Aokzoe teases its next-gen handheld gaming PC and it looks like it’s just stuffed a better chip, screen, and battery into its not-bad, not-great A1 Pro

Sometimes you really don’t need to reinvent the wheel when designing a spiffy new product. That seems to be Aokzoe’s approach with its forthcoming A1 X handheld gaming PC, as it looks almost exactly like its current A1 Pro—just with a bigger battery and a nice AMD Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 chip.

There’s not a wealth of detail about the new handheld in the teaser post on X, but the A1 X will sport a full-fat Strix Point APU. That means you’ll be getting 12 CPU cores (4x Zen 5, 8x Zen 5c) and 16 RDNA 3.5 compute units for graphics. Compared to the Ryzen 7 7840U in the A1 Pro, it’s a reasonable uplift in hardware.

That chip has eight Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA 3 compute units, so you’re potentially looking at up to 33% performance in games on the A1 X, compared to the A1 Pro. I say potentially because it will come down to what power and clocks Aokzoe decides to use, and there’s no word on those so far.

So, what else is better? Well, the screen for one—it’s still 8 inches in size (and that’s plenty big enough for a handheld) and while its resolution is unknown, the refresh rate is 120 Hz and it has VRR (variable refresh rate) support. The A1 Pro sports a 1200p 60 Hz panel, so even if the resolution is unchanged, it should be a much nicer display to stare at for hours on end.

Whether you actually get hours of game-staring will come down to the battery, of course, and Aokzoe has seen fit to shoehorn a 72.5 Wh cell into the A1 X. The A1 Pro makes do with a 65 Wh battery, so you’re only getting a 17% increase in capacity, but given that it lasted for over two hours of Elden Ring gaming in its 15 W mode, I should imagine you’ll get around the same with the A1 X.

The standard version of the Aokzoe A1 Pro boasts a whopping 32 GB of LDDDR5x-7400 and I really hope that the A1 X has the same amount of RAM. As there’s no dedicated VRAM for the Ryzen’s GPU, the more memory you have, the more stable and better performing a handheld will be.

You can see this with the Asus ROG Ally X, which outperforms the standard ROG Ally, due to having 24 GB of memory (16 GB in the non-X Ally), even though the two have the same processor.

What we really want Aokzoe to get right with the A1 X is software. The system used in the A1 Pro is far clunkier than Asus Armory Crate, in the ROG Ally, and it’s not a patch on SteamOS. Windows 11 isn’t especially suited for handhelds and they rely heavily on a vendor’s software to overcome its desktop nature.

The one thing you can be sure of about the Aokzoe A1 X is that it almost certainly won’t be cheap and not even remotely so. The A1 Pro is $910 at Amazon so if the A1 X sports the same amount of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, then I expect it will launch at over $1,000 or more.

Whatever it costs at launch, if we get our hands on one for review, we’ll be sure to let you know whether it’s worth every cent or not.