Does anyone on TPU have any of these small handheld PCs besides the steamdeck. I know some people who have the steamdeck and love it. But it seems at this point its getting over saturated.

A&P211Does anyone on TPU have any of these small handheld PCs besides the steamdeck. I know some people who have the steamdeck and love it. But it seems at this point its getting over saturated.

I currently have 3 Steam Decks (2 LCDs, one of them on Windows, 1 OLED on SteamOS), the ROG Ally and the Legion Go.

The Legion Go and ROG Ally are currently match-for-match in performance with their latest respective updates. I can get better battery life on the Legion Go because it's latest BIOS allows disabling (not just parking) up to 4 cores to make it Aerith-like (4C/8T/8CUs) but with 12 CUs. ROG Ally has a "smoother" screen due to FreeSync, but the non-FreeSync screen on the Go is not that noticable unless you have a lot of framedrops.

While these things are neat, I *personally* don't see them fitting into my life until low-power chips evolve further; probably something N3P-based (or similar from a different foundry), as that will the mainstream node once Apple moves to TSMC 2nm. So think 2026ish, maybe 2027.

I'd like to see something like a 6-core Zen(6?)c with 2 RDNA5 SE chiplets (perhaps ~960sp/1920sp per chiplet, depending on how you define AMD's architecture?) with power-efficient clocks.

In theory, that GPU grunt could move something like the steam deck from ~720p30->~1080p60 (or whatever analogy you want to make), and something like a 6-core AMD chip at that point would *probably* be enough for most games, as by that time we'll probably have a >50% IPC increase from Zen 2. We'll probably get that from Zen 5, but I think waiting for Zen 6/3nm for the power savings/perf improvements will be worth it and it would be nice to cut out those 2 cores for power if IPC/power-efficient clocks will allow.

By that time a 1080p/120hz VRR OLED display also shouldn't be too much of an ask because there will be more (and more established) players/options in that corner of the display market; proliferation.

As for right now, I don't understand why none of them incorporate a 900p screen. I know it's not the *biggest* deal bc upscaling, and ofc most non-gaming content scales from 720/1080p, but, you know, battery life and decent performance (as imo you don't *really* need 1080p on a 6-7inch screen, but above 720p would be nice). I suppose that would be a special order as opposed to a 720p/800 or 1080p screen that may be cheaper simply because they're more common and more readily-made.

At any rate, the future is bright for these things (at least as a niche) imo, but we're still a couple years off them being what I *think* most people want them to be if they plan on investing in one unit for 2-4 years and using it as something truly akin to a portable option for cross-save/play from their home pc/console experience. That is not to say what they already can do (often emulation/older titles) isn't cool/useful.
If you're an early adopter (like the amigo above) though, that's very cool. I appreciate you building the ecosystem for the rest of us and hope you are enjoying it/them for what they are. :toast:

Legion Go here.
I'm coming from PC, not expecting console-like experience (so not using Legion Space) and I'm happy it is a Windows-based, extremely portable PC when 'docked'.

I think we definitely need more competition and more diversity in PC gaming handhelds.
Competition keeps features being added, shared if possible (say, kind of feature parity), prices in check, good enough performance and usability.
Diversity means we get to choose if we want: separable controllers (Go), touchpad (Go, SD), light weight (Ally, Claw?), bigger screen (Go), high/low resolution, ports, fingerprint reader (Ally), etc.
Current generation of handhelds still needs some TLC from manufacturers (usability and features of overlays) and CPU/platform providers (BIOS, drivers, battery life at idle or playing video).

I have a ROG Ally and have been pretty pleased with it across the board. I like the weight of it and the VRR display is a pretty big advantage over everyone else when playing more modern titles. MSI using hall effect sticks and triggers is a great feature (assuming it stays that way for launch), but that's the only feature I'd like to see standardized across the market that the Ally doesn't already have. Oh and all of the handhelds should really have at least 24GB DRAM as it would be ideal to allocate an 8/16 GPU/system split.

I think the biggest problem with the Ally (which also impacts every other handheld) is the lack of easy fine tuned control over the CPU. Shouldn't need to use third party software to cut off things like SMT, or handle active core control. Stock behavior also emphasizes CPU boosting over GPU which I think is why they added in the ability to toggle CPU boost. I'm really curious what sort of impact Qualcomm may end up having in this space assuming they have any interest. I don't think I'll be looking for an upgrade until there's a significant improvement in performance.

Software I assume is always going to be evolving so not much to say there other than I hope it continues.

So the current Claw is going to get zero support down the road. Message received MSI.