I would like to buy a handheld console and I have ended up with the standard 3 to choose from. The Steam Deck, Rog Ally and Lenovo Legion GO.

I can now buy the Steam Deck LCD 64 GB on sale for €370, the 256 GB for €420 and the 512 GB for €470.

The Steam Deck OLED 512 GB costs €570.

The Rog Ally Z1 Extreme 512 GB costs €600 (Black Friday deal)

The Lenovo Legion GO 512 GB costs €800.

I mainly want to use the console to play Football Manager and emulate Switch games. I think it would be useful to have a trackpad to use as a mouse in Football Manager.

I think the Lenovo is still too expensive, so I’m not going for that one. The Steam Deck LCD 64 GB seems like a good choice now that it is on sale and I can replace the SSD whenever I want. The Rog Ally costs €230 more but does not have a trackpad and I read it has some problems with a SD card.

I’ve never really been a PC gamer and have always only played FM on a laptop. That’s why I would never buy a gaming PC nor laptop. Not only because the price is between €1000-€1500 for a good gaming PC, but I also no longer see myself sitting in a corner for a few hours. I like the idea of having basically a laptop in a handheld which you can take everywhere with you and play everywhere you want.

A laptop with Ryzen 5, 256 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM and a Full HD IPS screen would cost around €450 at the moment and the same configuration with a 512 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM cost around €500 at the moment. Both Black Friday deals. A Ryzen 7, 512 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM, Full HD IPS screen cost around €650.

I use a laptop almost exclusively for school (Word, Google Chrome, etc.) and I only browse the internet with my phone or iPad. I therefore see no reason to buy a laptop purely for FM and emulation.

There is at the moment also a Ryzen 3, 8 GB RAM with a 512 GB SSD configuration available at the moment for €400 which is around the Steam Deck’s price.

What would you take? A logical choice seems to me to be the Steam Deck LCD or perhaps the OLED version. But should I pay €200 more for the OLED in my case?

Is the Steam Deck better in performance than the above laptops? Can it generally achieve a higher FPS?

Switch games that I would emulate would be the Mario games such as Mario Kart, Wonder etc. How does the Steam Deck handle this? Do the games run smoothly and without errors and if not, will this only get better in the future?

Can the Steam Deck play games connected to a monitor in 1080p+ and what kind of FPS can I expect for example in Call of Duty or GTA 5?

I would like to receive your tips to make a good choice.

Thank you!