A year ago at CES 2020 in Las Vegas, Alienware made headlines with a modular gaming PC that operated like a Nintendo Switch, with a pair of gamepads flanking a powerful Windows 10 tablet. Unfortunately, Alienware’s UFO was only a concept, just like Lenovo’s idea this year—but two companies are now taking the torch with a pair of hugely successful devices that you might possibly see in your lifetime.
The 5.5-inch GPD Win 3 and the 7-inch Aya Neo are not doing the same thing; while the Ava is attempting to fit Nintendo’s console in shape, scale, and purely gaming controls on board, the GPD sticks to its palmtop machine roots with a slide-up screen that shows a tiny backlit keyboard. There is also a fingerprint sensor, a microSD slot and an additional Thunderbolt 4 dock if you want to use the GPD as a complete Windows 10 device.
They’re both just trying to produce a versatile tablet surrounded by joysticks and buttons for under $1,000 each. With Intel’s new Tiger Lake chips and AMD’s Ryzen 4500U, each has some of the newest and best built-in graphics you can purchase, and they claim pretty decent performance is the result. —Cyberpunk 2077 is estimated to reach 30fps at Aya Neo’s 1280×800 resolution at low settings, and GPD offers a long number of examples of recent, challenging games that can be coaxed far beyond the 50fps mark with its Intel Xe graphics.
As you can see in the comparison sheet below, each features 16GB of DDR4 memory, a fast NVMe solid state drive, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0, a pair of stereo speakers, a real headphone jack, and several USB ports.