The gaming handhelds released in 2024 have demonstrated solid performance, but none have caught our eye here at PCWorld as much as the yet-to-be released OneXFly F1 Pro, which claims to be the first handheld gaming console powered by AMD’s ripped Strix Point APUs.
Our long wait for the OneXFly F1 Pro is just about over now that the device is available for pre-order ahead of its end-of-November release date. But if you’re thinking of picking one up, you might want to have some tissues at hand because of its eye-watering price that ranges from $1,099 up to $1,699 USD (with pre-order discount).
What’s all the excitement about?
It’s easy to look at the more-than-$1,000 price tag for a OneXFly F1 Pro and wince at the cost. Then again, the handheld’s specs are impressive. It comes in configurations ranging from Ryzen AI 9 365 all the way up to AMD’s flagship Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.
If you choose the model with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, your handheld will benefit from the next-generation chip’s 12 cores and 24 threads that can hit boosted clock speeds up to a blistering 5.1GHz. That puts it on par with the Asus ROG Ally X’s Ryzen Z1 Extreme for sheer APU clock speed.
Yet for graphics, the ROG Ally X utilizes an older-generation Radeon 780M iGPU. Graphics processing in the OneXFly F1 Pro’s flagship model is carried out by a Radeon 890M, which boasts performance gains of around 20 percent over that previous generation iGPU.
All versions of the handheld come with 32GB LPDDR5x-7200 RAM and a brilliant 7-inch 1080p OLED display with a 144Hz refresh rate. The base model in each configuration ships with 1TB storage, but there will also be 2TB and 4TB storage options available at extra cost.
OneXFly F1 Pro performance expectations
AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series processors have made a big splash in laptops this year, impressing gamers both in performance and efficiency, but we’ve yet to see them used in handhelds. Some gamers say the addition of the AMD Strix Point APUs will deliver the biggest performance leaps we’ve seen to date in handheld gaming.
That’s a big claim, but it may be true if recent performance testing from OneXFly F1 Pro’s manufacturer One-Netbook is any indication. In comparative tests, the company showed that its handhelds outperform the Z1 Extreme-equipped ROG Ally X by about 20 percent.
What’s most encouraging, though, is that those gains are seen in the base model featuring the Ryzen AI 9 365. In benchmarks for Black Myth: Wukong, for example, the base model hit an average frame rate of 58FPS compared to the ROG Ally X’s 50FPS (at 1080p and lowest settings).
That result looks even more promising if you consider the fact that the handheld tested was one of the company’s pre-release engineering samples running at a TDP of just 15W.
If that’s the worst-case scenario, we can’t wait to see what kind of performance the higher-end configurations will deliver.