Best handheld gaming PC in 2024

Valve has realized the full potential of its handheld with the Steam Deck OLED. The screen is bigger, brighter, and better than the original Deck in our number two spot, but the refresh is far more than meets the eye.

You get improvements to battery life for longer gaming sessions, a weight reduction for greater comfort, plus Wi-Fi for quicker downloads. The Steam Deck OLED is the best on-ramp for handheld PC gaming there is, with a few downsides. The APU inside the OLED is almost identical to the original Deck, save for efficiency, and that places the handheld significantly behind the curve in terms of power. Simply put, some triple AAA releases will be out of reach to you.

If you’re looking for a well-priced handheld with a stunning display and access to your Steam library on the go, the Steam Deck OLED is the top choice.

Read our Steam Deck OLED review.

The Steam Deck wasn’t the first handheld gaming PC, but it’s certainly been the most successful. It gives you seamless integration with Steam and a console-like experience means it can be as plug-and-play as you like – with the benefit of having a completely user-tweakable OS under the hood.

The lower-end 64GB model is now discontinued, but for now, you can still pick it up from retailers like Amazon, expand the storage, and pair it with the best Steam Deck accessories to bring it up to a usable capacity.

Titles such as Starfield, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and Remnant 2 cause the Steam Deck to misstep. Whilst we’re a little away from all major AAA releases being unplayable, the clock is ticking and you may feel you get more value if you opt for something a little newer.

The custom APU dubbed Van Gogh is still powerful enough for most games and if you mainly want to play through retro games, 2D games, sidescrollers, or emulated titles then you will be more than happy with the performance. This is still a great-value handheld gaming PC.

Read our Steam Deck review.

The amount Asus charges for its ROG Ally is a pittance compared to what smaller production-run companies such as OneXplayer, GPD or Aya Neo offer up, and whilst they cook up their own Zen 4-based handhelds, the ROG Ally stands head and shoulders above them.

The Z1 Extreme chip is enough to power most of the latest and greatest PC games, including Starfield mods designed to enhance the game’s performance.

The VRR display will greatly increase consistency when gaming too, with no screentearing. This means that you won’t have to stress about reaching a specific target like you have to with the Steam Deck. You can enhance the experience further by pairing it with the best Asus ROG Ally accessories.

Armory Crate also isn’t the best handheld interface. Going in and using it can be a little clunky at the best of times, especially in the early days. Fortunately, you can just set up Steam Big Picture mode to initiate on launch and you will essentially have a very close experience to the Steam Deck – just without precompiled shader compilations.

The souped-up hardware and great build quality land it a place in our guide. If you love playing modern titles in particular, the Asus ROG Ally’s spec put it in a position to outlast the Steam Deck.

Read our Asus ROG Ally review.

With its 8.8-inch display, the Lenovo Legion Go is the handheld for you if you want a big-screen experience. While its size naturally helps with immersion, it’s also responsive, sharp, and vivid. With a native resolution of 2560 x 1600 and a refresh rate of 144Hz, the IPS panel is about as good as it gets for an LCD handheld.

There’s some powerful hardware too. The AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme chipset makes the Legion Go one of the most powerful handhelds around, but it’s also one of the most versatile thanks to the detachable controllers and kickstand, which give you a unique experience, especially in ‘FPS Mode’.

The Legion Go does have a few flaws. It’s much heavier than its competitors, weighing in at 854g, which can make using it for long periods a bit tiring. You’ll also need to tinker with settings and resolution fairly frequently, as 1600p can be too demanding for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU in many cases, and the software can be fiddly.

Read our Lenovo Legion Go review.

The Aya Neo is a slick and svelte package that isn’t as astonishingly expensive as the other non-Valve/Asus entries on our list today. It has an excellent OLED display allowing for great contrast levels with true blacks and bright highlights making for a very vibrant and punchy image.

OLEDs have good image persistence too so there will be no visible ghosting and input delays will be kept to a minimum given the very fast response time. Its pint-like statute means it will easily be stowed away in your bag and playing it on the go is far more practical than say with the comparatively monstrous Steam Deck.

The Steam Deck’s ace up its sleeve, however, is its suspend feature which allows you to pick up from where you left off, something that is sorely missed here given how convenient the Aye Neo Air is.

Another letdown is what’s powering the device under the hood. The Ryzen 5 5560U. This unfortunately doesn’t hold a candle to the RNDA 2 and RDNA 3-derived APUs powering the rest of our roundup.

This limits the Air to less processing intense games, but that still covers a lot of ground. 2D-pixel games particularly shine on the OLED panel, for example. That may be more than enough for you – especially when combined with its smallness.

Sony’s PSP is arguably one of the best-designed pieces of tech ever conceived and it’s clear GPD is of this persuasion as it seems they took everything great about that and improved the controls and added a keyboard hidden underneath a sliding screen.

Whilst being a similar price to other handhelds, this novel construction and quality design make it our pick for the most premium handheld gaming PC. Whilst the screen doesn’t slide up that much, it makes a noticeable difference and your neck will thank you if you play it for any length of time.

The keyboard is not the most ideal typing experience but it’s surprisingly useable. It also blows the Steam Deck and ROG Ally’s touch keyboard out of the water. Powering the GPD Win Max 2 is the Ryzen 6800U, a very performant APU that will see more recent titles ticking along despite it not being the latest and greatest.

By taking inspiration from the PSP though, the controls can only be improved by so much and they are still more cramped and uncomfortable than most of the other entries in this list. It is of course rather expensive, but if you are a PSP purist, that may be a small price to pay.

While not a PC gaming handheld in the traditional sense, the Razer Edge gives you access to your PC library via cloud streaming. You can link your Game Pass, GeForce Now, and Steam accounts to stream games from anywhere and the Edge does it all with a stunning display and plenty of power to back it up.

Mobile games are also a breeze thanks to the Andriod OS, giving you the option to run games natively with its 128GB storage. When we reviewed the Razer Edge, we found the cloud streaming setup to have one notable flaw with its resolution output, but beyond that, it was a fantastic device with plenty of room to grow in the future.

Nexus is the trick that the Edge has up its sleeve, as it allows you to completely remap the button inputs to the included Razer Kishi V2 controller. You can then make these overlays disappear, leaving your gaming experience uninterrupted. This software is only for mobile titles though, as PC cloudy streaming supports the Razer Kishi V2 as though it was a standard Xbox controller.

Read our Razer Edge review.