Watch out, Valve, because Ayaneo is coming for the portable crown with its new Ayaneo 3 gaming handheld. The Ayaneo 3 is not only advertised as the world’s first modular handheld, allowing for the quick swapping of face buttons, thumbsticks, and trackpads, but also comes with a 144Hz OLED or 120Hz LCD panel, both of which are 7-inch in size.
While the Steam Deck remains the best handheld gaming PC for most, Ayaneo is trying to bring power and innovation to this growing market, and potentially turn some heads away from Valve’s aging hardware.
The decision to pursue modular controls on a handheld gaming PC makes sense. This will allow players to choose their preference between symmetrical and asymmetrical thumbsticks while also offering the opportunity to fine-tune controls for specific genres. This means you can set up the Ayaneo 3 with true fighting game controls or even alter the positioning of your face buttons for accessibility reasons.
The Ayaneo 3 is going to be hard to ignore once it’s available. Not only is it bringing a brand new feature for handhelds to the market, but it’s also bringing power thanks to the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 or AMD Ryzen 7 8840U being available as APU options.
If raw power is what you’re after, the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is the option to go for as its Radeon 980M graphics chip runs on the more advanced RDNA 3.5 architecture. This APU also has 12 CPU cores and 16 GPU compute units, both of which are improvements on the Ryzen 7 8840U.
Choice is king with the Ayaneo 3, as you can also choose between LCD and OLED for your panel, as well as memory and storage options ranging from 16GB of RAM with 512GB SSD storage up to a maximum of 64GB RAM with 4TB of SSD storage. The memory used in the Ayaneo 3 is LPDDR5X running at 7500MT/s, the same that is used in the ROG Ally X.
The Ayaneo 3 is only available to pre-order in Starry Black, Sky White, and Retro power designs via Indiegogo with limited numbers of each configuration available, ranging from $699 for an entry configuration with power similar to the Steam Deck, up to $1,799 for the most powerful design. Shipping on these early bird units is expected in April 2025.
For more handheld content, you can read our Asus ROG Ally X review and Steam Deck OLED review to see how two of the leading portables match up against one another.
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