2 months ago
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As in any race, being behind the pack has some advantages. It means you can look at your competitors and capitalize on their mistakes before you swoop in for the win. Acer thinks its best chance to take on the Steam Deck is the Nitro Blaze. It’s coming in with a weird race car-heavy design and the most 4/20-friendly names we’ve seen for the still-burgeoning world of handheld gaming PCs. Besides the odd design, the device’s big claim to fame as a Windows 11 handheld gaming rig is the full 2 TB of SSD storage.
First, we have to talk about its look. It has a form factor like an Asus ROG Ally X crossed with a Lenovo Legion Go. It has a flat face, and a 7-inch IPS LCD touchscreen drops suddenly into the grips. Its backplate features two rounded vents that look like a car’s speed gauges. The front plate also has a number of decals that seem to be ripped out of a sports car’s dashboard, as if the “Nitro” moniker wasn’t enough to invoke the speed of a hot rod.
Both the Legion Go and Asus ROG Ally top out with the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme CPU, but Acer’s taking a slightly different tack with the Hawk Point era AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS. Specs-wise, the two chips are neck and neck. Both support the same RDNA 3 integrated graphics. The 8840HS supports up to 30 W TDP, like the Z1 Extreme. Acer also boasts the chip has 39 total TOPS for AI performance in its CPU, though I’m wracking my brain trying to find a use case for AI processing on such a small, gaming-centric machine.
Other than its CPU, the device runs on 16 GB of LPDDR5X RAM. The 7-inch display supports up to 144 Hz refresh rates and AMD FreeSync. It will be hard to beat Valve’s OLED display on its latest handheld, but at least it’s a good baseline. As for battery life, it has a 50Wh battery. It’s equivalent to the Steam Deck OLED, but it pales compared to the Ally X’s 80Wh battery.
At least this guy looks excited. Image: Acer The controls are what you expect, from the face buttons to the d-pad and left and right hall effect triggers. There’s no trackpad; strangely enough, there are no rear bumpers as you get on most other big-name PC makers’ handhelds. Instead, there’s a specific button to bring up Acer Game Space. It’s a new app like Lenovo’s Legion Space or Armoury Crate that allows users to bypass Windows and quickly access their games.
The handheld clocks in at 670 grams, or 1.4 pounds. That’s just a touch lighter than the Ally X and a little heavier than the original ROG Ally or Steam Deck OLED. It’s far lighter than the Legion Go with its attached controllers, but then again, so are most handhelds. At a little over 10 inches wide, it’s going to be slightly more compact than an Ally or Deck, which may be a point in its favor for pure portability.
Otherwise, it does have two USB-C ports and a microSD card slot on top of that whopping 2 TB of storage at the high end. My usual suggestion for somebody shopping for a handheld is to grab the minimum SSD you think you’ll need to play your games on the go, then grab a cheaper microSD card on sale for your less-intensive titles or for emulation. You usually will see 2 TB on the higher end gaming laptop or desktop configurations for gamers who want to have to uninstall a game as rarely as possible.
Acer previously told Tom’s Guide it was “watching” the gaming handheld space. That seems a little on the nose, considering the Nitro Blaze looks very comfortable without any standout features save for the bigger SSD. I’m hoping more time with its racecar design will endear me more to it, but I’m just wondering if the specs are hiding something more profound.
