by The launch of the Steam Deck (opens in new tab) seems to have typed a lot more handheld PCs (opens in new tab) projects. The newest is the Loki from AYN (opens in new tab), a line of five handhelds that starts out cheap and is fairly upgradeable. Thanks to Techpowerup (opens in new tab) and lilliputing (opens in new tab) for guidance on this one.
AYN has already released the Android-powered Odin (opens in new tab), but Loki is running Windows. The machines come with a range of CPU options, most of them from AMD. However, the entry-level member of the pantheon comes with an unnamed Intel Alder Lake U chip. The Loki Mini with Iris Xe graphics and 64GB of storage (no RAM information seems to be available for any of the Loki machines, although Odin came with a choice of 4GB or 8GB) will retail for just $299. The storage appears to be interchangeable across the range, so hopefully new SSDs can be easily snapped in.
Up the range a bit and you get three Lokis with a Ryzen 5 6600U APU with six cores, 12 threads, a boost speed of up to 4.5GHz and Radeon 660M graphics (six cores). These machines come with different storage capacities ranging from 64GB to 512GB and range in price from $499 to $699.
The big boy at the top of the range is the Loki Max, bringing a Steam Deck-matched Ryzen 7 6800U APU (eight cores, 16 threads, 4.75GHz boost, 16-core Radeon 680M graphics) to the party. It’s only available with 512GB of storage, and the amount of RAM is yet to be determined. At $799, it’s a bit more expensive than the equivalent Steam deck, but it comes with a copy of Windows instead of Linux, so that needs to be factored into the price.
The Loki range features two analog sticks, a D-Pad, the usual four face buttons in an Xbox configuration, plus select, launch and trigger. The screen is similar to the Odin’s 5.98-inch 1080p display. There’s a USB-C port on the back, as well as a headphone jack, but that seems to be it. The Odin had a Switch-like dock (opens in new tab) That added USB Type-A and HDMI ports (plus oddly N64 and GameCube controller ports) ready to hook it up to a big TV, so there’s a good chance Loki will do the same.
The Loki is yet to appear on the AYN website at the time of writing, but there is a product announcement on Facebook (opens in new tab).
| Row 0 – cell 0 | CPU | graphic card | R.A.M. | storage | Screen |
| steam deck | AMD6800U | Radeon660M | 16 GIGABYTES | 64GB to 512GB | 7in 1280×800 |
| Loki Mini | Undetermined Intel Alder Lake | Iris Xe | unknown | 64GB | unknown |
| LokiMax | AMD6800U | Radeon 680M | unknown | 512GB | unknown |
