intel days, it can hold over 10w to the SOC but the power management does not exactly run that way, instead it fluctuates between 9 and 15w, so direct comparison is a little tricky.
I managed to find one spot, basically just looking over your own party after the goblin fight starts and NPCs have taken their turns.
Z1 Extreme: 63 FPS
M2 15W: 50 FPS
M2 9w: 42 FPS
M3 Pro 14c 25W: 132 FPS
It's hard to tell what power level the Legion Go is running because it differs depending on whether it's plugged in, it supposedly is 25w while plugged in however there's another piece of information which is the fact that it draws ~45w from the battery while running in performance mode, sure it has a big screen but that's not a 20w screen is it? I've had the same experience with the ROG Ally, where the actual real power draw is just much larger than whatever the software reports the SOC is drawing.
I also tried finding results for Steam Deck but they're all running very aggressive FSR, should really have tested this while I still had my deck, Didn't want to because I heard it can't really run Act3 very well at all. The M2 is btw, unfazed by act3, because it's 8-cores.
Anyway, my impression is, the M2 is quite a bit stronger than the Steam Deck at the same power level. While the AMD Z1 Extreme/7840u is yet stronger, but only at ~2x power.
With this in mind, I just think these gaming handhelds make even less sense. Because with a MacBook I can in fact play BG3 better than those handhelds, even though the Z1 Extreme can run higher FPS, the game is just better with trackpad/keyboard, and I'm pretty sure a MacBook has at least 3x the battery life. Or if you go with a bigger Apple chip you can get much higher frame rates. This is all while also being able to do all the other things, much better than a gaming handheld.
More importantly I got them because they supposedly represented the best non-Apple SOC on the market. The Z1 Extreme is certainly the fastest but it's actually not great at 15w, where the Steam Deck OLED new 4nm custom chip is slightly stronger. However having used these devices I'm still not impressed by their power efficiency, especially not the Z1 Extreme. The reality is they only have high power efficiency while at maximum load, the idle times are still not great, so for example a Ryzen 7840u laptop may be able to run Cinebench R23 for just as long as a MacBook Air, it cannot let you browse Facebook for nearly as long, because more power is being wasted while idle, and for most people, even "heavy" work loads like photo/video editing have a significant idle portion.
What about games? If you look up these handhelds there's lots of praises on how powerful they are, however direct comparison between to Apple Silicon is extremely limited. I looked around there's only a couple direct comparisons on Notebookcheck.net with GFXbench but even I have to say that benchmark is not super convincing because everyone is running over 200fps, but the result is total victory for M2.
Just to satisfy my own curiosity, I downloaded and ran BG3, because it apparently has native code and is very new. I found a benchmark showcase on Youtube with FSR off:
My current device is a 15" air with 24GB, I have applied thermal pad mod for better cooling and I've been doing this since the intel days, it can hold over 10w to the SOC but the power management does not exactly run that way, instead it fluctuates between 9 and 15w, so direct comparison is a little tricky.
I managed to find one spot, basically just looking over your own party after the goblin fight starts and NPCs have taken their turns.
Z1 Extreme: 63 FPS
M2 15W: 50 FPS
M2 9w: 42 FPS
M3 Pro 14c 25W: 132 FPS
It's hard to tell what power level the Legion Go is running because it differs depending on whether it's plugged in, it supposedly is 25w while plugged in however there's another piece of information which is the fact that it draws ~45w from the battery while running in performance mode, sure it has a big screen but that's not a 20w screen is it? I've had the same experience with the ROG Ally, where the actual real power draw is just much larger than whatever the software reports the SOC is drawing.
I also tried finding results for Steam Deck but they're all running very aggressive FSR, should really have tested this while I still had my deck, Didn't want to because I heard it can't really run Act3 very well at all. The M2 is btw, unfazed by act3, because it's 8-cores.
Anyway, my impression is, the M2 is quite a bit stronger than the Steam Deck at the same power level. While the AMD Z1 Extreme/7840u is yet stronger, but only at ~2x power.
With this in mind, I just think these gaming handhelds make even less sense. Because with a MacBook I can in fact play BG3 better than those handhelds, even though the Z1 Extreme can run higher FPS, the game is just better with trackpad/keyboard, and I'm pretty sure a MacBook has at least 3x the battery life. Or if you go with a bigger Apple chip you can get much higher frame rates. This is all while also being able to do all the other things, much better than a gaming handheld.
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