Zotac Gaming officially launches its Zone handheld gaming PC with a super fancy AMOLED HDR screen

All of us in the PC Gamer Hardware tower-of-tech love a good handheld gaming PC. Whether it's the luscious screen and brilliant software ecosystem of the OLED Steam Deck or the raw power of the ROG Ally X, the market is awash with all kinds of devices. And now Zotac, purveyor of GeForce RTX graphics cards and mini PCs, is throwing its gauntlet into the ring with its Zone handheld, replete with a 7-inch AMOLED screen.

The display is probably the biggest selling feature of the Zotac Gaming Zone andwe first laid our eyes (and sticky mitts) on it back in January, at the annual Computex event. In terms of size, resolution, and refresh rate, it's par course for the market (7 inches, 1080p, 120 Hz) but it uses an AMOLED touch-sensitive panel, with a claimed colour gamut of more than 100% DCI-P3 and 150% sRGB.

With a peak brightness of 800 nits, it should be ideal for gaming outdoors, although it's not clear what that will drop to when it's displaying HDR content. According to fellow staff Chris, "...in a brightly lit environment, [it] really impressed with the brightness, contrast, and color reproduction."

Zotac has also given the Zone (or how about ZGZ, for short?) a decent set of control options, with dual Hall Effect thumbsticks and two-stage adjustable triggers, radial dials around the sticks, two trackpads, plus two buttons around the back. Of course, we don't know how well these all work until we get our hands on a ZGZ and properly test it, but there's no shortage of control options, at least.

The rest of the hardware is fairly standard fare for a modern handheld gaming PC—an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U, with 8 CPU cores, 16 threads, and 768 RDNA 3 shaders that handle all the gaming duties. That gets backed up with 16 GB of LPDDR5-7500 RAM, which is nice and fast, but having spent a lot of time using the ROG Ally X with its 24 GB of RAM, I think 16 GB is perhaps a little lacking.

It's a similar story for the storage, as it's just 512 GB. Given the size of many games these