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GPD’s brand-new handheld, featuring the powerhouse AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 gaming CPU, now has a release date. The GPD Win 5 is set to launch in just a few weeks, giving gamers an exciting new Steam Deck rival with a GPU more powerful, on paper, than the chip used in the PlayStation 5.
Early signs show how dominant the AMD Strix Halo processor in this GPD handheld is for gaming, with a recent GPD Win 5 teaser showing it hitting over 200fps while playing Black Myth: Wukong. The GPD Win 5 looks set to be yet another seriously powerful AMD entry into the market, and one that could easily rival the options in our best handheld guide so far.
Luckily, we won’t have much longer to find out for ourselves just how powerful this new handheld can be. The GPD website now shows the Win 5 with a release date of October 17, and while it is listed as out of stock, you can sign up for notifications to alert you when pre-orders become available.
We’re excited to see the GPD Win 5 in action ourselves, and it’s all down to that AMD chip. The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU has 16 Zen 5 cores, but it also incorporates a hugely powerful AMD Radeon 8060S GPU. That’s an RDNA 3.5 chip with 40 compute units, with GPD claiming it can reach 2.9GHz.
Put into context, the PlayStation 5’s RDNA 2 GPU only has 36 compute units, while the desktop AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT graphics card only has 32. AMD’s flagship Strix Halo chip is proving to be a powerful option for portable gaming, and we’re seeing it appear in a lot of up-and-coming handhelds, including the 12-inch OneXPlayer Super X.
We’ve also tested a lower-spec Strix Halo APU in our Asus ROG Flow Z13 review. The Flow Z13’s GPU only has 32 compute units versus the 40 offered here, but it was still able to reach 86fps on average in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p on high without relying on frame gen.
The rest of the GPD Win 5 specs look pretty decent, too. It has a 7-inch LCD display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a max 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, along with AMD FreeSync support. The GPD Win 5 has a fairly standard control layout, with Hall Effect triggers, D-Pads, capacitive joysticks, and a number of control buttons on either side.
GPD is also claiming the Win 5 to be the world’s first handheld to have a mini SSD slot, a curious new storage format for an SD card-style drive with speeds up to 1,600MB/s. The GPD Win 5 will also have “up to” 128GB of LPDDR5X RAM, along with a PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive with “up to” 4TB storage, although it’s unclear what capacity options will be on offer when it launches.
The GPD Win 5 shows how powerful handhelds are becoming compared to the OG Steam Deck, and we’ll be keen to put it to the test ourselves once it launches. You can check out our Steam Deck OLED review to see what we thought about Valve’s most recent model, while our AOKZOE A1X review showcases a powerful new Windows 11 rival.
Don’t forget to check out our best gaming laptop guide if you’re looking for something bigger to play your favorite games on without losing portability, with a list of recommendations to suit any budget.
Our Discord server is the best place to start a conversation if you’ve got some seriously strong opinions about handhelds, including whether or not this new GPD model is good enough to rival the Steam Deck.
