Meteor Lake muscles into the portable gaming PC market with the new OneXPlayer three-in-one X1

OneXPlayer is hardly a novice when it comes to portable PCs, as it has been producing handheld devices and tablets for over six years, originally under the name of One-Notebook. Now it's bringing Intel's Meteor Lake CPUs to its portfolio with the X1, the latest range-topper for the OneXPlayer OneXPlorer Series of handheld PCs. It's not the smallest thing you'll ever see but the feature set might help it stand out from the very busy crowd of PC gaming-on-the-go machines.

OneXPlayer first dropped hints to the X1 project last December but the official crowdsourced funding campaign under way, I was hoping for more details. Well, colour me disappointed because the retail prices and full specifications are still shrouded in mystery.

But what we do know is that all of the processing duties will be handled by a Core Ultra 7 155H. This is one of Intel's first Meteor Lake-based chips and houses six P-cores, ten E-cores, and two low-power E-cores (which just handle background tasks) for 22 threads in total.

With a base power of 28W and maximum limit of 115W, the 155H can potentially reach 4.8GHz on the P-cores and 3.8GHz on the main E-cores, but that's assuming OneXPlayer isn't using a lower power limit on the X1.

The integrated GPU uses Intel's Alchemist architecture and has eight Xe cores (1,024 shaders) with a boost clock of 2.25GHz but again, the X1 might launch with lower clocks than that. The processor choice for most handheld PCs is AMD Ryzen 7 7840U and the GPU in that is the RDNA 3-based Radeon 780M. That has 768 shaders but a much higher boost clock of 2.7GHz.

When Jacob did some hands-on game testing with a Core Ultra 7 165H laptop last year, he found it to be perfectly acceptable for 1080p gaming, even more so in games that supported Intel's XeSS upscaling algorithm. The GPU in that processor is exactly the same as the one in the 155H, so the X1 should be just as good as, say, the Asus ROG Ally or Ayaneo Air 1S.

The display is an 11-inch 120Hz LTPS screen, with a