The Gaming Zone (or simply the Zone) is Zotac’s first-ever handheld, making its debut during Computex last year before officially launching in August, and later arriving to the local market in December. It enters a rapidly growing category, one that has seen a surge of challengers aiming to take on theSteam Deck – and in many cases, outperform it. But what sets the Zotac Zone apart is how closely it resembles what could be considered a true next-gen evolution of Valve’s handheld.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve spent a good amount of time putting the Zone through its paces – even bringing it along on travels, where it comfortably stepped in as a gaming laptop replacement. It’s the only handheld outside of Valve’s own to feature both an OLED display and dual touchpads, and that’s just the beginning. With several other firsts to its name, the Zotac Zone offers a compelling option for anyone in the market for a handheld.
With the necessary introductory stuff out of the way, let’s get on with the full review of the Zotac Gaming Zone.
What Am I Looking At?
I’m not joking when I said the Zotac Zone is the closest thing we can get to a next-gen Steam Deck. It offers an almost identical design, complete with parallel analog sticks and touchpads, though the D-Pad and face buttons are thankfully positioned lower than on Valve’s handheld.
Apart from those, you can expect the standard affair of left and right shoulder buttons and triggers on top, along with two rear buttons as well as switches to control the stiffness of the aforementioned triggers. It should also be noted that both the Zone’s analog sticks and triggers use hall effect sensors – a much appreciated feature, as this eliminates any possibility of stick drift as well as minimise dead zones.
Of course, there are also the various features that are unique to the handheld, including a wide rear kickstand and the gracious 7-inch FHD OLED touchscreen display with 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. It is also the first gaming handheld PC to feature a built-in HD webcam (located beside the top left corner of the screen) as well as a fingerprint reader. Additionally, the Zone features stereo speakers, rear RGB lighting, a microSD card slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a built-in microphone, two USB4 ports (top and bottom), as well as Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless connectivity support.
Despite its similarities to the Steam Deck, the Zone runs on Windows, which comes pre-installed out of the box. Along with it is Zotac’s own Gaming One launcher, where you can access games which you own various supported platforms (Steam, Ubisoft Connect, and so on), as well as fine tune certain settings such as display resolution and refresh rate, graphics performance and also audio.
As for hardware, unlike its competitors that feature either AMD Z series or Intel Core chips, the Zotac Zone is instead equipped with a Ryzen 7 8840U with Radeon 780M integrated graphics – a processor commonly found on laptops. Is it good or bad? Well, I’ll get to that soon enough.
What’s Good About It?
Design-wise, the Zotac Zone is ergonomically pleasing. While notably hefty, the device is still quite comfortable to hold, while most of the various buttons are easy to reach. The addition of a kickstand on its back is also excellent, opening up the option to use it as a portable media device for playing videos or music.
Since it is running on Windows, the addition of touchpads makes it more convenient to navigate throughout the platform’s interface. The right lets you move the cursor around, whereas the left functions more or less like a mouse wheel. Both are also clickable, with left and right clicks functionalities. All that said, you could technically utilise the Zone as a makeshift PC by connecting a keyboard or mouse wirelessly or through a USB Hub. It’s not the most ideal device to do work on, but hey, the option is there if you need it.
Like the OLED versions of the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch, it is proven yet again that having this particular display on a handheld device just makes the overall experience ever sweeter. In regards to the Zone, visuals look crisp and punchy thanks to the darker blacks that’s usually exhibited by OLED panels. Its 120Hz refresh rate, while lower than what some competing devices are offering, is sufficient for typical usage and gaming. The latter, of course, depends on whether a game could actually hit higher framerates with the handheld’s hardware.
Which now brings us to the next thing to discuss: Performance. Coming in blind with little to no expectation, I’m actually impressed with the Zotac Zone’s capabilities. At 800p and with Performance mode enabled, the handheld managed to maintain framerates of over 50fps for games such as Tekken 8 (Medium graphics settings), Warframe (High settings), and Helldivers 2 (Steamdeck compatible settings). Also keep in mind that all of these have FSR or first-party based dynamic resolution enabled at Balanced.
Granted, visuals won’t look its best on the Zotac Zone, especially for the more recent and hardware demanding games, but that’s a given. The whole point of getting a handheld gaming device is for its greater sense of portability and ability to bring your PC games everywhere. In other words, if high-end graphics and silky smooth performance is what you’re after, then perhaps you might want an actual gaming laptop instead.
And speaking of portability, those longing for the good ol’ PSP and 3DS days of monster hunting will be glad to know that the Zone can run Monster Hunter Wilds, though won’t be as straightforward as you’d hope. Unfortunately, the game is still not optimised for handheld gaming, and this will require you to tweak its graphics to low, setting FSR at Ultra Performance, and also running a third-party fullscreen mode enabler. Again, just to reiterate, the fault lies within the game’s optimisation and little on the handheld’s hardware. Anyway, I digress.
As far as heat generation is concerned, things do get quite hot while gaming on the Zotac Zone, though never at an alarming rate. It should be noted that its touchscreen will get warm as well during these sessions. Temperature averages between 60 to 68 degrees during these sessions, while it settles around the mid 40s when the device is idling or running regular tasks. Additionally, fan noise can be very apparent when it needs to go faster.
Next up is the device’s battery, which fares more or less on par with the competition. With the settings I mentioned earlier, each gaming session with the Zotac Zone lasts almost three hours on a single charge. This is pretty much the standard with current tech, and you can push usage even further when running less demanding games or regular tasks. To help you keep track of how much juice is left, a three-bar indicator is available on top of the device.
When plugged in, the Zone takes about over an hour via a compatible fast charger for a full topup, which is actually pretty good. Another quality-of-life feature which I appreciate is the ability to charge via either the top or bottom USB-C port.
What’s The Catch?
While I did say earlier that most of the Zone’s button layout is ergonomic, the same can’t be said for the position of its volume rockers. These are located so far in on the left side, which makes it impossible for you to reach with your finger while also holding the device. Reason being is that the fingerprint scanner is situated in between the volume rocker and left bumper button.
This is actually quite baffling, as the best solution for this design issue by simply relocating the scanner on the right side. One would assume that this flaw could have been avoided during the planning stages, but here we are.
A minor gripe, but I do find the Zone’s built-in webcam to be awkwardly positioned as well. Situated to the right of the screen, subject positioning in the frame will be off centre, which will appear weird during video calls or even live streams. On the flip side, though, you do get the option to broadcast your face directly via the handheld without needing external hardware. As for quality, I’ll be honest, there’s only so much a 1MP webcam sensor can achieve.
Then there’s the Zotac Gaming One launcher, which felt barebones, uninspired and at times, buggy. There was one occasion where it drove me up the wall, which resulted in a complete factory reset.
What triggered this unfortunate outcome is also infuriating, as all it took was me bringing up the launcher’s performance customisation screen while running a game, and then switching the settings back to default. Doing so resulted in a freeze, which then prompted me to restart the whole system, but only to be greeted with a black screen after bootup.
Any attempt to restore the system via Windows Recovery or the Zone’s BIOS only resulted in failure, so I was left with the only solution: a complete reset and fresh installation of Windows as well as Zotac software which, thankfully, is available via the latter’s website. Nevertheless, all this ended up with me clearing out all data – including screenshots of benchmark results, framerate data, and many others. In case you’re wondering why these screens aren’t included in this review, there’s your answer.
Now, I would’ve called this a complete dealbreaker for the Zone, but in fairness to Zotac, I’ll chalk it up as an early software flaw. Besides, this happened months ago when the handheld was still relatively new to the market and running an early version of its software. Zotac has since released version 2.0 of the Zotac Gaming One launcher, which not only looks better but also brings a variety of improvements—and hopefully resolves the issue too. Unfortunately, the review unit is no longer in my possession, so I can’t confirm whether the problem has been fixed.
Should I Buy It?
Despite the drawbacks mentioned above, I would still recommend the Zotac Zone to anyone in the market for a handheld gaming device—particularly those who value an OLED display, dual touchpads, fingerprint authentication, and hall effect joysticks. Personally, it ticks all the right boxes for what I want in a handheld, and then some.
Priced at RM3,899, it’s by no means an affordable device. However, this places it below competitors like the ROG Ally X and MSI Claw 8 AI+, and roughly on par with Lenovo’s two Legion Go models. All things considered, the Zotac Zone stands as a relatively competitive option in the current handheld landscape.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Telegram for more updates and breaking news.
