Zotac Gaming launches the Zone handheld gaming computer with an AMOLED HDR display.

We at PC Gamer Hardware love a good portable gaming PC. The market is flooded with all sorts of devices, whether it's a luscious OLED screen and brilliant software eco-system of the OLED steam deck or the raw power the ROG AllyX. Zotac is a manufacturer of GeForce graphics cards and mini-PCs. It has now launched its Zone handheld with a 7" AMOLED display.

The display is the most important feature of the Zotac Gaming Zone. We first saw it in January at the annual Computex show. It's standard for the market in terms of size, refresh rate and resolution (7 inches, 1080p) but it has an AMOLED panel with a colour gamut that is more than 150% sRGB and 100% DCI-P3.

It's unclear what the brightness will be when HDR content is displayed. According to Chris, "...in brightly lit environments, [it] really amazed with the brightness and color reproduction."

Zotac also gave the Zone (or, how about ZGZ for short?) a set of control options. It has dual Hall Effect thumbsticks and two-stage adjustable triggers, radial dials around the sticks, two trackpads plus buttons around back. There are a lot of options for controlling the game, including dual Hall Effect thumbsticks, two-stage adjustable triggers with radial dials on the sticks, and two trackpads. We won't know if they work properly until we test a ZGZ, but at least there are plenty of options.

The rest of the hardware for this handheld gaming PC is standard: an AMD Ryzen 8840U with 8 CPU cores and 16 threads. It also has 768 RDNA3 shaders to handle the gaming. The 16 GB LPDDR5-7500 memory is a nice addition, but after using the ROG ally X, which has 24 GB, I feel that 16 GB is a little short.

The storage is also 512 GB. This is not enough for many games today, but the Zone uses a standard PCIe 2.0 M.2 2280 connector, which should allow it to be easily expanded with a gaming SSD.

You do get a built in kickstand, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, a UHS II microSD slot and two USB4 ports to handle external displays and peripherals. It has a fingerprint reader and a front-facing 720p camera. Zotac makes a dock and carry case.

The battery is only rated at 43 Wh. It was acceptable a few years ago, but now that the ROG Ally X has an 80 Wh and a similar weight battery, I think Zotac missed a trick.

Specifications only tell half the story. The way it feels in the hands, how thermals are managed, as well as the software ecosystem, all play a role in how much fun such devices can be. We'll let you know if we receive a Zotac Gaming Zone for review.