Zotac's Gaming Zone handheld challenges the ROG Ally X with AMOLED display

[zohaibahd]

What just happened? Nvidia graphics partner Zotac has unveiled its first portable gaming PC – the Zotac Gaming Zone. First teased back in May, the Zone is now available for pre-order from select retailers with a $799 price tag, putting it in direct competition with the recently launched Asus ROG Ally X.

Separating Zotac's freshman effort from the crowded handheld gaming space is its 7-inch 1080p AMOLED display with a blazing 120Hz refresh rate and impressive 800 nit peak brightness. That should provide a far superior visual experience compared to Asus's rival device, which has an LCD that goes up to 500 nits.

The controls get an upgrade too with Zotac employing fancy Hall effect sensors for the triggers (with two-stage adjustment) and analog sticks. This tech is meant to prevent pesky controller drift over time. There are also radial dials on the sticks and two trackpads for mouse-style input. Zotac also claims the Zone's ergonomics and grip have been carefully shaped for comfortable extended play sessions.

Under the hood, the Zone packs AMD's Ryzen 7 8840U Hawk Point APU and the Radeon 780M based on Zen 4 and RDNA 3. That chip performs mostly similarly to the ROG Ally X's Ryzen Z1 Extreme, even though it's a few months older. The processing is supported with 16GB of DDR5 RAM and 512GB of NVMe storage.

The Zone's not quite as beefy as the 24GB/1TB config in Asus's model, but it should still be packing enough horsepower for decent AAA gaming. What does seem like a major step down is the 48Wh battery, which is almost half the size of the Ally X's massive 80Wh cell. The AMOLED panel, which generally is less power-hungry than LCDs, should help offset some of that reduced capacity.

The handheld also packs some nice extras like a built-in kickstand, macro switches, dual USB-C ports, a fingerprint reader in the power button, a 1MP 720p camera, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Connectivity is handled by Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 standards.

The pricing is a bit of a sticking point at $799, matching that of the Asus ROG Ally X. Whether Zotac can sway gamers with its AMOLED screen and controller tweaks remains to be seen.

The company will be showcasing the Gaming Zone handheld alongside its latest graphics cards and mini PCs at the upcoming Gamescom expo from August 21-25.

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Zotac's Gaming Zone handheld challenges the ROG Ally X with AMOLED display

 

[yRaz]

I say the AMOLED is worth more to me than the 24gigs of ram on the ally X. And while not everyone is like me, I have several 1TB NVME drives laying around. Older ones, of course, but I'm not really worried about cutting edge performance on these.

I'd say this is a winner. My only problem is that an offical version of steamOS is coming to the Ally X, but I'd probably put my own distro on it anyway. It's basically an AMD laptop in a handheld form factor so I can't imagine there being any major driver issues.

Looks good, I'm all for it. Also, you don't here too much about Zotac anymore, it's cool to see them even putting themselves out there.

 

[godrilla]

Just like I predicted years this space is becoming a hot commodity far from being a more than a $1k premium product. Everyone is popping up with their own handheld including Antec. Microsoft is also rumored to enter the ring soon. For example the original base ROG Ally is selling as low as $379.99 at Bestbuy.

 

[yRaz]

Microsoft is also rumored to enter the ring soon.

I can't wait for the Xbox Surface
/SARCASM

it'll probably run on ARM

 

[godrilla]

I can't wait for the Xbox Surface
/SARCASM

it'll probably run on ARM

I'm glad Steam is allowing their os on other devices. Love to see any performance deltas between windows and Steam os in gaming.

 

[yRaz]

I'm glad Steam is allowing their os on other devices. Love to see any performance deltas between windows and Steam os in gaming.

MS needs knocked down a peg or two and I think SteamOS is the closest thing we're going to get to seeing that. The idea that enough people want SteamOS on the ROG Ally for valve to develop an official release for it is a good sign

 

[ScottSoapbox]

I doubt it is variable refresh OLED.
And that's a deal killer.

Also the double battery in the X has been huge in not worry about finding power while traveling so I doubt I’ll upgrade again until the Z2 chips hit next year.

 

[Watzupken]

I think the OLED and touchpad are great improvements over the Ally X. However, I feel Zotac missed the opportunity to offer a compelling product by limiting the ram to just 16GB. I believe most of the performance inconsistencies with handheld PC is due to the 16GB ram limit. In general, even with a newly formatted Windows PC and just booted up, I see ram usage around 5 to 6GB. Just opening some apps will see ram usage go up higher. The moment you fire up a PC game, I don't think the ram usage will remain below 10GB. So that means the iGPU will have between 4 to 6GB at best. Hence, the older Ally with the Z1 Extreme and even the Lenovo Go are able to churn out high average frame rate, but the frame time, 1% and 0.1% low FPS suffers.