While we missed Zotac’s booth at CES 2025, the gaming brand did have its updated Zone gaming handheld on display. Well, the prototype at least.
According to TPU, the updated Zotac Zone houses the beefier AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, a processor that we were extremely impressed with, in our review of the ASUS Zenbook S16. To recap, that’s a 12-core, 24-thread Zen5 CPU, featuring a Radeon 890M integrated graphics, complete with 16 Compute Units.
Further upgrades include up to 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM, plus an increase PCIe 4.0 storage capacity of 1TB.
That’s a massive milestone in power, considering that the current iteration of the Zotac Zone is powered by a Hawk Point Ryzen 7 8840U APU, which is an 8-core, 16-thread Zen4 CPU with an Radeon 780M GPU. Additionally, the console comes with just 16GB LPDDR5X RAM, and half the PCIe 4.0 storage capacity.
What the new Zotac Zone does retain is the 7-inch 120Hz OLED display, which is fine given that the number of gaming handhelds that can boast having such a panel is limited. Sadly, it still only has a 48.5Whr battery which is relatively small when compared with other handhelds like the ASUS ROG Ally X and or even the soon-to-be available Lenovo Legion Go S. Oh, and it uses Hall Effect joysticks and triggers.
At this point, there’s still no exact launch date for the new Zotac Zone. Hopefully, the brand would have changed its name as well.
(Source: TPU)
