Zotac is again already with a brand new model of its Zone handheld gaming PC. Sporting a brand new white shade scheme, the Zotac Zone 2025 (Zotac doesn’t appear to have referred to as it the Zotac Zone 2) seems to have already upgraded from the Ryzen 8840U to AMD’s newest.
The unique Zotac Zone is among the higher examples of Home windows-based greatest handheld gaming PC rivals, aping among the greatest options from Valve’s Steam Deck. Nevertheless, it landed simply that bit too late to make for significant competitors to present options.
Together with the truth that hardly any inventory has ever been obtainable, that is why you gained’t see it popping up on many prime handheld gaming PC lists. As such, it’s no nice shock to see Zotac has gone again to the drafting board within the processor division. As reported by TechPowerUp, Zotac was exhibiting off the subsequent model of its handheld at CES 2025.
The clearly labeled prototype will include a virtually similar set of specs to the present mannequin however is ditching the Ryzen 8000 cell chip for an AI 9 HX 370. This nets the hand held a leap up in each CPU and GPU specs, with the brand new CPU sporting 12 cores and its GPU leaping from the RDNA 3 Radeon 780M to the RDNA 3.5 Radeon 890M, which nets a reported 20% enhance in gaming efficiency for the brand new chip.
This new AMD chip is identical one discovered contained in the not too long ago launched OneXPlayer F1 Professional and is ready to be featured in a bunch of different handhelds, together with the Lenovo Legion Go 2.
One other improve for the 2nd-gen Zotac Zone is a transfer from 16GB of RAM to 32GB, which places it in keeping with different new 2025 gaming handhelds. Whereas which will appear quite a bit for a handheld, needless to say this whole system RAM can be used because the VRAM for the built-in GPU, so a good quantity is required for contemporary video games. We noticed the ROG Ally X’s 24GB assist its growing older Z1 Excessive chip beat out the common ROG Ally, as an illustration.
Zotac is sticking with the crisp AMOLED panel from the primary machine, in addition to taking a web page out of Valve’s Steam Deck playbook, in relation to controls, with it together with twin trackpads.
Storage additionally sees a rise to 1TB from 512GB. Plus, it makes use of a “full-size” 2280 M.2 SSD, moderately than the shorter 2230 dimension discovered within the Steam Deck and different handhelds.
There’s no phrase on the launch date or pricing but, however based on people on the Zotac CES sales space, it’s slated for this 12 months.
Choice for handhelds and even mini gaming PCs have flourished this 12 months at CES, with a bunch of recent units and wonderful new processors to energy them. Whereas Nvidia may need been the speak of the city with their RTX 5000 bulletins, seeing the low-end chips go from energy to energy brings plenty of pleasure for these trying to sport on the go.
