GPD Win 5 handheld soars with AMD's Strix Halo — gaming deck is almost twice as fast as Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 competitors at same power

More content creators are getting their hands on GPD's incredibly potent Win 5 handheld gaming PC, sporting AMD's flagship Strix Halo APU. YouTube hardware tester The Phawx has turned in his initial impressions of the handheld, particularly against competing AMD handhelds with more "conventional" hardware. He found the GPD Win 5 is up to twice as fast as competing Ryzen AI 9 HX 370-powered handhelds while consuming the same amount of power (at 25W to 35W TDP).

The Phawx provided a limited benchmark comparison between the flagship Ryzen AI Max 395+-powered GPD Win 5 and a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370-powered handheld system. In these comparisons, the GPD Win 5 shows an astonishing amount of performance headroom thanks to the RTX 4060-class GPU on the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 SoC.

In Returnal, the GPD Win 5 ran at nearly twice the framerate as the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 handheld The Phawx was using for these tests with both systems running at the same 25-watt power limit. The GPD Win 5 produced about 80 FPS, and the HX 370-powered handheld ran at around 45 FPS.

In Doom: The Dark Ages; the GPD Win 5 ran at 56 FPS, and the HX 370-powered handheld turned out 31 FPS. The cherry on top is that the GPD Win 5 was running at higher graphical fidelity using FSR Quality upscaling instead of FSR Balanced on the HX 370 handheld.

Furthermore, the Strix Halo 395+ offers even greater performance margins at higher power limits, thanks to its impressive specifications. According to these tests, the GPD Win 5's implementation of the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 only starts hitting diminishing performance returns at 40 watts or greater. By contrast, HX 370-handhelds start producing diminishing performance returns at 18 watts or greater.

In God of War: Ragnarok, The Phawx reports that the GPD Win 5 runs at around 85 FPS at 25 watts, and the HX 370-powered handheld 67 FPS at the same power limit. However, bumping up the power limit to 70 watts on the GPD Win 5 produces a colossal jump all the way up to 176 FPS.

The only caveat with the GPD Win 5's monstrous APU is that it doesn't behave well at ultra-low power limits. Below 25 watts, the Win 5's Strix Halo APU reportedly produces performance results that are barely any better than the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. This performance behavior also extends to CPU-bound titles, since both CPUs take advantage of the same Zen 5 CPU architecture.

Still, these initial tests demonstrate the sheer power Strix Halo can offer when squeezed inside of a handheld gaming PC. Strix Halo wasn't designed to be a handheld gaming chip; it's more commonly seen in laptops and mini-PCs. Its massive 442mm² die sports 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and an RDNA 3.5 GPU with as many compute units as a PS5 (40 CUs in all). Somehow, GPD was able to figure out a way to fit this monstrous chip inside of its Win 5 handheld without sacrificing comfort or usability.

Once it hits the market, the GPD Win 5 will likely be the world's first handheld to be powered by Strix Halo, and will almost certainly be the fastest handheld in the world as a result. The device will come in three trims: a baseline model sporting the Ryzen AI Max 385 with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, a mid-range option with the same storage and memory but with the flagship Ryzen AI Max+ 395, and there's a top-of-the-line model with the 395 chip, 64GB of RAM, and a 4TB SSD.

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