We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: modders have a tendency of DIY-ing the craziest things, and gaming handhelds are no exception. In that spirit, a Chinese modder by the name Qingchen DIY made their own beast of a gaming handheld by using full-fat laptop components.
The Bilibili creator basically took the following components: an Intel Core i9-14900HX, an NVIDIA RTX 4090 175W laptop GPU, 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, and a 12.5-inch IPS panel with 4K resolution. Additional hardware includes a 2TB SSD and one 50Wh battery, the latter of which may be enough for the current gaming handhelds and their AMD Ryzen APUs, but it’s clearly not going to be enough for a monster gaming handheld like this.
The chassis, or casing rather, of Qingchen DIY’s gaming handheld was from the Chinese brand, Tongfeng, and shaped it into the familiar look. For the record, if the name Tongfang sounds familiar, that’s probably because the company provides its casings for brands such as Maingear.
There is one other point to the custom gaming handheld: Qingchen DIY reused the cooling system from the Tongfang chassis, meaning that the weight is still going to be hefty, but perform well it reportedly does.
The Bilibili video they posted shows the gaming handheld being demoed, running Cyberpunk 2077, God of War and Horizon Forbidden West. That, and it is a chonker in terms of size. While running at full load, Qingchen DIY specifies that the GPU peaked at 72°C.
Qingchen DIY’s project does highlight a problem in the gaming handheld market. It’s an industry that is currently dominated by AMD and, to a smaller degree, Intel and Qualcomm, with NVIDIA nowhere in sight. Well, technically, the recently launched Nintendo Switch 2 is powered by team Green’s hardware and supports DLSS technology, but it is nowhere as powerful as the Ryzen Z1 or Z2 Series APUs.
(Source: Bilibili, Tom’s Hardware, Videocardz)
