First AMD Strix Halo handheld gaming PC confirmed — GPD teases Ryzen AI Max+ 395 handheld in performance video

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A lot of power in your palms. Now we nervously await pricing.

GPD WIN 5 teaser
(Image credit: GPD on X)

Portable and handheld PC stalwart GPD today teased the first AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395-powered handheld. Moreover, in a short video clip shared on X, we get to see the device in action, with someone playing Black Myth: Wukong. We don’t get a summary chart accompanying the video, but this handheld appears to run this popular game at between 170 and 212 fps for the duration of the gameplay clip.

AMD’s ‘Strix Halo’ Ryzen AI Max+ chips debuted at CES 2025, at the start of the year, with the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 being the halo product of the family. Its blend of RDNA 3.5 graphics and Zen 5 CPU cores – plus radical new memory tech, offering up to 256 GB/s bandwidth. It’s a natural for a premium handheld, but we’ve only seen rumors and suggestions of such handhelds in the making until now.

GPD’s “breaking news” post doesn’t reveal a lot about the GPD WIN 5 it is teasing. However, we can see a few interesting things straight away. The pocketable PCs specialist has chosen to show a few key stats overlaid on the gaming video: processor temperature, iGPU clock speed, CPU power consumption, and frames per second performance.

(Image credit: GPD on X)

Watching these stats, we note that, during the brief 20s or so we get to see, the processor hovers around the 65 degrees C region, which looks good for a handheld. At the same time, the ‘CPU Power’ varies between 55W and 58W. The iGPU, the Radeon 8060S, also maintains a clock speed of around 2.5 GHz. As per our intro, Black Myth: Wukong runs from between around 170 and 212fps for the duration of the clip. Admittedly, there are a lot of stats and settings missing from our view, like the graphics quality settings used.

GPD WIN 5 controls were hidden in the shadows

After grabbing the best quality video we could from the source and fiddling with levels in Photoshop, the joyvpad and buttons layout of the GPD WIN5 comes into view.

There are no big surprises in the buttons, pads, and sticks plucked from the darkness of the promo video. On the left, it looks like there is a thumb stick at the top, with a D-pad below, then three buttons and what looks like a speaker grille.

Levels adjustment reveals controls (Image credit: GPD on X)

To the right, below the typical quad action button diamond, is another thumb stick. Next to a couple of other buttons, lower down on the right, there also might be a tiny touchpad, just like the one on the Lenovo Legion GO S, for example.

The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and its brethren have previously popped up in tablets and mini PCs. Sadly, machines powered by this family of processors often come with high, even prohibitive, price tags. It may well be quite an expensive package of 4nm silicon to produce at TSMC, and the laws of supply and demand will also play a part.

Whatever the price, the processing power on tap could make the GPD WIN 5 one of the best gaming handhelds. GPD’s WIN 5 will make its public debut at ChinaJoy 2025, which kicks off on August 1. Hopefully, we’ll get a lot more details and pricing at the show.

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Mark Tyson
Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

15 Comments Comment from the forums
  • gggplaya
    Glad I held off, this would be a game changer!!!
    Reply
  • atomicWAR
    I been waiting on a pc handheld spec'd this highly. Finally something with enough performance to get me to buy one. Z2 extreme was as low as I'd go....this should be better but I suspect crap battery life. I'll wait for reviews for sure on this one.
    Reply
  • rluker5
    This same model seems heavily restrained by cooling:
    https://i.ibb.co/1G4LGQW0/GPD-WIN-STRIX-HALO-HERO-1-1536x799.jpgfrom: https://videocardz.com/newz/gpds-gaming-handheld-with-ryzen-ai-max-395-strix-halo-spotted-on-geekbenchMy 13600k/B580 living room ITX beats it by a wide margin even though the respective silicon should have worse results:
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fcada6013d244f945cd3da9ba632818f5eb7d6afd269ed21b83a4b6daf10b0e4.png?w=800&h=662And the most obvious difference is my ITX has ITX level air cooling while this thing has handheld level cooling.

    It will still be the most potent handheld currently out by a lot, it just won't get 100% out of the Strix Halo chip. It should also be a suitable lower end desktop replacement when docked and the idle temps shouldn't be unusual compared to other Ryzen desktop chiplet CPUs.
    Reply
  • gggplaya
    atomicWAR said:
    I been waiting on a pc handheld spec'd this highly. Finally something with enough performance to get me to buy one. Z2 extreme was as low as I'd go....this should be better but I suspect crap battery life. I'll wait for reviews for sure on this one.

    Yes, me too. Especially when I travel for business, I want to dock with a monitor or a tv, the performance of the current handhelds is typically at lower resolutions and quality. It's just not up to par with my standards.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    rluker5 said:
    This same model seems heavily restrained by cooling:
    https://i.ibb.co/1G4LGQW0/GPD-WIN-STRIX-HALO-HERO-1-1536x799.jpgfrom: https://videocardz.com/newz/gpds-gaming-handheld-with-ryzen-ai-max-395-strix-halo-spotted-on-geekbenchMy 13600k/B580 living room ITX beats it by a wide margin even though the respective silicon should have worse results:
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fcada6013d244f945cd3da9ba632818f5eb7d6afd269ed21b83a4b6daf10b0e4.png?w=800&h=662And the most obvious difference is my ITX has ITX level air cooling while this thing has handheld level cooling.

    It will still be the most potent handheld currently out by a lot, it just won't get 100% out of the Strix Halo chip. It should also be a suitable lower end desktop replacement when docked and the idle temps shouldn't be unusual compared to other Ryzen desktop chiplet CPUs.
    Thanks for bringing up the obvious point: 30W at most for the cooling capabilities of the handhelds, unless they improve cooling by a lot, which would make hands really warm :D

    Also, battery life... Strix Halo looks thristy. Like... THIRSTY when pushing the graph cores.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • Neilbob
    I know I'm a bit of a dinosaur, but is there really that much call for portable hand-held gaming systems such as these?

    I suppose there must be, or else they wouldn't bother manufacturing them, but still... I don't quite get it.

    Edit: then again, I'm basically tied to keyboards and mice these days, and I was never much good at the hand-held control systems. I clearly am not the target audience.
    Reply
  • kealii123
    This is going to be amazing!!!
    ...ly expensive. First $2k USD handheld .

    >Thanks for bringing up the obvious point: 30W at most for the cooling capabilities of the handhelds
    >my ITX has ITX level air cooling while this thing has handheld level cooling

    if you read the article it says its running at 55 watts, which is about the best TDP to run the chip at for maximum GPU performance. It can go higher but that only improves CPU performance (see yiHr8CQRZi4View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiHr8CQRZi4)

    If they can cool 55 watts handheld, then with an 80wh battery, standard for the newer 3rd party handhelds, you'll get a little over an hour. Realistically, with a 7" or smaller screen, you don't want/need the highest settings, resolutions, and even frame rates so running it at 30 watts will still give significant gains over existing handhelds (like double), and then save the 55 watts for when you're docked. That will give you better than PS5 graphics.


    All that being said, i also wonder if they have an active cooling dock, like those Clevo water cooled laptops...
    Reply
  • Notton
    The rumors I heard were 65W to 85W, and detachable battery pack

    So I assume they packed in more cooling where the battery would usually go, and the battery attaches... somewhere on the outside.

    7" is a small screen. I would prefer 8" to 8.8" if it's going to be heavy and I have to place it on a desk.
    Reply
  • rluker5
    kealii123 said:
    This is going to be amazing!!!
    ...ly expensive. First $2k USD handheld .

    >Thanks for bringing up the obvious point: 30W at most for the cooling capabilities of the handhelds
    >my ITX has ITX level air cooling while this thing has handheld level cooling

    if you read the article it says its running at 55 watts, which is about the best TDP to run the chip at for maximum GPU performance. It can go higher but that only improves CPU performance (see yiHr8CQRZi4View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiHr8CQRZi4)

    If they can cool 55 watts handheld, then with an 80wh battery, standard for the newer 3rd party handhelds, you'll get a little over an hour. Realistically, with a 7" or smaller screen, you don't want/need the highest settings, resolutions, and even frame rates so running it at 30 watts will still give significant gains over existing handhelds (like double), and then save the 55 watts for when you're docked. That will give you better than PS5 graphics.


    All that being said, i also wonder if they have an active cooling dock, like those Clevo water cooled laptops...
    That's a great video. My OC B580 only gets 9% more FPS (128.4) in CP2077 Steam deck settings with upscaling turned off as his 395 at 55w and I'm sure it is using a lot more power. On the other hand 55W really isn't realistic for a handheld. Some people say it is, but it is a lot sustained even in a laptop. Imagine what a phone could do with proportional cooling. And the 395 was only about 50% faster than the 370 (or 258v) at 25w and 720p native.

    It all comes down to the cooling. That 395 embedded ITX motherboard featured on this site a day or two ago should be pretty nice, but I'd wait on a review for the handheld. I'm guessing GPD leaked the Timespy score they did for the reason to check if people were ok with that level of performance.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    I think the ideal SoC power point for handhelds performance is 15-20W (~25-30W total system power) which kneecaps Strix Halo. It's certainly still going to have better performance than one of the 16CU parts, but it's only going to be 20-30% faster despite having twice the bus width and 2.5x more CUs. I'd be surprised if moving to even a 192-bit bus on one of the 16CU parts didn't accomplish the same thing. At sufficient power levels Strix Halo is around double, or more, performance of these 16CU parts.
    Reply