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HoloDust on 29 October 2025
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Zippy6 said:
HoloDust said:

I guess I would probably use laptop if I traveled and needed to game, but this is more like 15-20 minute bursts in taxi, breaks and that kind of things - for which I find small clamshell handheld perfect fit. As I said, one that can also can run lighter PC games from Steam, along with pretty much everything up to and including Switch, is for me just a perfect fit.

If I was in actual market for portables, I would go with GPD Win 5 - I actually like detachable battery design, so you can just swap out another one. OneXPlayer is making 395+ based handheld as well, with detachable liquid cooling no less, which can actually run at up to full 120W...on a battery of 85W, which is pointless, but hey, they're doing it anyway. AYANEO is still to reveal its 395+ based handheld.

I think I'll wait for AMD to make a proper handheld chip that's a good jump over the Z1E. The 395+ is very impressive but not something I want in a handheld. If you are going to use it docked regularly as well and want a decently powered desktop experience I guess it's a good fit. It's performance is still pretty good at 28w, It's a 36% jump over the Win4 8840u in 3dmark with both running at 28w. But I imagine it drops off very hard the lower you go and could end up in a situation like what happens to the Z1E when you drop it to 15w and lower, where efficiency drops off a cliff and steam deck can start outperforming it. Also I'm not in the market for a $1.5k+ device lol.

Personally I think I'm in for a long wait before something comes along that makes me want to upgrade my Z1E ROG Ally.

Phawx did great review of it, he always benchmarks at different wattages:

It's not really a 15W device - I mean, you can run it at that wattage and still have gains over Ally X, but it's sweet spot seems to be around 25-30W...unless you have battery pack(s) to replace, so you can drive it harder.

That said, yeah, it's not exactly handheld SoC - you can obviously make successful design with 395+, but it is really more of "because we can" approach, and there's, at least it seems, nothing til 2027 from AMD that will be based on RDNA5, so they figured there's market for it anyway.