Steam Deck too dinky for you? Always wished you could purchase a handheld gaming PC capable of obscuring your entire head? Then Acer might just have the answer. The company has unveiled its new Nitro Blaze 11, sporting a 10.95-inch screen and chunky form factor testing the limits of what might reasonably be considered a ‘portable’ gaming device.
Acer’s Nitro Blaze 11 is, it’s fair to say, a bit of a beast, measuring 36.4 cm x 17.1 cm x 1.59 cm and weighing in at 1050g – roughly the equivalent of 1.5 Steam Decks. It’s unclear if those figures include the machine’s two chunky detachable controllers – Acer’s press release is vague on that point – but it’s certainly not what you’d call an understated device. Judging by the promo images, it could comfortably be used to serve nibbles between gaming sessions too.
On the positive side, its hefty frame boasts some decent innards. That 10.95-inch screen, for instance, is a 120 Hz WQXGA 2560 x 1600 touch display capable of up to 500 nits of brightness, and it also packs in an AMD Ryzen 8040HS processor, 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and up to 2TB of NVMe SSD storage. That’s on top of a built-in kickstand and those aforementioned detachable controllers, which now feature back buttons. And if that appeals, you’ll be looking at a minimum price tag of $1099.99, depending on your storage requirements.
But if you’re in the market for something a little more
discreet – and a little cheaper – there’s also Acer’s new Nitro Blaze 8, which features an 144 Hz 8.8-inch screen and weighs in at a more modest 720g. This one measures 30.5 cm x 13.4 cm x 2.2 cm (controllers are definitely included here, seeing as they’re not detachable) and costs $899.99. Both machines include three months of Xbox Game Pass and are scheduled to launch in Q2 this year.
Acer’s expanded Nitro Blaze line-up won’t make use of AMDs newly announced trio of next-gen Ryzen Z-series APUs – designed for handheld gaming PCs – but Digital Foundry has a little more to say about those elsewhere on Eurogamer if you’re curious.