A few months after announcing plans to release a handheld gaming PC powered by an AMD Renoir processor, the developers of the Aya Neo have unveiled a working prototype.

The hardware design hasn’t been completely finalized, and it’s unclear if or when mass production will begin. But thanks to a series of recent videos, we can see that the company has managed to assemble a functional handheld computer with an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U processor, Radeon Vega 6 graphics, and game controllers surrounding a touchscreen display.

Update 11/09/2020: The AYA Neo is available for pre-order in China and may be eventually become available internationally through an crowdfunding campaign. 

Aya Neo handheld gaming PC prototype

The prototype’s specs include:

Display7 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel IPS LCD
CPUAMD Ryzen 5 4500U 6-core/6-thread
GPUAMD Radeon Vega 6
RAM16GB DDR4-4266 LPDDR4X
Storage512GB PCIe NVMe
Battery47 Whr
OtherWiFi 6
Built-in game controllers
10-point multitouch
Accelerometer

The prototype features a single large cooling fan and a copper heat sink on top of the solid state drive, which do seem to do a decent job of keeping the system from overheating — in an video overview, The Phawx notes that CPU temperatures hit around 74 degrees Celsius (165 degrees Fahrenheit) under heavy load.

Meanwhile, a Chinese-language video uploaded to Bilibili shows games including Final Fantasy XV and Detroit: Become Human running at 30 frames per second or better. Sea of Thieves tends to hover closer to 40-45 frames per second, and Forza Horizon 4 hits 60 fps.

The Aya Neo is still probably months away from release. Its makers still need to finalize the PCB and controller designs. But in just a few months, the project has made a lot of progress.

Update: A new video showing a prototype of the Aya Neo running the Horizon Zero Dawn benchmark shows that it averages around 30 frames per second while the CPU consumes about 18 watts. When you factor the power consumption of the display and other components, it’s likely that you’ll get around 90 minutes of battery life while playing this game (or more for less demanding games or non-gaming tasks).

via The Phawx, TweakTown, and Aya Handheld gaming device Facebook group

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,543 other subscribers

11 replies on “Aya Neo handheld gaming PC with Ryzen 5 4500U reaches the prototype phase”

  1. Seems interesting. I’m not holding my breath but let’s see how they can go.

  2. I haven’t played a PC game in many years so are most PC games nowadays perfectly playable with gamepads? The PC games I’ve played back in the day were really designed for keyboard and mouse input.

    1. It’s the type of games. You’re still not gonna see people using controller for Starcraft, and you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage if you play Overwatch with a controller, but other styles of games (Witcher 3, Divinity 2) support controller.

  3. Nice to see another gaming PC handheld in development. Good luck to the company. Hopefully they can make it to production with well functioning device.

  4. Any word on if the controllers are wired? If so that might really get Gamevice’s legal teams attention, unfortunately.

  5. Well, I guess they’re better at making videos than GPD from a presentation point-of-view. There’s an intro with a cosplay model, background music, a pretend conversation and some jokes.

    Anyway, nice to see another company entering the handheld gaming/UMPC market. Is this a new company? Have they released products before? Wondering about the chances of this making it to retail. The engineering challenges are already big. The logistics/production challenges are probably just as difficult for a new company.

  6. For me, anything running desktop Windows 10 needs a physical keyboard and mouse even if it’s targeted mostly for gaming. If my gaming device runs Windows, I’d want to make full use of it as a PC too for the price I’m paying.

    If I were looking for a Windows 10 gaming handheld, I’d prefer the GPD Win 2 form factor. However, I’m not so I’m getting nothing.

    Good luck to this team though. This form factor with these specs seem difficult to accomplish but they seem to be pretty far along.

    1. Would be cool if this thing was just thick enough to slide into a Switch Dock

  7. Make the controller detachable and add a slide-out keyboard and I would probably get one.

Comments are closed.