PC Gaming company Zotac has made its Zone handheld gaming PC official at Computex 2024. That’s not surprising, since the company said it would during a teaser last week. What is surprising is that it’s not a rebadged competitor unit, at least as far as initial impressions go.
The Zone has yet to debut on the company’s official website but it’s definitely coming. Computex attendees have seen and played with the thing, but have no idea when it’ll turn up at retail. There’s talk of a September launch at a R15,000 price point ($800), which is about in keeping with similar hardware from Asus, MSI, and Valve.
Zone of the enders
What will you get for your (estimated) money? About the same as you’d get from the ROG Ally, MSI Claw, and other similar handheld PCs. There’s an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U processor, which uses the same GPU as those competitor units, and Zotac has opted for LPDDR5X-7500 memory.
It’ll probably outperform the MSI Claw but there may be fewer differentiators between the Zone and more recent announcements. The only real issue, besides the problems inherent in the design (heat dissipation, screen size, frames per second), might be the battery. Zotac has opted for a 48.5Wh effort. The newest Steam Deck, as well as Asus and MSI’s newest portable PCs opt for larger batteries. We can reasonably expect the Zone’s successor to follow suit but this initial batch may find itself spending more time at the charger than its compatriots.
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But there are Hall Effect joysticks, a 7in AMOLED display (at 1,920 x 1,080), adjustable triggers, and a ‘radial dial’ that can swap between settings profiles at a twist of an RGB-laden knob. There’s also an integrated trackpad (or two), so you can use your thumbs to navigate a mouse cursor instead of wiggling a thumbstick, to look forward to. Oh, right, and there’s a kickstand, in case you opt for a controller for your on-the-go PC gaming habit.