ZOTAC Shows New ZONE GAMING Handheld Prototype with AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 at CES 2025

We had a chance to take a closer look at the new ZOTAC ZONE GAMING prototype at CES 2025. While it’s not the final product, we had a chance to see it in action as it’s a working prototype and with updated hardware it should deliver much faster performance across compared to The ZOTAC zone we were able to review last year.

The biggest upgrade is the 4nm Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor. The Strix Point architecture includes a 12-core/24-thread (four performance and eight efficiency) CPU based on the Zen 5 architecture, 24 MB of shared L3 cache and 1 MB L2 cache per core. It also features a Radeon 890M, an RDNA 3.5 architecture GPU and 16 compute units. ZOTAC has also increased the LPDDR5X RAM to 32GB and increased the M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 SSD storage capacity to 1TB. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 has a standard TDP of 28W and a custom TDP from 15W to 54W, giving ZOTAC plenty to work with. It is also equipped with 50 TOPS XDNA NPU.

The new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 represents a significant upgrade over the Hawk Point Ryzen 7 8840U in the first ZOTAC ZONE handheld, which had an 8-core/16-thread Zen 4 CCPU and Radeon 780M GPU. Of course, the original had 16GB of LPDDR5X memory and 512GB of M.2 NVMe 2280 PCIe 4.0 storage.

ZOTAC decided to keep the same 7-inch 120Hz OLED screen, which isn’t a bad thing since it already had an edge over other portables on the market since it was the only one with an OLED panel. Of course, some future laptops, like the announced Legion Go 2, will feature both upgraded hardware in the form of the Ryzen Z2 Extreme and an OLED screen.

Other specs include Hall effect joysticks and triggers, a 48.5Wh battery, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, a microSD UHS-II card slot, USB4 ports, and a built-in kickstand. This time around, ZOTAC is showing off the White Edition, so we could have a few different options when and if the new ZOTAC ZONE releases later this year.