Every hardware vendor seems to want a go at making a handheld, and now its ZOTAC jumping in with the Zone.
Teased during Computex it will come with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U (Zen 4) and AMD Radeon 870M graphics (RDNA 3). It will also come with 2-stage adjustable triggers, hall effect joysticks and triggers, a 1920x1080 7" AMOLED multi-touch 120Hz display, a front-facing camera and even dual trackpads.
Zotac shared some images on X (formerly Twitter):
It looks pretty big. And of course, it will come with Windows. So if you want to run it on Linux, you'll need to wait for drivers to be worked on and for the likes of ChimeraOS and Bazzite to get support ready for it.
“Ever since the establishment of the ZOTAC GAMING brand, we have strived to provide an unmatched gaming experience for enthusiasts worldwide,” Said Tony Wong, Chief Executive Officer of ZOTAC. “We have made considerable efforts to raise the bar with our debut handheld, tailor-made with competitive features for all gamers.”
Valve well and truly lit a fire under everyone didn't they with the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED? Handheld PCs for gaming are now really becoming a bigger mainstream thing. We also had the silly-named MSI Claw 8 AI+ revealed recently too.
The ZOTAC Zone will launch in September priced reportedly around $800. So they're not even remotely trying to compete with the Steam Deck at that price. The price alone may be the biggest issue with it.
You can follow it on their store.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
dziadulewicz Jun 4
Buying few things from Steam instead then to support Valve who stands with current times and Linux.
Quote“We have made considerable efforts to raise the bar with our debut handheld, tailor-made with competitive features for all gamers.”
They have managed trackpads by the look of it, which is a significant upgrade over a lot of their competitors.
It's interesting that they didn't go with AMD's Z series chip. This handled will probably be more powerful and use more power, though I hope they took the opportunity to include more than one USB port.
Viesta2015 Jun 4
Quoting: nondetectIt appears that ZOTAC is not aligning with the current market direction. I believe other handheld making companies will soon begin introducing updated models of their portable computers equipped with the latest Copilot+PC compatible processors, whereas ZOTAC was intending to launch their product with the previous generation 8040 CPU.
Ah just what i needed... recall spyware on my handhelds.
RavenWings Jun 4
This one looks a bit like the Steam Decks ugly brother, but to me its more important how it feels and performs. I appreciate the two trackpads, but going FullHD is still a bad descision on these devices IMHO. 800p is perfect with the current hardware.
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