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- Zotac’s latest showcase of their Zone handheld seems promising, demonstrating a host of features I have been looking forward to seeing in a handheld.
- The Zotac Zone directly challenges the Steam Deck with its display configuration, offering a 120 Hz AMOLED screen.
- Zotac has also incorporated a few quality-of-life features including a touchpad, radial dials, as well as adjustable triggers.
There have been a lot of handheld showcases in the recent Computex; however, the one that caught my eye was certainly the Zotac Zone. While the device itself hasn’t been released, the early access unit shows a lot of promise.
The Display Can Be A Gamechanger
One of the biggest advantages of Zotac Zone is its 120 Hz AMOLED display, allowing you to get an HDR experience on the go. While you don’t get a high-resolution display such as the one found on the Lenovo Legion Go, I think 1080p is still good enough, especially if you are working with a 7-inch screen.
What’s more, there aren’t a lot of consoles in the current market that can rival the display of the Zotac Zone. Even the steam deck OLED only maxes out at a refresh rate of 90 Hz. On the other hand, ASUS has yet to implement an OLED screen on any of their handhelds, making the Zotac Zone further stand out in terms of the display specifications.
Solid Set Of Features
Of course, the display isn’t just the Zone’s main selling point. In my opinion, it also does well in a lot of other areas, providing a fairly decent set of features that extend beyond what you would typically expect from a handheld.
The biggest things that stood out to me were the adjustable dials underneath the joysticks, Hall Effect joysticks, and the dual trackpads that make navigating through Windows a lot easier. Additionally, the handheld also comes with adjustable triggers as well as a webcam on the front, both of which are neat features in my book.
Of course, software features, or any of the actual software itself hasn’t been showcased, so I can’t really speak on that front. However, we can expect something similar to ASUS’ armory crate on the ROG Ally.
Specifications That Keep Up
Display and ergonomics aside, the Zotac Zone doesn’t fail to keep up in terms of specifications either, utilizing a Ryzen 7 8840U, 16 GB of GDRR6X running at 7500 MHz as well as the Radeon 780M GPU. Naturally, the CPU and GPU configuration isn’t something we haven’t seen before, but it’s nice to see that the handheld keeps up on that front.
In addition to that, the TDP ranges from 15-28W, which is fairly standard. Speaking of which, you get a 48-watt-hour battery with the Zotac Zone, which is also reasonably in line with other handheld releases I have seen so far. To put that into perspective, the original ROG Ally came with a 40Wh battery; whereas, the ROG Ally X takes things up to 80Wh.
It’s worth mentioning that a USB type-C port is available on both sides of the handheld, which makes charging a lot easier.
For storage, Zotac went with a 2280 512GB SSD, allowing you to replace it with a higher capacity option easily. The inclusion of a full-sized slot is going to be important, considering Zotac has no plans of launching higher-capacity variants of the Zotac Zone.
Competitive On All Fronts
As long as the pricing of the Zotac Zone isn’t anything outrageous, then the Zotac Zone will certainly be a fantastic addition to the handheld market. I found that the Zotac Gaming does fairly well in most regards, and while official benchmarks are yet to be revealed, performance is going to be similar to most recent handheld PCs.
What we have here is a very competitive handheld that also has a few tricks up its sleeve that the competition might lack, which makes things quite exciting for the entire landscape of handheld PCs. From what I can see, its feature set stacks up well against the competition, and I hope Zotac refines everything before the final release.
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[Hardware Expert]
With a major in Computer Science, Sameed is a tech enthusiast who puts his passion for gadgets into words and creates informative blogs. From comparing different hardware to reviewing the best RAMs, motherboards, and graphics cards for your next build, Sameed has covered a wide spectrum of topics that have given him a special insight into every nook and cranny of the tech world. Sameed is also a certified expert at Computer Hardware & Networking.
Get In Touch: sameed@tech4gamers.com
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