AMD

AMD’s Strix Halo is a beefy chip with superb CPU performance (according to our testing), but I thought it was a bit too power hungry and pricey to slap into a gaming handheld. Well, me just a few days ago was a fool, as GPD has announced just that. There’s just one catch— It doesn’t really function as you’d expect a gaming handheld to.

YouTube creator The Phawx (via The Verge) has pointed out that the GPD Win 5 is packed with that chip, plus a 7-inch 120 Hz VRR display. It can come with either the AI Max 395 or 385 chip, with both sporting the same 45-75 W TDP. This TDP has largely been the problem with trying to get Strix Halo in a handheld previously, as other handhelds can operate at a very low TDP.

Higher TDP means higher battery draw and higher thermals. This means having to accommodate both with more fans and bigger batteries.

The Win 5 gets around this problem by not giving it an internal battery. Instead, there’s a backpack mountable external 80 Wh polymer lithium-ion battery. This battery reportedly gets up to 2 hours of “continuous intensive operations” according to the specs sheet sent to The Phawx. The battery is reportedly 110.76 x 110.3 x 18.1 mm in diameter.

If you don’t want to lug an extra battery around, you can instead use the 180 W power adapter and just plug it straight into a wall. This means, should you want to bring it to a cafe, you will need the device itself, plus either a separate external battery to plug into it or the power brick.

Effectively, this makes travelling with the GPD Win 5 feel a little more like the effort needed to bring a laptop, except without the larger screen and bigger keyboard that comes with it. That chip and size will really have to be worth it to justify all that effort. It is, however, worth noting that weight and price have not yet been confirmed, so specifics about the Win 5 could still change as we approach the launch of the device.

GPD says the Win 5 is due to debut at Chinajoy 2025, an expo held in Shanghai. The hardware is currently planned for release in October this year, but we don’t yet know which markets it will launch in. The Win 4 ships worldwide and is even available to buy on Amazon, but we don’t know if 5 will follow suit.

In our ROG Flow Z13 review (which houses the AI Max 390 chip), we said, “This is not the dedicated GPU killer that it’s made out to be, or was hoped to be in the lead-up to launch. It’s maybe a step on that journey for AMD, a proof of concept that discrete GPU performance is possible for an iGPU, and I do really hope it leads to better things.”

The 390 has the Radeon 8050S, and the 395 has the Radeon 8060S, so you can expect better CPU and GPU performance. We’ll have to get our hands on it to really tell, but it’ll be an uphill battle if our time with the Max 390 is anything to go off.

James is a more recent PC gaming convert, often admiring graphics cards, cases, and motherboards from afar. It was not until 2019, after just finishing a degree in law and media, that they decided to throw out the last few years of education, build their PC, and start writing about gaming instead. In that time, he has covered the latest doodads, contraptions, and gismos, and loved every second of it. Hey, it’s better than writing case briefs.