don't trust your eyes that is not a nintendo switch with sweet clear plastic
joy-cons in fact it's not even made by
nintendo at all that's right it's a full-blown gaming pc
in the shape of a nintendo switch it's got controller buttons joysticks and a
d-pad and based on the marketing at least it's got enough raw gaming dragon
energy to compete with real handheld consoles while carrying the weight of a
full Windows 10 installation how you might ask let me put it this way
if you saw the gpd win3 and you thought man how awesome would it be if they did
that but they went AMD i'm holding the answer
just like i hold the answer to who our sponsor is war thunder is an online
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devices like the a neo are clearly niche compared to purpose-built handheld
consoles from the likes of nintendo but as the hardware has caught up to the
idea of a handheld portable gaming pc
the popularity of these is absolutely exploding as of filming this video the
gpd win3 which is kind of the incumbent in the category has raised over 3
million us dollars on its indiegogo campaign
and why shouldn't it honestly for being hands-on it's pretty great
which means though that the neo here is going to have to be even greater in
order to stand out aya's company history is short but fascinating it was only
founded at the start of 2020 by a man we'll be calling uncle a who dreamed of
creating a truly zero compromises gaming experience that he could take with him
anywhere he ended up moving to shenzhen and despite having no obvious business
experience here he is a year later with a team of 11 people over a thousand
pre-orders for the console in china and an indiegogo that's already raised one
and a half million us dollars and we're going to have that linked below but i
wouldn't recommend clicking it just yet because all of that sounds like a pretty
unbelievable story and we haven't even tried this thing out for you yet
now under normal circumstances i like to crack open these kinds of devices to
take a look at the internal layout but what's cool is a actually saved me some
trouble by sending over one of their limited edition units with a clear
plastic shell at the heart of it we find their raptor hexacore ryzen 5 4500u with
vega 6 integrated graphics which i guess is their way of saying it
has a ryzen 5 4500u processor i don't
know where the raptor stuff comes from it's paired with 16 gigs of ddr4x memory
clocked in at 42.66 megahertz and then up here is a full-sized m.2 slot with a
one terabyte western digital sn530 NVMe SSD and over here we can see the 47 watt
hour battery now these would be pretty modest specs in a laptop
but hand-held they're a lot more impressive and really
cool on that note by the way the built-in all-copper cooler is small but
i would describe as fairly mighty we did experience thermal
throttling during heavy extended workloads but it managed to hold our 6
core CPU at over 2.8 gigahertz and without getting unpleasantly allowed
when it comes to general use the neo continues to improve aya offers a
download on their website to joyx off which allows you to use the controller
inputs for mouse control but it still falls behind the win3s hardware keyboard
that's hidden behind a sliding screen to be clear gpd's approach is not
perfect but if you've ever used the on-screen keyboard on a nintendo switch
you'll have a pretty good idea of what the experience is like on the neo where
even typing something basic like lttstore.com
such fine merchandise requires shifting your grip or reaching beyond the point
of comfort one cool quality of life improvement is the inclusion of these
two four button clusters on each side the left has xbox style start and select
keys a shortcut to Windows game bar menu and a toggle for the built-in green
lighting should turn that on while the right has the Windows and
escape keys and shortcuts to bring up task manager and the on-screen keyboard
curiously though this keyboard button summons the worthless classic Windows
on-screen keyboard so i would strongly recommend just pushing here in the
bottom right corner and getting the touch appropriate one what all this
tells me is that you could make a case for the neo as a daily driver pc it's
got three usb type-c 10 gigabit ports with displayport 1.4 built in i mean
that's better io than some decent sized laptops already
but then that argument falls apart a little bit unless you're willing to dock
it every time you want to do more than just browse youtube or netflix because
it's just not that easy to use clearly
uncle a was laser focused on building a portable gaming system
and for that you know what uncle you got a lot of things right starting
with the screen the neos 7-inch hips
panel has a peak brightness of 500 nits and resolution of just 1280x800
but you know what that's actually a really good choice here i wouldn't start
doing all my photoshop work on it but it's bright and accurate enough that
it's not distracting and it offers reasonable pixel density while being
much easier for the low powered integrated graphics to drive at its
native resolution now it's only 60 hertz but given that we're looking at a little
over an hour and a half of battery life in a moderately demanding game like
rocket league that was probably a wise choice
the biggest thing that stands out about the gaming experience though is the
screen because seven inch doesn't sound a lot bigger than the 6.2 inches of the
nintendo switch but it feels downright immersive especially
compared to the 5.5 inch display on the gpd win3 where it falls behind however
is the speakers while they're large they
did not meet my expectations and could be best described as tinny and hollow
thankfully the controller experience makes up a significant amount of this
ground they're joy-con style which means that if your hands are better described
as paws you might end up cramping after an extended play session but as someone
with smaller hands who is used to using the nintendo switch i found them
downright usable that is as long as i wasn't trying to play a racing game
unlike the win3 the neo does not have analog style trigger buttons as for
performance it's really good even though AMD's zen 2
based 4500u isn't quite enough to keep up with the 11th gen core chosen by gpd
esports games like rocket league run well enough that i would describe them
as butter smooth and as for aaa games
while aye has claimed that it can run cyberpunk should be taken with a grain
of salt the game does technically run
even if it feels extremely sluggish and definitely doesn't look its best
emulation on the other hand is frankly awesome and since we're relying on AMD
rather than Intel graphics drivers we encountered far fewer random
incompatibilities and glitches a bigger performance issue we ran into
seemed to be related to wi-fi in online matches we'd experience leg spikes and
irregularities that were resolved by plugging in a dongle and switching to a
wire so what we'd like to see before they ship this thing is maybe some
tweaks to the wi-fi antenna while they're also fixing the speakers
but there's good news because other than those two complaints if you're the kind
of person who wants a device like this in your life aya is off to an incredibly good start
here like gpd has been playing in this game for a lot longer and it does show
in the maturity of their designs but the neo is already a dangerous competitor
and i expect that the rivalry between these two is only going to heat up once
mobile ryzen chips with AMD zen3 architecture start showing up in fact i
was reading today gpd is working on a zen-based uh win max
anyway as always we won't outright recommend a crowdfunded product it's not
finished yet but at around the same price as the win3
this one is compelling enough that as i said before we're at least gonna put the
link in the description and let you decide if you want to back it just like
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up if you guys enjoyed this video and you enjoy learning about these kinds of
handheld devices we talked about it a lot go watch the video about the gpd
win3 it's also pretty sick