At the beginning of last year, the Alienware Concept UFO teased us with the possibility of a real portable gaming PC, but “with no plans to advertise it as a formal product” in 2021, we are stuck sitting in the best gaming chair, hunched over our mouse and keyboard. Fortunately, there is light at the end of the tunnel while the Aya Neo with a Ryzen engine seems to take over the mantle, and is already proving to be quite popular.
Aya, the Chinese startup behind the device, surpassed its crowdfunding goal in the first hours after Neo aired on Indiegogo and is currently more than 2,536% above its initial target. The 512GB SSD model sold out in less than 24 hours and will not be replenished, but Aya has issued another 1,000 1TB drives to meet demand.
Although the Aya Neo looks like a Nintendo switch by design, it is slightly more powerful with a 7 nm AMD Ryzen 5 4500U processor, Radeon Vega 6 GPU and 16 GB of RAM – four times more than the console. It even has a slightly larger 7-inch touchscreen with 800p resolution and runs Windows 10, so there are no troublesome compatibility issues.
As your inspiration, there is an optional docking station that you can add to your level, but this one is portable enough to take with you and has enough ports to connect the best gaming mouse and keyboard – which is useful considering you can’t slide the Aya Neo controllers off.
With the current setting, frame rates should be between 30fps and 60fps on most titles, including Cyberpunk 2077 according to Aya’s tests. You will need to check the system requirements of the latest games to see if Neo fits the bill, but the company has confirmed that it will push optimizations that can help increase fps as more titles are released.
Aya originally retained her crowdfunding campaign due to the scarcity of stocks that plagues the best graphics cards and the best gaming CPUs, but thinks that now is the time to start. There is no way to say how great demand will affect whether we will see Neo on store shelves in the future, but for now, all sponsors are expected to receive the product this year.
Before you spend $ 6,750 HKD (approximately $ 869 / £ 628) in support of Aya Neo, remember that this is a collaborative funding campaign and each out of ten successfully funded products does not reach the market. These are investments in product concepts and not a promise of a physical product at the end of it. That said, Aya has already tested its proof of concept and is actively selling Neo in China, which gives us confidence that the portable gaming PC is the real deal.