Display and Audio

In short, the screen found on the Zone is fantastic. It's an OLED panel with a max brightness of 800 nits, instantaneous response time like all OLED displays offer, great HDR once you tweak the gamma, and a 120 Hz refresh rate.

The only downside here is the lack of Variable Refresh Rate (VRR). This isn't noticeable when playing 3D games, especially fast-paced ones, but the vertical screen tearing (the screen is a native portrait panel) is very prominent when playing most 2D titles. It's like there's an invisible line that causes screen elements to vibrate/wobble when it comes into contact with them. The only 2D title in which I didn't notice vertical screen tearing was Hollow Knight, most likely because the art in the game is pretty dark and without much color variation.

Turning on HDR blows up the gamma and makes everything washed out, and you have two ways to remedy the issue. The first is to tweak brightness and contrast in Radeon software, which can result in an okayish HDR image quality, but there's a better way.

All you've got to do is download a third-party app that allows you to adjust gamma (Radeon software hasn't included the gamma adjusting option for a while now). We used Gamma Manager. Next, run the Windows HDR calibration app and set the max brightness to 800 to match the screen's maximum brightness. Then, run the Windows display color calibration tool, open the "adjust gamma" screen, and then tweak the gamma with the Gamma Manager app until the small dots in the center of the circles are invisible. Finally, adjust the contrast and color saturation to your liking in Radeon software.


If you've nailed the gamma calibration, the result should be a striking HDR image that's bright, with luscious, well-saturated colors and an excellent level of detail in dark areas and shadows. Playing Forza Horizon 4 and 5 in HDR was a phenomenal experience, as was watching HDR videos on YouTube. Even games in which you can use HDR only via the Auto HDR Windows 11 feature looked great even though you cannot adjust the HDR Intensity slider in Windows 11 Game Bar, which is unfortunate.

The good news is that the games I played looked stunning even in SDR. The max brightness in SDR is pretty high, and while colors are oversaturated with default settings, you can tweak color saturation in Radeon software to your liking. Personally, I think HDR is clearly the better option when gaming on the Zone, but SDR doesn't look too shabby, either.

As for the speakers, they're average at best, the bottom-firing design makes their sound discernibly muffled, without much bass and with an average sound fidelity. At least they're plenty loud at max volume. As for their channel separation, it's a far cry from the impressive stereo image created by ROG Ally's speakers, which remain the best I've ever heard on a handheld PC.