The rumors turned out to be true – Zotac priced its first portable game console, Zone, at an immodest $799. For the same price you can buy, for example, the Asus ROG Ally X portable console, which is based on almost the same processor. At the same time, Ally X is distinguished by the presence of 24 GB of RAM (instead of 16 GB for the Zotac Zone), an SSD twice the size, and an almost twice as capacious battery.
Image source: Zotac
But the Zotac Zone portable console differs from the ROG Ally X in that it is equipped with an AMOLED screen. It has a diagonal of 7 inches, supports Full HD resolution, a refresh rate of 120 Hz and has a brightness of 800 cd/m2. ROG Ally X has a more modest display – a 7-inch IPS matrix with Full HD resolution, a 120 Hz refresh rate with VRR support and a brightness of 500 cd/m2.
At the heart of the Zotac Zone is an 8-core and 16-thread Ryzen 7 8840U (Hawk Point) processor based on Zen 4 architecture with a frequency of up to 5.1 GHz. ROG Ally X uses Ryzen Z1 Extreme (Phoenix) on Zen 4 architecture with almost the same characteristics except for the NPU. The chip is also equipped with a built-in Radeon 780M GPU based on 12 execution units with RDNA 3 architecture. The processor installed in the Zotac Zone features support for standard AMD drivers. And this is a definite plus, since regular drivers are not suitable for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme and special OEM versions of drivers (that is, provided by Asus) are required.
Zotac also says that Zone will have support for AMD Fluid Motion Frames and FidelityFX Super Resolution image upscaling technologies. For comparison, ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go consoles do not support these technologies.
Zotac Zone received 16 GB of LPDDR5X-7500 RAM and a 512 GB NVMe PCIe 4.0 drive. The console is also equipped with a slot for reading UHS-II microSD memory cards. In offline mode, the device runs on a 48.5 Wh battery. ROG Ally X has an 80 Wh battery.
The Zotac Zone console features Hall effect triggers, two touchpads and two USB4 ports. There is support for Wi-Fi 6E and BT 5.2. The new product runs Windows 11 Home.
The device is available for pre-order. The manufacturer announced that open sales will begin with the opening of the Gamescom gaming exhibition, that is, in two days.