Save Your Money: A new portable console that’s twice as powerful as the Steam Deck is coming this year

news hardware Save Your Money: A new portable console that’s twice as powerful as the Steam Deck is coming this year

Aya Neo is one of the few Chinese companies specializing in “portable consoles/PC”. Powerful machines capable of running AAA in 720p at a very decent level of performance. We were recently able to test the Aya Neo Next, a kind of premium “Steam Deck” that sells twice as much but has the advantage of running directly under Windows. We are therefore not limited to the Steam catalogue: you have the games from Game Pass PC, the Epic Game Store or Battle.net.

The Aya Neo Air, lighter than a switch

But Aya Neo doesn’t want to stop there and expand its offer. The company recently announced the Aya Neo Air, a console in a more compact format and equipped with an OLED screen. Less powerful than the Next, it’s still said to allow AAA to boot in “Low” and 720p, but is primarily intended for lovers of independent games.

Aya Neo 2 and Aya Neo Slide: unrivaled power?

The real performance upgrade comes a little later in the year and takes the form of two models: Aya Neo 2 and Aya Neo Slide. They will be the first to be equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U APU (CPU + graphics chip) under Zen+ architecture. 8 physical cores, a frequency of up to 4.7 GHz… and most importantly, a Radeon 680M iGPU. The latter theoretically offers 3.38 teraflops of raw performance under the RDNA2 architecture, more than double the Steam deck, which is capped at 1.6 teraflops.

Two consoles twice as powerful as the Steam Deck that should allow you to play on a small screen in good conditions. It remains to be seen how this type of chip will affect autonomy. We know: this is not the strength of this type of portable console and we often limit ourselves to 2 hours for a somewhat greedy game.

An integrated keyboard on the Aya Neo Slide

On the design side, the Aya Neo Slide has the particularity of having a “physical” keyboard hidden under the screen. Just slide it up to access it. A very good concept that is reminiscent of a competing product: the GPD Win 3.

The Aya Neo 2 retains a more classic design, similar to that of the Aya Neo Next. We will therefore find two asymmetrical analog sticks, triggers and buttons on the front… Whether the format will be the same remains to be seen. As a reminder, the Aya Neo Next is halfway between a Nintendo Switch and a Steam deck in terms of size.

Price and release date of Aya Neo 2 and Aya Neo Slide

Aya Neo didn’t name a price or a specific release date for these two new machines, but did confirm they will be released “later in the year”. On the price side, we have to reckon with a retail price equal to or slightly higher than the Aya Neo Next, which already costs more than $1400.

Visit the Ayaneo Store on Amazon

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