This is the world's first liquid cooling
compatible 8 in gaming handheld. It's the 1X Player Apex. And you might be
asking, liquid cooling? That's a little bit overkill, guys. Let's just calm down
a little bit. But it's for good reason because this is one of the very few
handhelds on the market that are packing the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 aka Stricks
Halo aka the most powerful gaming chip
you can get in a handheld that's available right now. One of the challenges that handheld makers have had
to deal with when thinking about how to have the Stricks Halo unified memory
chip with Radeon 860S graphics. How do
we put that into a handheld and extract the amount of performance that we want
to get without making it burst into flames? And the answer that 1x player
came up with is liquid cooling. So, there are three or four ways I guess
that you can use this thing. One is plugged in with the AC adapter. Number
two is with the external mountable battery pack. It's 85 watt hours and it
just clips right on there. It's got a built-in kickstand and everything.
Number three is another 85watt hour external battery pack, but it doesn't
clip right on. It connects via cable, so you can just have it sitting on a desk
or something. And the fourth way that you can use the
Apex is by plugging it into 1X Player's Frostbay liquid cooling module. Now,
when you're running off the external battery, that's going to give you 55
watt TDP. When you plug it in via the dedicated plug or by the USBC 4 port,
you can run it at 80 watts TDP. When you plug it into Frost Bay, you're going to
be able to run this thing up to 120 watts TDP. The amount of performance,
it's a little exciting. It's pretty cool. Power supply mode changed to
battery power. So, this is the Frost Bay liquid cooling module. Right now, it's
plugged into the Super X laptop 2in1
that is actually running the exact same chip, the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 stricks
Halo. Now, 1X Player doesn't have the connector for the Apex here at CES, but
they do have it connected into here. So, we can see what it looks like there.
There's liquid going in and out. You will still need to plug in the power
connector in order to get that extra juice because this thing, as I said, can
go up to 120 watts. As you can see, this thing is running at that DDP right now.
So, if you are interested in liquid cooling, you will have to choose the
version of the Apex that you buy. There will be a version that does not work
with the liquid cooling and then there will be another version that does. It
makes sense that you would need a different version if you're going to inject liquid in there. Some handhelds
just aren't ready for that. OneX player says that if you order the liquid cooling version of the Apex, it should
be shipping out by the end of this month. So, other than the liquid cooling
shenanigans, what does this thing feel like as like a normal gaming handheld
when it wants to try and act like a normie? Well, we're going to find out,
trust me, after this message from Dbrand, our sponsor. I don't know if you guys heard, but our CS sponsors keep
dropping out. What's the deal? What's What do we What did we do? Luckily,
Dbrand has unconditional love for us, and they're always there to pop in and
sponsor our CS coverage. We love them so much. especially because they make
really cool skins, cases, screen protectors, and other things. Cases for
handhelds like this. You should check them out probably and send them a
message on Twitter saying how much you appreciate them and go to one of their
fun new URLs like emergencysponsor.com.
You get it? So, we're dealing with an 8 in display, 1920 x 1200 resolution at
120 hertz, 16x10 aspect ratio. Nice and
big. It feels nice and big. I could get lost in here. Colors look good. Doesn't
look washed out. Nice and sharp. I'm I'm in trouble. They're going to arrest me.
We also have two capacitive joysticks. So, that's really nice to see. A back
button over there, start button, D-pad. They've got a button there to call up
Windows game bar. They got their one X button here. A single tap will open up
their performance overlay. And a long press will open up the 1X player
library. And then it's kind of like a Steam OS style, you know, library
aggregator. So, you can see get to all your games in one place. And then you got your face buttons here which are
have a have a very detectable click.
>> Yeah. >> You can hear that, Andrew?
>> Wow. >> technology. That's what CES is all
about. But on the back, it gets a little more interesting. We got customizable
paddles here, as well as some toggles to
switch between two different travel modes for the main triggers. Right now,
I'm in short travel mode. Good for FPS players. They're going to want that
short travel just to get to the activation quicker or you can slide it
up and have a longer travel with more of kind of like a gradual
ease into it, you know, take it easy. We got nice long shoulder buttons here and
they had that on the website and I was kind of like, okay. But they are long.
Look at that. Perfect for my fingers. And we can't forget the IO. So, we got a
3.5 mil headphone jack up here, a fingerprint sensor, power button, nice
volume rocker, USB 3.2 2 a port, power
plug, and a USB 4 port, which can also be used to charge it, as well as connect
to accessories like 1x Player's external GPU dock. And while we're here, we got
two vents here for ventilation. And I can feel I can feel the heat coming out
of it. I could dry my hair with this. This thing's working hard. Stricks Halo
works all day. On the bottom, we got another USBC port, this time USB 3.2,
two, as well as a micro SD card slot that does support up to 2 terb of
additional storage. And then over here, we got a mini SSD uh slot. So, that's a
newer form factor that you're seeing in some handhelds. I think BWIN is the
company that's kind of pushing that forward, but it's a it's a new SSD form
factor, and that will also support up to 2 TB of storage. Now, inside there's
also an M.2 SSD. You can get it with 1 TB or 2 TB of storage and that comes
with Windows installed on it by default, but 1X player told me you can install
Steam OS on one of these other storage options and then dual boot if that's,
you know, what you're into. I'm cool with it. Down here, we also got
dual speakers that are Harmon certified.
Oh, and not to mention that when you take the battery off, you can see the
dual fans in the back. It's sucking in air there and shooting it out the top.
Now, as you would expect for a handheld that requires, you know, either to be
plugged in or have a hefty external battery on it, it's got a little bit
more weight to it than some other handhelds on the market that have a built-in battery, but, you know, it's
not it's not ridiculously heavy. You know, I feel like it your arms might
start to complain if you were like holding it at a kind of an angle like this for a while, but overall it's
comfy. My my hand kind of curls around it nicely. I don't feel like I'm uh
using a a handheld for giants like I normally do. So, the base model of the
1X Player Apex comes equipped with 32 gigs of unified RAM across the CPU and
GPU and 1 TB of onboard storage, but you
can get up to 128 gigs of unified memory and 2 TB of onboard storage on that M.2
SSD. The 1X Player Apex starts at >> $1,700 and it comes with an external
battery and then it'll be another $260 for the liquid cooled version that comes
with the Frostbay module itself. Now, yeah, that's a little steep, but this is
the most powerful handheld on the market right now. And have you seen our other
videos covering CES on ShortCircuit? You should probably check those out and
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