No gaming handheld could challenge the Steam Deck both in terms of price and finance And performance, and this series is expected to continue with the Zotac Zone Price now confirmed at $799.
Time will tell if the Zotac Zone can make a name for itself as one of the best portable gaming PCs, but launching at the same price as the Asus ROG Ally X is far from ideal. Asus already had some interest in gaming and a great brand reputation before the Ally was released. Zotac, on the other hand, is starting from scratch in this market.
For many, it doesn’t matter that the Zotac Zone comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U APU or a 1080p, 120Hz AMOLED display. All they see is the astronomical $799 price tag and perhaps the Windows operating system, both of which are major criticisms.
Just last week, Valve announced that SteamOS is being prepared for launch on the Asus ROG Ally, a bold move that has generated a lot of interest in the upcoming Asus handheld. This is only bad news for the Zone, as it will lag behind due to its operating system.
Ignoring the Steam Deck’s much more attractive price for the LCD and OLED models, the Asus ROG Ally X, which also costs $799, poses a big problem for the Zotac Zone. Both have similar APU performance with eight cores and 16 threads at up to 5.1 GHz and work with AMD’s Zen4 and RDNA 3 architecture.
When you consider that the Zone has a much smaller battery (48.5Wh compared to 80Wh) and only 16GB of LPDDR5X-7500 RAM versus the 24GB in the Ally X, the Zone’s $799 price tag becomes even more puzzling. The only major unique feature the Zone still has is its AMOLED display, but it’s hard to say at this point if that’s worth the price parity with Asus.
We were incredibly impressed with this new handheld when we got to try it out as part of our Zotac Zone preview, but despite its impressive performance, this pricing decision may be too high in an already highly competitive market.
When the Zotac Zone launches, you can check out our list of the best Steam Deck games to find titles that run great on handheld devices. You can also follow all of our Gamescom coverage of the latest gaming and tech reveals live from Germany.
