Zotac is entering the gaming handheld segment. The Zotac Zone will apparently soon be released as a strong competitor to the Steam Deck OLED or ASUS ROG Ally, which will be presented at Computex 2024 in early June. After the handheld was already teased in a press release, a leak now provides all the specs.
Zotac Zone: With 120 Hz AMOLED display and AMD Ryzen 7 8840U
The Zotac Zone is a gaming handheld PC for enthusiasts, according to the press release. The device is set to be unveiled at Computex 2024 next week. Now, however, the website VideoCardz has already leaked all the details in advance by publishing the data sheet.
According to this, Zotac is equipping the Zone with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U chipset with an integrated Radeon 780M iGPU, which, with 8 cores, 16 threads and clock speeds of up to 5,100 MHz, is on par with the Ryzen Z1 Extreme handheld chip, which can be found in the ROG Ally, for example. The chip runs at 15 watts TDP, but can be pushed up to 28 watts.
Zotac has also equipped the Zone with 16 GB LPDDR5X RAM and a 512 GB PCIe 4.0 SSD. This is connected via an M.2 2280 slot, which makes it easy to replace. Memory can also be expanded via a microSD card reader that supports fast UHS-II cards.
A highlight of the gaming handheld is undoubtedly the 7-inch AMOLED display, which achieves a frame rate of 120 Hz and is up to 800 nits bright. It has a resolution of 1080p with 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, which is of course absolutely sufficient given its size. HDR content should be able to be displayed.
USB4 and (fairly) small battery
There is a USB-C port on the underside of the Zotac Zone, which promises high transfer speeds in the USB4 standard. The battery has a capacity of 48.5 watt hours, which results in a meagre runtime of 1.25 hours at maximum load. However, this naturally varies depending on the load and settings.
This makes the battery slightly larger than in the ASUS ROG Ally (40 Wh), but smaller than in the Steam Deck OLED (50 Wh) or the upcoming ROG Ally X, which has a whopping 80 watt hours.
The Zotac Zone also has joysticks and triggers with a reverb effect, whereby the triggers can be adjusted in two stages. Windows 11 Home is used as the operating system, with delivery scheduled for the third quarter of 2024.
