Portable handheld gaming PCs are one of my favourite recent offshoots of PC gaming. It's been a delight to watch all these Switch-styled devices crop up with their cute plastic shells hiding often beastly gamer interiors. The downside is while we are seeing more of these Steam Deck competitors around, we're also seeing relatively limited options with new Nvidia powered machines nowhere to be seen. That is until one ingenious modder decided to build one of their own.
VideoCardz spotted Qingchen DIY's Nvidia powered creation over on the Chinese forums Bilibili. The astonishing lime green device resembles something between a Steam Deck and a tablet with controllers built into the sides. At the centre is the 12.5 inch IPS 4K panel, which gives the impression that you're basically holding a laptop screen, because that's actually pretty true.
To achieve this high-end portable green machine, it looks like Qingchen DIY took an Nvidia gaming laptop and crammed it into a tablet form. The conversion means the laptop's mainboard and cooling are likely still in place, allowing the Core i9 14900HX CPU and GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU to run some gaming magic inside what looks like a Tongfang chassis. It's also rocking 64 GB of upgradable DDR5 RAM and a 2 TB hard drive.
We can see this hardware running God of War, Cyberpunk, and Horizon Forbidden West at 4K resolutions in the video Qingcheng DIY posted to Billibilli. Gameplay looks smooth and easy, though I can't help but wonder how comfortable it would be to hold. The sheer size of it looks unwieldy and my wrists hurt looking at it. I guess that's also fairly likely when you're forcing a laptop into half its original form.
The conversion design made some things, like the general build easier but has also brought its own challenges. Much like a laptop, it requires an external power source to run at full power, and only has a built-in 50 Wh battery. It also looks like it's running Windows, which we've found to be quite lacking compared to native Steam OS in cases like the Lenovo Legion Go, so that could be another downside. Still, with the right know-how I'm sure these ideas could be applied to a different operating system.
For now, this green-team-powered-green-machine is the only one of its kind. If you're after an Nvidia powered handheld, this kind of DIY method really is one of the easiest options available to you. Though, you might want to wait for the Nvidia to drop its next round of hopefully more power efficient laptop cards before you get started on that build.
1. Best overall:
Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS ed.
2. Best budget:
Steam Deck
3. Best Windows:
MSI Claw 8 AI+
4. Best big screen:
Lenovo Legion Go
5. Best compact:
Ayaneo Flip DS
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