As part of the Gamescom event taking place these days in Germany, Zotac presented its first portable gaming console called Zone. The developer announced the cost of the device and also said that it will go on sale in the near future.
Image source: videocardz.com
Zotac Zone is already available for pre-order in Germany, the UK and Poland at prices of €849, £849 and PLN 3,899 respectively. The cost of the device is comparable to the price of the Asus ROG Ally X console, which sells for €899, £799 and PLN 3,899 in the same countries, respectively. According to German retailer Caseking, the Zone console will go on sale on September 12, while Polish retailers say the new product will hit the market on September 24.
The main feature of the Zone is the presence of a 7-inch AMOLED display with Full HD resolution and a refresh rate of 120 Hz. For comparison, ROG Ally X uses an IPS matrix with support for Full HD resolution and a refresh rate of 120 Hz. For performance in the Zone, the AMD Ryzen 7 8840U processor (8 cores, 16 threads) based on the Zen 4 architecture with a frequency of up to 5.1 GHz is responsible. The chip is equipped with a built-in Radeon 780M GPU based on 12 execution units with RDNA 3 architecture.
The console is equipped with 16 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and a 512 GB NVMe PCIe 4.0 drive. This is significantly less than the 24 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage that the ROG Ally X offers. The Zone is powered by a 48.5 Wh battery, while the ROG Ally has an 80 Wh battery.
Zotac’s new product has no real reviews yet, with the exception of a few videos from the Gamescom exhibition. It will be possible to understand what exactly Zone is when users can start interacting with the console software, and also test the device in real gaming sessions, which will allow them to evaluate the gadget’s autonomy, performance and AMOLED screen. At the moment, it appears that Zone is entering the market late and at too high a price.