Zotac’s next handheld gaming PC features a Linux-based operating system and a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor

Zotac entered the handheld gaming PC space last summer with the launch of the Zotac Gaming Zone. Now the company is preparing to introduce a new model.

After showing off a prototype of the next-gen Zone handheld during CES in January, Zotac says it plans to bring the latest version to Computex in Taiwan later this month. As expected, it’ll be powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor. But one surprise? It’ll run a custom Linux-based operating system.

While you might think that means this will be one of several upcoming handhelds to support Valve’s SteamOS, that’s not actually what Zotac is promising. Instead the company says the handheld will run “an all-new Manjaro Linux-based OS specifically designed for handhelds.”

We did know that Manjaro was working on a Linux distribution for handhelds. But up until now the only device that we knew about that was expected to run that operating system was the Orange Pi Neo (which has been listed as “coming soon” for well over a year at this point).

So it’s interesting to see that Zotac is working with Manjaro to bring this operating system to hardware. It’s unclear why Zotac would choose to go that route instead of partnering with Valve to add support for SteamOS, but thanks to Valve’s open source Proton software it should be possible to run many Windows games on devices running either of those Linux-based operating systems.

Zotac latest press release doesn’t include many more details about its next-gen handheld gaming PC, but there’s a picture on the company’s Computex preview page, as well as a brief description that confirms that handheld will have an OLED display.

The first-gen Zotac Gaming Zone featured an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U Hawk Point processor with an 8-core Zen 4 CPU and 12-core RDNA 3 graphics. The new model’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Strix Point processor has 12 CPU cores based on Zen 5 architecture and 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU compute cores as well as a higher-performance NPU.

In January Zotac also revealed that the handheld would have a 7 inch, 120 Hz display, LPDDR5x memory, an M.2 2280 slot with support for PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, a WiFi 6E & Bluetooth 5.2 card, and a 48.5 Wh battery. It’s also expected to have two USB4 ports, a headphone jack, and a microSD card reader.

Like the original, the new model also has dual analog sticks, dual trackpads, a D-Pad, action buttons and shoulder triggers.

More details could be revealed in the coming days.