Acer competes with Steam Deck
Acer has taken a surprisingly long time, but now this PC manufacturer is also entering the market for portable gaming PCs in the format of a Valve Steam Deck. Like Lenovo, ASUS & Co, the company is also relying on a mixture of an AMD platform and Windows 11. Acer
Seven inches should be enough
The Taiwanese PC manufacturer Acer announced the Acer Nitro Blaze 7 at the IFA 2024 in Berlin. This is a handheld gaming PC with a seven-inch display with an IPS panel and touchscreen that offers a dynamic refresh rate of 144 Hertz and supports AMD FreeSync Premium. The resolution of 1920×1080 pixels is exactly at Full HD level. Inside the new handheld from Acer, which of course comes with Windows 11 and is therefore primarily advertised as a platform for playing games via Microsoft’s PC Game Pass, there is well-known AMD technology.
The AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS is installed, i.e. an APU manufactured on a 4nm scale with eight CPU cores with speeds of up to 3.3 gigahertz (5.1 GHz maximum turbo clock) and an AMD Radeon 780M graphics unit. The chip normally operates with a power dissipation of up to 28 watts.
50 watt-hour battery but double cooling
Acer combines the AMD chip with 16 gigabytes of LPDDR5X-7500 RAM, which are soldered onto the mainboard. Depending on the configuration, the Acer Nitro Blaze 7 can be ordered with up to two terabytes of PCIe Gen4 SSDs. The built-in battery has a capacity of just over 50 watt hours. Given the 80 watt hours in the ASUS ROG Ally X, there seems to be a need for improvement here at launch. At least Acer boasts more efficient cooling thanks to two fans and corresponding inlets.
Acer has of course given the Nitro Blaze 7 the usual game controller controls for console-sized devices, including two Xbox-style joysticks, a D-pad and the usual ABXY buttons, as well as a few option buttons around the display. The case also has a MicroSD card slot for memory expansion and two USB 4-compatible Type-C ports for power supply and connecting peripherals.
To ensure that Windows 11, with its interface that is still largely unsuitable for such small screens, does not become a hurdle for buyers of the Acer Nitro Blaze 7, Acer also installs its own launcher called Game Space, which can be used to access most gaming platforms. Acer has not yet announced a price or a date for the market launch of the device.
Given the flood of portable gaming PCs in a small format, I ask myself the question: is there any interest in such products other than the Valve Steam Deck? Have you already had some initial experience with them? What advantages do you see over the Steam Deck? And above all: what are the quirks? Are the devices with their 7 or 8 inch screens even useful for use under Windows 11?
