HANDHELD GAMING PCs

In lieu of more powerful processors, handhelds are getting weirder

- Jacob Ridley

We’ve experienced a new form factor take hold of PC gaming over the past few years: the handheld gaming PC. Advancements in onboard graphics chips and chip manufacturing technologies means we now have the low power, high performance processors required to make a fully-fledge gaming PC able to fit inside the pockets of a man with very sizeable pockets. That’s progress.

It all kicked off with the Steam Deck. There were a handful (get it?) that arrived prior to that, except they weren’t very good. Nowadays a smorgasbord of Windows-based handhelds are available thanks to the performance offered by AMD’s Ryzen 7 7740HS and Ryzen Z1 Extreme – effectively the same chip – powered by the 780M iGPU. But where do manufacturers go next?

New and improved Ryzen AI chips are only available in a small number of laptops currently. In the meantime, handhelds have gotten weirder and more wonderful. OLED screens, compact designs, beefy tablets and even a PC equivalent of the Nintendo DS – you needn’t stick with a simple screen and a couple of analogue sticks these days.

Steam Deck OLED

VALVE £569

O-O-O-OLED

1 If you want to look to a single device for kickstarting our love affair with handheld gaming PCs, it is the Steam Deck. This plucky device offers less performance than most, an OS unfamiliar to many, and a size bigger than others. Yet despite its limitations, it remains a fantastic pick. That probably comes down to the fact it’s absurdly good value for money. The Steam Deck OLED only improves on the base formula that has proven so successful for Valve. It comes with the same AMD APU as the initial model, except now it’s attached to a larger 7.4-inch OLED screen. It’s very bright at 1,000 nits, though the wide colour gamut is the main attraction, which pairs wonderfully with HDR content.