SteamOS was always supposed to be bigger than Valve’s own Steam Deck, and 2025 is the year it finally expands. Not only will Lenovo ship the first third-party SteamOS handheld this May, Valve has now revealed it will let you install a working copy of SteamOS on other handhelds even sooner than that.

Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the lead designers on the Steam Deck and SteamOS, tells me a beta for other handhelds “is slated to ship after March sometime,” and that you might discover the OS just starts working properly after that happens!

Griffais and his co-designer Lawrence Yang would not confirm which handhelds might just start working, though there are some obvious candidates: the company confirmed to us in August that it had been adding support for the Asus ROG Ally’s controls.

Also, quite a few PC gamers have also discovered that Bazzite, a fork of Valve’s Steam Deck experience that I loved testing on an Ally X and vastly preferred to Windows, also works wonderfully on the Lenovo Legion Go. There still aren’t that many handhelds out there at the end of the day, and I would think Valve would take advantage of work the Linux gaming community has already done on both.

Speaking of Bazzite, Valve seems to be flattered! “We have nothing against it,” says Yang. “It’s a great community project that delivers a lot of value to people that want a similar experience on devices right now,” says Griffais, adding later “In a lot of ways Bazzite is a good way to kind of get the latest and greatest of what we’ve been working on, and test it.”

But he says Bazzite isn’t yet in a state where a hardware manufacturer could preload it on a handheld, nor would Valve allow that. While users can freely download and install the SteamOS image onto their own devices, companies aren’t allowed to sell it or modify it, and must partner with Valve first.

There are some non-selfish reasons for that. Among other things, Griffais explains that the Lenovo Legion Go S will run the same SteamOS image as the Steam Deck itself, taking advantage of the same software updates and the same precached shaders that let games load and run more smoothly, just with added hardware compatibility tweaks. Valve wants to make sure SteamOS is a single platform, not a fragmented one.

“In general, we just want to make sure we have a good pathway to work together on things like firmware updates and you can get to things like the boot manager and the BIOS and things like that in a semi-standardized fashion, right?” says Griffais, regarding what Valve needs to see in a partnership that would officially ship SteamOS on other devices.

Valve isn’t currently partnered with any other companies beyond Lenovo to do that collaboration — Yang tells me the company is not working with GPD on official SteamOS support, despite that manufacturer’s claim.

Valve’s also not promising that whichever Windows handheld you have will necessarily run SteamOS perfectly — in a new blog post, Valve only confirms that a beta will ship before Lenovo’s Legion Go S, that it “should improve the experience on other devices,” and that users “can download and test this themselves.”

As far as other form factors, like possible SteamOS living room boxes, Valve says you might have a good experience trying that. And partnerships are a possibility there too: “if someone wants to bring that to the market and preload SteamOS on it, we’d be happy to talk to them.”

Valve wouldn’t tell me anything about the rumors that it’s developing its own Steam Controller 2, VR headset with wands, and possibly its own living room box, but did tell me that we “might expect more Steam Input compatible controllers in the future.”

Lenovo is trying an experiment. In May, it will officially become the very first company outside of Valve to ship a handheld gaming PC with the Steam Deck’s wonderfully pick-up-and-play SteamOS instead of Microsoft Windows. And at $499, it’ll be a true Steam Deck rival, joining it as one of the lower-priced PC handhelds you can buy.

That handheld will be the 1.6-pound Lenovo Legion Go S, a new and improved version of the company’s eight-inch handheld that ditches the Nintendo Switch-like detachable gamepads and kickstand for a lighter and more traditional design, with a sculpted grip that felt supremely comfortable in my hands.

It’ll also be one of the few handhelds on the market to offer a 120Hz variable refresh rate screen — a highly desirable feature that lets low-power handheld gameplay feel smooth, even if it’s not generating lots of frames. That screen will be lower in resolution at 1920 x 1200, too, and feature a hopefully power-sipping new AMD Ryzen Z2 Go chip. (It’s a Lenovo-exclusive chip, by the way.)

In other words, it might address every major complaint I had in my Legion Go review, while additionally adding fun configurable RGB lighting around the joysticks, a slightly larger 55Wh battery, a pair of levers to reduce the throw of the triggers, and a less obtrusive touchpad, too, while retaining the dual USB 4 ports.

But Lenovo isn’t going all in on SteamOS. Not only will it hedge its bets by shipping a Windows version of the Legion Go S as well but it’ll also ship with Windows this month — four months ahead of the SteamOS models. The Windows model is white:

It’s not like the SteamOS model is ready now anyhow. Valve codesigners Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais tell me they’ve only been working with Lenovo for a couple of months, and the integration isn’t quite done. The new touchpad, gyroscope, and both RGB lighting and TDP configuration options are among the things on their to-do list.

But the Windows version shipping in January will cost $729.99, with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. In May, the true experiment will begin when gamers can pick between a $499.99 SteamOS version with 16GB / 512GB, a $599.99 Windows version with 16GB / 1TB, or the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED at $399 and $549, respectively.

And it does sound like there will be one important reason to pick the Steam Deck over the Legion Go S and vice versa, because AMD’s Z2 Go is a different chip. While the Z2 Go announced yesterday sheds cores and GPU generations to be slightly more akin to the Steam Deck’s semi-custom Aerith and / or Sephiroth parts, we noted that it targets higher power levels, and Legion Go product manager Alex Zhu confirms to me that the Legion Go S is aimed at 20-watt performance, 30-watt, maybe even 40-watt configurable performance, which will likely offer higher performance (and lower battery life) than the 15-watt-and-below Steam Deck’s chip.

Zhu says Lenovo is targeting between two and 2.5 hours of battery life in demanding heavy games — which lines up with the basic math of dividing a 55 watt-hour battery by 20 watts, assuming the rest of the system doesn’t eat up a lot more. Versions with AMD’s existing Z1 Extreme chip will also be available in some markets. All Legion Go S can fit full-length M.2 2280 solid state drives.

BTW, Valve isn’t keeping key Steam Deck features like precompiled shaders to itself, or anything else, for that matter. Yang and Griffais say it will be one SteamOS, and the Legion Go S and any future SteamOS devices will get the same updates as the Deck, minus hardware-specific tweaks.

Valve tells me Lenovo is currently its only partner for a SteamOS device — there are no other third-party SteamOS devices currently in the works. But Griffais hints that Valve is close to publicly releasing a new beta of its SteamOS that just might possibly start working on other handhelds as well. (Valve previously confirmed to us that it was building toward some level of support for the Asus ROG Ally in SteamOS as well.)

And it’s vaguely possible that SteamOS beta could arrive before the SteamOS Legion Go S — Valve says it’s slated to ship sometime after March.

But the real dream is to pull a PC handheld out of a box and have it just work, the way a Nintendo Switch works, not to shoehorn an operating system on it afterward, no matter how good the result. That’s why Lenovo is working with Valve: Zhu agrees that SteamOS has the best out-of-box experience. But, he says, Windows offers a whole ecosystem of gaming and productivity that the company believes its customers still want.

Zhu agrees that SteamOS is an experiment for Lenovo and says it’ll look at the feedback and momentum before making its next move. Speaking of what’s next, Lenovo is also building a larger Legion Go 2 with detachable controllers and an 8.8-inch OLED screen, and it brought prototypes of that unit to CES:

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Zhu tells me Lenovo doesn’t have “any specific plans” to put SteamOS on the larger Legion Go, just Windows — but perhaps it depends on what customers buy in May.

Meanwhile, Valve is still looking ahead to a future version of its own Steam Deck, saying that partnering with companies like Lenovo hasn’t reduced the desire to build its own. But AMD’s Z2 isn’t the “leap” that Valve’s been waiting for, Griffais tells The Verge. There won’t be a Z2 Steam Deck.

Gaming hardware manufacturer Razer is introducing what might be its most controversial “project” yet — an “AI gaming copilot” designed to help you get better at video games. With your permission, it takes thousands of pictures of your screen, then tells you how to play a game, optimally in real time, as you continue to play.

“By analyzing millions of simulations within seconds, I’ll always have an answer to your toughest gaming challenges,” a Razer marketing video claims.

For example, watching a prerecorded video of a punishing Black Myth: Wukong boss fight, Razer’s AI assistant had all sorts of tips:

• “Get ready to dodge when his blade spins or glows with an orange tinge.”
• “Keep a close eye on his health. Once you shave off 10 to 20 percent get your dodge fingers ready.”
• “He’s going to vanish...”
• “If he grabs you, you will feel it!”

I felt weird about this almost immediately. While it could be more convenient than looking up a guide, it doesn’t credit or compensate the creators of the guides that Razer ingests in order to train its AI. It would be pretty disruptive if Ava spent time telling me that Verge sister site Polygon crafted that guide, after all!

And yet, Ava did sound pretty disruptive regardless, seemingly interrupting the game’s audio to tell the player what to do. I suppose you might only summon Ava when you need help, but it still feels like a bit of a weird fit for Razer, a company that’s long associated itself with elite gamers. (There’s also a long conversation about how “female” AI can perpetuate harmful stereotypes, but at least Razer global marketing director David Ng tells us it’ll offer other voices in the future.)

Next, we saw an actual live demo of Ava helping someone play League of Legends, acting as an AI chatbot that could help you figure out what to do and which spells and items to equip based on enhanced situational awareness of the game, API calls, guides, and even potentially historical data about the outcomes of matches played by esports teams.

Ava knows where the enemy’s champions are because it’s taking pictures of the mini-map, and it knows what you might want to use to counter them — though its answers were delayed by multiple seconds in the prototype we saw, which ran on a pair of local Nvidia RTX 4090 laptop GPUs using Meta’s Llama 3.2 LLM instead of in the cloud.

Following the match, Ava attempts to continue to act as a coach, creating replays, pointers, and feedback for you about your performance.

It’s clear that there’s a lot of work that would need to be done to make this useful, particularly if Razer wants to fulfill some of its other dreams. (It imagines Ava could help you auto-configure your computer, act as an autonomous gaming companion, and serve as a raid leader if no one wants to spend their time organizing the group.)

But unlike many of Razer’s concepts, which it never guarantees to turn into products, it seems the company is already invested in Ava and is thinking about an Ava service as a new business opportunity. It’s not waiting for feedback on the idea before it rolls out a beta, and Ng tells us it’s building out a whole team of AI developers to work on such ideas, with a planned bigger announcement at GDC in March.

The company says it’s got a patent-pending algorithm on the way it figures out how to suggest gaming tips and is working on some sort of “proprietary AI hardware” to help it run. It’s thinking about how it can beat the competition with the cloud service — because yes, there is competition for AI gaming apps that coach you to play League of Legends. I just heard about another one yesterday.

This smoky black translucent box isn’t a gaming PC — instead, it might be the most powerful single-cable portable docking station ever conceived. When you plug your laptop or handheld into the just-announced 2025 Asus XG Mobile, it promises to add the power of Nvidia’s top-flight GeForce RTX 5090 mobile chip, and up to 140 watts of electricity, and two monitors, and a USB and SD-card-reading hub, and 5Gbps ethernet simultaneously.

That’s because it’s the world’s first* Thunderbolt 5 external graphics card and one of the first Thunderbolt 5 docks, using the new 80 gigabit per second bidirectional link to do more things with a single cable than we’ve ever seen before.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

And if you’re keeping score, I’m pretty sure it’s also the first standards-based portable eGPU with an Nvidia graphics chip. While Asus’ last-gen XG Mobile also boasted up to an Nvidia 4090, you could only tap into that power with a proprietary port found only on a few Asus devices. (Its USB4 and Oculink rivals have mostly featured the AMD Radeon 7600M XT.)

None of that makes it the most powerful eGPU out there, as I currently have no performance figures from Asus, and you can definitely go further with bigger docks that can fit desktop graphics cards rather than mobile GPUs. But Asus rep Anthony Spence tells me that the Thunderbolt 5 link does give you up to 64Gbps of bandwidth for its Nvidia graphics — more than USB4 and tied with Oculink — and I’m wowed that Asus managed to fit all this and a 350W power supply (no external brick!) into a sub-2.2-pound package with a fold-out kickstand.

Asus says it’s even 25 percent lighter and 18 percent smaller than the previous proprietary model. It’s got HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 for video output and a pair of 10Gbps USB-A ports, in case you’re wondering.

Image: Asus

When it arrives later in Q1, it won’t come cheap. Spence says the top-tier XG Mobile with an RTX 5090 laptop chip will cost $2199.99 — meaning you could almost certainly cobble together a more powerful (but stationary) solution yourself. That said, Asus does plan to sell a lower-end $1,199.99 version with Nvidia’s mobile RTX 5070 Ti. Again, you’re paying for compact power here rather than maximum bang for the buck.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

While it should work with any Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 laptop or handheld, including Asus’ own ROG Ally X, you’ll likely want the still-rare Thunderbolt 5 to get the full GPU bandwidth here. Finding a Thunderbolt 5 computer that doesn’t already have a powerful discrete GPU might be tough, but perhaps some of 2025’s thin-and-light laptops will seize this opportunity to double as potent travel desktops.

*We are aware of one possible Thunderbolt 5 eGPU enclosure, to house a desktop graphics card, but that WinStar has barely even been detailed yet.

Alienware has built some of the easiest-to-open toolless gaming PCs around — but for years, the Dell-owned brand has stifled their upgrade potential by limiting them to Dell’s own proprietary power supplies and motherboards.

But the 2025 Alienware Area-51, an 80-liter tower just introduced at CES in Las Vegas, finally ditches the proprietary parts in favor of standard ATX components.

Even though the tempered glass sided chassis features fancy compartments for liquid cooling and power supplies, it’s no longer a hexagonal monster or even a proprietary tower: it’ll come with a standard power supply, standard based motherboard, and even feature standard fan mounting locations. And even though there’s a dedicated daughterboard to easily control and cable manage its lighting, fans, I/O, and power switch, Dell will offer a conversion kit to make it work with third-party motherboards.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

“With this edition, we are returning to our roots with a machine that caters to the desires of PC gaming enthusiasts and longtime Alienware fans who have a deep appreciation for technology and a can-do attitude for manually customizing their build to their needs,” writes brand manager Matt McGowan, promising “the ability to make serious upgrades for years to come.”

Why now? I asked McGowan, and his primary answer is that he’s listening to his customers. “I’m talking with customers, reading reviews, understanding what the sentiment is in the market and where things are going,” he tells The Verge, and what he’s hearing is demand for “standard mounting locations” — a demand so “loud” that Alienware decided to make a “wholesale shift” toward a fully upgradable computer.

That’s not to say there weren’t reasons to go proprietary, or that Alienware is promising to do this on every PC. In fact, Alienware built its own nonproprietary ATX motherboard for this Alienware Area-51, and the new 2025 version of its smaller Aurora (a spec bump with new Nvidia and Intel chips) will still feature proprietary motherboards and power supplies, at least for now.

McGowan says that’s because of the “leverage” Dell gets with proprietary parts.

“If you go back years and years, there was a decision to take the power supply unit and go and drive commonality between our Dell Precision products and Alienware products,” he explains. Dell got better prices that way — and, he argues, more efficient, higher-quality power supplies, too, by unifying its supply chain and taking advantage of those economies of scale.

And, he says, it allowed Dell to shrink the size of its PC cases at a time its commercial customers, in particular, valued a “form factor aggressive” chassis.

Images: Dell

So, does that mean the Alienware Aurora, the smaller and less expensive desktop that Dell is more likely to sell in volume, will get the ATX treatment, too? “We’re evaluating that for Aurora as well,” McGowan tells me, but he isn’t promising anything today. “We have to hit an inflection point ... where we apply resources to go and redesign the internals of that chassis,” he says.

But Dell would need to see the numbers add up — not just in terms of price, but the ratios of price, performance, size, and quality that would allow a new Aurora to compete.

“There’s a clear customer advantage around how much power we can put into a compact mini tower. The other [consideration] is cost related; when we get economies of scale across other Dell product and it’s something we can adopt with little impact on the gaming side, we’re going to take that and pass that savings on to the user,” he says.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

This is far from Dell’s only shift in strategy this year in an attempt to become more consumer-friendly: it’s also killing off the XPS brand for Apple-like “Pro” and “Pro Max” product lines instead, and those Pro laptops will now all feature consumer-replaceable USB-C ports in addition to user-replaceable batteries.

Alienware hasn’t shared the entry price or configuration of the Area-51 quite yet but says it’ll ship later in Q1 starting at $4,499 with a “high-end, next-gen Nvidia GPU.” The company is also announcing a pair of new Area-51 laptops.

Alienware is joining Asus, Samsung, and MSI in making a silly “world’s first” claim — all four of them are now set to launch a genuinely exciting new wave of 27-inch 4K QD-OLED gaming monitors with an excellent 240Hz refresh rate. Remember when I called Alienware’s 32-inch version the best monitor of CES last year because it finally offered the best of all worlds? Now, you’ll be able to buy a smaller 27-inch version, without a curved screen, in a far more subtle design that no longer dominates your desk.

Like competitors that are using the same Samsung panel, the Alienware AW2725Q has a technically 26-inch screen that offers 166 pixels per inch and 250 nits of typical brightness (1,000 nits of HDR at peak), while displaying 99 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut.

Unlike some competitors, though, Alienware’s G-Sync and FreeSync Premium Pro screen only offers DisplayPort 1.4 rather than DisplayPort 2.1, which could theoretically mean dealing with the occasional Display Stream Compression (DSC) hiccup to get your 4K at 240Hz. It also features a pair of HDMI 2.1 ports that offer 4K at 240 with HDR, VRR, ALLM, and eARC for Dolby Atmos passthrough. There’s no USB-C video in, but the 15-pound monitor does offer a very basic USB-A hub and a single USB-C port with 15W charging.

Image: Dell

The monitor supports Dolby Vision HDR and offers a three-year burn-in warranty — with a graphite sheet “placed between the panel layers” to help fight burn-in and image retention, plus “AI-based technology” that “actively monitors on-screen images and makes adjustments to help prevent burn-in.”

For now, the best thing it has going for it over the competition is a firm price and release window: March for $900 in the US or $1,230 CAD in Canada. (Alienware’s competitors for the 32-inch version took a good bit longer to hit the market, and I wonder if that’ll be the same this time.) The monitor will actually hit China this month and arrive in EMEA territories in April.

AMD has just officially announced its full lineup of Ryzen Z2 chips for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck, after a brief tease this fall — but as of today, it’s pretty muddy who they’re for or what they’re going to do for handheld PC gaming.

First off, although AMD told journalists in a pre-recorded briefing that Valve’s Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and Asus ROG Ally lineups would all feature the new chips, it’s not clear that’s actually true.

While we’re expecting Lenovo handhelds later this week that could come with Z2, Valve has categorically denied that a new Steam Deck will include one. “There is and will be no Z2 Steam Deck,” Valve designer Pierre-Loup Griffais posted on Bluesky today, correcting the record after VideoCardz leaked a portion of AMD’s briefing.

While that denial seems pretty clear, AMD strangely wouldn’t correct the record on Steam Deck (or ROG Ally) when we asked. The company would only say that its slide was “designed to highlight our current handheld design wins,” and that it’s not “preannouncing any partner handheld devices.” That’s not a denial. Asus won't announce a Z2 ROG Ally here at CES, rep Anthony Spence confirms to me, but couldn't comment on Asus' future plans.

It’s also not clear what the new Z2 chips can do. While AMD is promising “more performance and capabilities than prior generations” with “hours and hours of battery life,” the three chips are each built differently.

The Z2 Extreme is an intriguing mix of Zen 3 and Zen 5c CPU cores with RDNA 3.5 graphics, four more GPU cores than last-gen, and can boost 5 watts higher for a combined total of what should almost certainly be more performance than before — though AMD hasn’t provided any benches this time around.

Image: AMD

But stepping away from the Extreme, the vanilla Z2 has the same number of cores as today’s existing Z1 Extreme with the same RDNA 3 and possibly the same CPU cores, and AMD hasn’t mentioned any improvements over that chip yet. The Z2 Go has fewer CPU cores than even a vanilla Z1, and is on older RDNA 2 like the Steam Deck’s chip — but it does have 12 graphics cores, triple that of the Z1 and four more GPU cores than the Deck.

And, each of these new chips has a higher minimum TDP than the previous generation (a quoted 15 watts, up from a quoted 9 watts), which could potentially mean less battery life when you crank down the CPU’s power mode for less intensive games. (Not everyone changes power modes, though, so the TDP manufacturers ship it at may matter more; the Z1 Extreme’s sweet spot was around 15-17W TDP, while the Steam Deck’s chip nominally runs at 15W but can dip as low as 4W.)

Anyhow: it’s weird! But maybe the AMD-Lenovo-Valve-Microsoft handheld gaming event tomorrow will make things clearer.

AMD promised eventual “mobile gaming dominance” back in 2022, and it feels like we’re getting closer every day. Today, the company is announcing not one, not two, but three different families of chips designed to take it there, including final confirmation of the long-rumored “Strix Halo” and “Fire Range” laptop chips.

The former is now known as the Ryzen AI Max and Ryzen AI Max Plus, boasting the most powerful graphics AMD’s ever put in a chip, with up to 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, and a new memory interface with 256GB per second of bandwidth. AMD claims the highest-end AI Max Plus 395 has over 1.4x the graphics performance and 2.6x the 3D rendering performance of Intel’s highest-end Lunar Lake chip, the Intel Core 9 288V — and enough power to frequently beat Apple’s M4 Pro MacBook Pro.

As you can see in the chart above, not all AI Max parts are equal — but they all consume up to a monstrous 120W of power, making them most suitable for machines that’ll be plugged in and / or docked. HP will offer a Z2 Mini G1a desktop and a ZBook Ultra G1a laptop, while Asus will offer the ROG Flow Z13 gaming tablet with the new parts.

Fire Range, meanwhile, is AMD’s codename for its new HX- and X3D-series laptop parts, which don’t come with their own groundbreaking integrated GPUs but are designed to be paired with discrete ones. They do, however, contain the new version of its flagship gaming laptop chip with the 3D V-Cache that’s been so popular for boosting frame rate in AMD’s desktop chips. Previously only available in the 7945HX3D, the new 9955HX3D has the same incredible 144MB of cache, though there are a couple of lower-end parts, too:

AMD is also announcing two new X3D desktop chips today, declaring that it now has a CPU that’s “the world’s best processor for gamers and creators.” You can read more about the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D here.

Last and possibly least are AMD’s Z2 Extreme chips for handheld gaming PC competitors to the Steam Deck, which, strangely, raise the low-end TDP up to 15W from just 9W with previous-gen parts and each contain a different generation of GPU: RDNA 3.5 on the Z2 Extreme, RDNA 3 on the Z2, and RDNA 2 on the Z2 Go.

Image: AMD

AMD hasn’t yet offered any concrete idea of performance from its Fire Range or Z2 chips, or of battery life from any of these chips in its prerecorded briefing for journalists, though it did promise the Z2 will offer “more performance and capabilities than prior generations” and with “hours and hours of battery life.”

Despite comments made by former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who got ousted from the company last month, Intel will not kill off its discrete graphics business. “We are very committed to the discrete graphics market and will continue to make strategic investments in this direction,” Intel’s new co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus just told an audience in the company’s CES 2025 keynote. She says it’s a question she gets a lot.

Gelsinger was incredibly blunt on a recent earnings call that the company’s radically different Lunar Lake laptop processors were something of a failed experiment from a financial perspective, and suggested there’d be “less need” for the company’s investments in discrete graphics too: “How are we handling graphics? That is increasingly becoming large, integrated graphics capabilities, so less need for discrete graphics in the market going forward.”

But weeks later, Intel finally notched its first win in the discrete GPU space with the Intel Arc B580 graphics card, selling out of the budget gaming card most everywhere.

Now, it’s possible Holthaus’ new statement is code for “we’re retreating, but slowly and less overtly,” as her overall tone in this morning’s keynote was exceedingly upbeat despite Intel’s recent troubles. She also celebrated the Lunar Lake chip, and called 2024 “the year Intel really reasserted ourselves as the leader in this AI PC market” on its performance and battery life strengths, even though the company’s just announced Arrow Lake chips, and upcoming Panther Lake chips, are built differently.

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

(Holthaus reiterated that Panther Lake will launch in the second half of the year, and says samples are already shipping to all its major customers.)

Intel’s future “strategic investments” could also be in the AI space rather than gaming ones, similar to how AMD and Nvidia have refocused their efforts recently on the huge opportunity there.

There is at least one more gaming card coming soon, though. Holthaus says Intel will launch its next, already-announced B570 GPU this next week, a card which is even more budget than the B580.

The first time I installed Bazzite on a Windows gaming handheld, I laughed. It looked like such a blatant clone of Valve’s Steam Deck interface. Its many bugs kept me at bay.

Now, an Asus ROG Ally X running Bazzite has all but replaced the Steam Deck in my life. For the moment, it may be the best handheld your time and money can buy — because it brings 90 percent of the Deck’s ease of use to the Ally’s more powerful hardware, larger 80 watt-hour battery, and variable refresh rate screen. Depending on the game, it can even offer better performance and battery life than the very same handheld with Windows. I’ve been testing it for five months, and I’ve rarely looked back.

This combination won’t be for everyone, because the $800 Ally X costs far more than a Steam Deck, and Bazzite still has annoying quirks. But because Bazzite can so convincingly transform a Windows handheld into a true Steam Deck rival, I believe it singlehandedly proves that handheld manufacturers are making the wrong choice if they doggedly stick with Windows, and that others should join Lenovo in hedging that bet as soon as possible. Bazzite is one way — another may come as soon as next month, when we’re...

Read the full story at The Verge.

In late September, Dominik “Domtendo” Neumayer received a troubling email. He had just featured The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom in a series of videos on his YouTube channel. Now, those videos were gone.

“Some of your videos have been removed,” YouTube explained matter-of-factly. The email said that Domtendo had now received a pair of copyright strikes. He was now just one copyright strike away from losing his 17-year-old channel and the over 1.5 million subscribers he’d built up.

At least, he would have been, if Domtendo hadn’t spotted something fishy about the takedown notice — something YouTube had missed.

Domtendo had been a little bit confused right from the start; the strikes didn’t make sense. Like countless other creators, Domtendo specializes in “Let’s Play” videos, a well-established genre where streamers play through the entirety of a game on camera.

Nintendo has a complicated relationship with the fans who use its copyrighted works, infamously shutting down all sorts of unauthorized projects by sending cease-and-desists. It has gone after YouTubers, too. But both the Japanese gaming giant and the broader...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Stellar hardware from a controversial figure.

Read the full story at The Verge.

When 19-year-old Josh King suggested he would single-handedly redefine mobile gaming with his 3D-printed gamepad, drawing a direct line from himself to Steve Jobs, I have to admit I thought it was a bit much!

But it’s no longer just a 3D-printed controller. OhSnap, the company behind the excellent magnetic PopSocket alternatives I showed you in October, is now officially turning his design into the coolest looking gamepad attachment I’ve ever seen for a phone:

It’s no taller or wider than an iPhone, so it should slide into a pocket. It’s got a MagSafe pattern of magnets to attach it to your magnetic ring device. You don’t have to remove it to use your phone like a phone, because the whole gamepad retracts underneath, a little like the slide-out keyboard phones (or PlayStation Phones) of old — and now, it’s mounted on a spring-loaded arm that pops out at the push of a button and also slightly angles your device towards your face.

Video by Josh King / OhSnap

OhSnap even found room for a pair of Nintendo Switch-esque analog sticks, with drift-resistant Hall effect sensors, and pair of fold-out grips so you can (theoretically) hold it more like a full-size gamepad. The sticks are clickable buttons, and it’s got a full set of shoulder buttons and triggers as well.

Image: OhSnap

Two months ago, Retro Game Corps came away impressed with a prototype, and it seems King has been very busy since then. As he explains on YouTube, he initially tried to start his own company around the gamepad, even attracted a few investors, manufactured some boards and was working toward injection molding, before he started running out of money and reached out to OhSnap about a partnership.

Image: OhSnap

Speaking of money, we don’t have any idea how much it’ll cost, particularly at retail — OhSnap is planning to launch a Kickstarter on January 2nd to raise funds. It’s taking signups here for now.

I should be getting my own hands on a prototype next month at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, and I’ll let you know how it feels.

“The future of gaming handhelds is coming to CES ‘25 and you have a front row seat!” the email in my inbox exclaims.

Let me translate: it looks like Lenovo just tacitly confirmed it will announce its first SteamOS handheld in Las Vegas on or before January 7th, 2025. We’re expecting it to be the Steam button equipped Legion Go S that leaker Evan Blass revealed last week.

Why do I say that? The January 7th event, titled “Lenovo Legion x AMD: The Future of Gaming Handhelds,” will feature a special guest: Valve SteamOS and Steam Deck co-designer Pierre-Loup Griffais. Lenovo and AMD are calling him Valve’s “Chief Design Architect” for purposes of this event.

(Most Valve employees are simply considered designers internally, since they fluidly switch between teams and tasks; I believe Griffais once told me he prefers the same, but it’s true he’s also been one of the few public faces of SteamOS and the Steam Deck. It’s a fascinating company.)

Griffais won’t be the only intriguing choice of panelist on stage: Jason Ronald, Microsoft VP of Xbox Gaming Devices and Ecosystem will also be in attendance. He's now being introduced as Microsoft’s “VP of Next Generation."

We exclusively shared with you last week that Lenovo will revamp its larger, seemingly Windows-based Legion Go with detachable controllers, too. And we’re also expecting Lenovo to hedge its bets with a Windows version of the smaller Legion Go S based on those same leaks. It's a reasonable bet some, if not all of these devices will come with AMD’s yet-to-be-detailed Z2 Extreme chips.

Image via Evan Blass

Here’s the full description of the event:

Join us for a cocktail reception hosted by Lenovo Legion and AMD gaming leaders, with special guests Valve and other gaming industry giants. We’ll be sharing our thoughts on what lies ahead in the gaming handheld space and showcasing our latest Lenovo Legion Go innovations advanced by AMD. Come to hear how Lenovo Legion and AMD Ryzen are making gaming more immersive for all and stay to experience the future of handheld gaming firsthand!

We’re not currently expecting Microsoft to surprise with an Xbox handheld at the event, as gaming boss Phil Spencer has suggested that might be a few years away. But it’s possible that Microsoft and Lenovo will try to suggest that all handhelds are Xbox handhelds, like Microsoft does in its new “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign:

I’ll be attending, and I’ll let you know!

The US Senate has passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual defense spending bill, and it may have major consequences for the world’s largest drone company — though not necessarily the immediate ban that China’s DJI feared.

While it did not contain the full “Countering CCP Drones Act” provisions that would have quickly blocked imports of DJI products into the United States, it instead kicks off a one-year countdown until its products (and those of rival dronemaker Autel Robotics) are automatically banned.

If DJI cannot convince “an appropriate national security agency” to publicly declare that its products do not “pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States,” the act instructs the FCC to add DJI’s gear to its “covered list” under the Secure and Trusted Communication Networks Act. Not only does that list keep that gear from running on US networks, it bars the FCC from authorizing their internal radios for use in the US, effectively blocking all imports.

While none of that would keep US citizens from continuing to use their existing DJI gadgets, it wouldn’t just ban new DJI drones from import into the United States. Every DJI product with a radio or camera, like the Verge favorite DJI Osmo Pocket 3, would technically be banned. (The NDAA doesn’t specify just drones, but rather communications and video surveillance equipment.)

The text of the bill (PDF, see page 1084-1088) should theoretically prevent DJI from exploiting the loophole of whitelabeling its drones under other brand names or licensing its technology, too, as it seemed to be doing with the Anzu Robotics Raptor and Cogito Specta. The bill explicitly tells the FCC to add “any subsidiary, affiliate, or partner” and “any entity to which the named entity has a technology sharing or licensing agreement” to the covered list, too.

The bill had already passed the House of Representatives and is headed to President Biden’s desk, where it’s considered a must-sign: it would trigger a partial government shutdown if not signed, and it already passed both houses of Congress with strong bipartisan support.

So it’ll really be up to the Trump administration as to whether it wants to rescue the Chinese drone company, in the year after he takes office. Trump may not need to lift a finger if he’d prefer to see fewer DJI products in the country, so the ball’s in DJI’s court. It wouldn’t be surprising if DJI tries to get face time with Trump in the near future — like TikTok, which is more imminently facing a ban.

Even without the NDAA, DJI was already facing increased US scrutiny, reporting that its products had begun to see surprise import restrictions (allegedly over the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act), and making a conscious decision to ship fewer of them into the United States as a result. In October, it sued the US Department of Defense for labeling it a “Chinese Military Company”.

In a blog post, DJI calls it “good news” that the NDAA doesn’t explicitly ban DJI products, but says the US government is singling out Chinese drones for scrutiny, and worries about the fact that the law doesn’t specify a government agency to actually carry out the task of determining whether it poses a risk.

“This means that DJI would be prevented from launching new products in the US market through no fault of its own, but simply because no agency chose to take on the work of studying our products,” the company writes. It’s asking Congress to pick a “technically focused agency to assure the assessment is evidence-based,” and to give the company the opportunity to reply.

Last Friday, we brought you leaked dimensions of the next Nintendo Switch from the most likely source yet: a “3D scan of the actual hardware” obtained by case manufacturer Dbrand. But case manufacturers aren’t the only source of leaks.

A Redditor named “NextHandheld” claims to have seen and touched an actual final retail unit of the Nintendo Switch 2. I spoke with them, and I’ve now heard and seen enough to think they might be legit.

In particular, I’ve seen two photos of a possible Nintendo Switch 2 dock, and one photo of the inside of a possible Switch 2 controller rail, covered in certification logos and with copper contacts exposed, which also shows its metal kickstand hinge open at an angle. Notably, the dock was not included in the 3D scan that’s circulating among case manufacturers.

If NextHandheld is telling the truth, we now know a good bit more about Nintendo’s next console. For example: as much as we’d love it to be called the “Super Nintendo Switch,” it’ll likely be introduced as the Nintendo Switch 2.

Name and date

Officially, Nintendo has only called it “the successor to Nintendo Switch,” promised to formally announce the new console by March 31st, 2025, and...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Intel is having an incredibly rough year — but at long last, the company’s discrete graphics card initiative has produced a card worth celebrating. While we haven’t managed to review it ourselves due to a fluke issue, the $250 Arc B580 “Battlemage” GPU launched to nigh-universal praise, has already sold out most everywhere, and Intel tells The Verge it’s working to ship new units every week.

“Demand for Arc B580 graphics cards is high and many retailers have sold through their initial inventory. We expect weekly inventory replenishments of the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition graphics card and are working with partners to ensure a steady availability of choices in the market,” Intel spokesperson Mark Anthony Ramirez tells The Verge.

To give you an idea, here are some of the headlines we’ve seen on reviews of this card:

• “The new $249 GPU champion has arrived”
• “The first worthy budget GPU of the decade”
• “The fastest mainstream GPU”
• “A New Mainstream King”
• “Intel Fixed Its Problems”

Mind you, in some ways the B580 is a glass of ice water in GPU hell, as its primary competition — the RTX 4060 and AMD RX 7600 — utterly failed to impress last year, following years of GPU prices that were more inflated than inflation itself. (Linus Tech Tips called the $300 4060 a “wet fart of a GPU” but considers the B580 “great and affordable” now.)

While reviewers have showed the B580 doesn’t beat the 4060 and 7600 in every game, especially for gamers who still play at 1080p resolution, it does seem to pull ahead on average, the drivers seem more mature than Intel’s earlier attempts, and the lower price and generous 12GB of video RAM make it relatively easy to recommend.

If you can find one at $250, that is — which you probably can’t, because they’ve sold out so quickly. For what it’s worth, Hardware Unboxed’s Steve Walton doesn’t think this is a so-called “paper launch” where a manufacturer ships a token number of components for bragging rights instead of mass-producing a product; he said that manufacturers, retailers and distributors told him that supply of the card was “quite substantial.”

That said, AMD and Nvidia’s next GPUs are apparently right around the corner.

Newegg may restock the $250 “Limited Edition” model early next month, according to its listing, and it’s still “coming soon” at B&H. A $279 Acer model is listed as coming to Newegg in as soon as a few days. Some models started at far higher prices: you can still purchase several Gunnir variants from China at around the $400 mark.

In August, an Asus thermal engineer goofed by revealing the existence of possibly the most powerful tablet PC ever made — an Asus ROG Flow Z13 powered by an unannounced AMD “Strix Halo” chip, one boasting an incredible 80 watts of power for its GPU alone.

Now, VideoCardz is reporting that the chip (and tablet) are about to become official at CES 2025 next month — as the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395 Plus, a Zen 5 processor with Radeon 8060S graphics.

With 16 Zen 5 processor cores and an impressive 40 compute units worth of AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics, VideoCardz points out that it should be AMD’s fastest portable chip ever made — far outstripping previous chips in the graphics department in particular. (The Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 had just 16 GPU compute units — this is 2.5 times as many.)

The leaks suggest that not all AI Max / Strix Halo chips will be equal; variants tipped as the AI Max 390, AI Max 385, and AI Max 380 are expected to have as few as six CPU cores and as few as 16 RDNA graphics compute units. But online retailer leaks show the Asus tablet should offer the two highest-end parts with 40 compute units.

Otherwise, the early Asus ROG Flow Z13 leaks describe a tablet running Windows 11 on a 13.4-inch, 180Hz IPS touchscreen display, at a 16:10 aspect ratio, with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 1TB of storage.

I’m excited for what a huge leap in laptop/tablet graphics might unlock. It wasn’t that long ago that a new wave of AMD integrated graphics paved the way for the handheld PC gaming revolution.

VideoCardz writes that AMD is “set to announce” the new AI Max Plus series at CES.

Nvidia’s new RTX 50 series graphics cards are looking like more of a lock for CES 2025 than ever, with Zotac and Acer now having leaked as many as five new GPUs — ones which may also have a new AI trick up their sleeves that we’ve never seen before.

Inno3D, an Nvidia graphics card partner, says it plans to “highlight” a wide slate of Nvidia AI features at the Las Vegas show, including “Neural Rendering Capabilities” that are allegedly “Revolutionizing how graphics are processed and displayed.” HardwareLuxx spotted the news.

It’s not 100 percent clear from the company’s vague teaser if that’s a new RTX 50-series hardware feature, but it appears alongside other features that are typically attributed to the cards, like “Improved RT cores”:

Image: Inno3D

Inno3D also writes the cards will feature “Advanced DLSS technology” — perhaps we’ll see higher image quality and faster framerates than ever with a possible announce of DLSS 4.0?

As far as the cards themselves, VideoCardz struck gold seeking out online retailer leaks this week, discovering that both Acer and Zotac had accidentally confirmed the existence of both an upcoming RTX 5090 with an unprecedented 32GB of GDDR7 memory, as previously leaked, and an RTX 5080 with 16GB of the same.

But the Zotac leak goes further, suggesting that Nvidia might announce not two, not three, but as many as five new cards at CES, including the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, an RTX 5090D for China, the RTX 5070 Ti whose specs have recently continued to leak, and even a base RTX 5070.

We’re not necessarily expecting any of these new cards to aim for affordability, but one can hope. If not, an RTX 5060 Ti and a vanilla RTX 5060 are reportedly on the way, though Wccftech reports that the RTX 5060 may stick with a paltry 8GB of video memory, while the 5060 Ti may be outfitted with 16GB.

32GB of video memory isn’t the only way that the RTX 5090 might physically be a beast: an early prototype leak suggested that its massive cooler might take up four slots in a computer case. But it’s possible that was just a prototype; reliable leaker kopite7kimi stated in September that Nvidia is going for a dual-slot design instead. Just a few days ago, the same leaker suggested its power consumption may have been revised downward from 600W, too.

The most ambitious laptop ever made just got a long-promised modular upgrade. Starting today, you can pay $39 to add two extra M.2 slots to the Framework Laptop 16 — letting you potentially carry around an AI accelerator, an eGPU adapter, or a grand total of four solid state storage sticks for ludicrous capacity.

As Framework’s blog post points out, the new “Dual M.2 Adapter” is Framework’s first new modular component since launch that takes advantage of the Laptop 16’s big expansion bay around back. At launch, you only had two options: a Radeon RX 7700S discrete graphics card for extra money, or a mostly empty bay that only contained fans.

But now, you can add the Dual M.2 Adapter to that mostly empty bay to fit an additional pair of M.2 2280, 2260, 2240 or 2230 modules, with four lanes of PCIe 4.0 each, on top of the twin SSD slots (M.2 2280 and M.2 2230) that come with the laptop to begin with.

With current stick SSD capacities topping out at around 8TB (2280) and 2TB (2230) respectively, that means you can theoretically cart around 26TB of storage at once... not counting any 1TB Framework Expansion Cards you stick into the sides of the laptop, or any giant SD cards you plug into the $25 full-size SD card modules that Framework finally released this fall.

(With 2TB SD cards on the market and six expansion slots for them on the Laptop 16, I guess the actual maximum capacity of Framework’s laptop is now 38TB.)

And while those who bought the Radeon discrete GPU won’t be able to take advantage without swapping out that module, swaps are thankfully quick and easy:

In addition to the adapter, Framework has swapped out the Framework Laptop 16’s liquid metal cooling for Honeywell PTM7958 thermal paste, and will help provide that for any customer who asks; while Framework characterizes this as a change to fix possible “performance degradation over time,” I definitely encountered uncomfortable levels of heat and fan noise right away in my review and long-term tests.

Find more about Framework’s recent updates in its full blog post — like the new “Framework Mystery Boxes” tinkerers can buy to try out an assortment of random, possibly non-functional parts that users have returned to the company.