We had a chance to get close and personal with the new ZOTAC ZONE GAMING prototype at the CES 2025 show. While it is not a final product, we had a chance to see it in action as it is a working prototype and thanks to updated hardware, it should provide much higher performance compared to the ZOTAC Zone that we had a chance to review last year.

The biggest update is the 4 nm Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor. The Strix Point architecture brings 12-core/24-thread CPU (four performance and eight efficiency) based on Zen 5 architecture, 24 MB of shared L3 cache and 1 MB of L2 cache per core. It also comes with Radeon 890M, a RDNA 3.5 architecture GPU with 16 Compute Units. ZOTAC also increased the amount of LPDDR5X RAM to 32 GB and raised M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 SSD storage space to 1 TB. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 has a standard TDP of 28 W, and a configurable TDP between 15 W and 54 W, so it gives ZOTAC a lot of room to work with. It also features 50 TOPS XDNA NPU.The new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is a significant upgrade from the Hawk Point Ryzen 7 8840U in the first ZOTAC ZONE handheld, which had an 8-core/16-thread Zen 4 CCPU part and Radeon 780M GPU. Of course, the original one had 16 GB of LPDDR5X memory, and 512 GB of M.2 NVMe 2280 PCIe 4.0 storage.

ZOTAC decided to retain the same 7-inch 120 Hz OLED screen, which is not a bad thing as it already had an upper hand over other handhelds on the market since it was the only one with an OLED panel. Of course, some future handhelds, like the announced Legion Go 2 will get both an upgraded hardware in terms of Ryzen Z2 Extreme and an OLED screen.

The rest of the specifications include hall effect joysticks and triggers, 48.5 Wh battery, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, UHS-II microSD card slot, USB4 ports, and built-in kickstand. This time around ZOTAC is showing a White Edition so we might have a few different options when and if the new ZOTAC ZONE launches later this year.