 In this video, I'm gonna show you guys the gaming handheld that 10 year old me would have literally given six inches of height for, if you hadn't already traded it for this sweet footwear. It's got high quality joysticks, analog triggers, an enormous, not to mention bright seven inch display, enough IO to rival modern full-sized laptops, and it managed to run every game I could imagine throwing at it. And I can imagine an awful lot. It's the IONEO 2021 Pro and its new retro power colorway and upgraded specs put it in contention with the Steam Deck as the best handheld gaming PC on the market. I have been having a ton of fun with this thing, just like I'm gonna have fun telling you about our sponsor. Smart Deploy provides out of box Windows imaging support for over 1500 computer models. Deploy one Windows image to any hardware model with ease with Smart Deploy. Get your free licenses worth over $500 at smartdeploy.com slash Linus. My love of mobile PC gaming started with installing ZSNES on an old cast off Pentium One laptop that my sister's dad was discarding. And to say that we've come a long way since then would be a gross understatement. Compared to my IONEO founders, the upgraded Pro 2021 model adds two additional CPU cores and SMT for a total of 16 CPU processing threads. And much more importantly, it adds a Vega 8 GPU. Now on paper, Vega 8 is about 30% wider and clocked about 15% higher than Vega 6, which not only puts the IONEO 2021 Pro ahead of the original IONEO, but puts it within striking distance of the upcoming Steam Deck featuring RDNA2 graphics, at least according to how the Steam Deck was performing back when I did my early preview. Let's take a look at what that performance difference means in the real world, starting with one of the most common use cases for these handheld PCs, Indie and Casual PC games. Now 10 years ago, there wasn't much in the way of single player controller optimized titles for PC. But these days, Steam is practically overrun with everything from niche cult favorites like CrossCode to smash hits like Among Us and Fall Guys, all of which run great on the IONEO Pro. The 16 by 10, seven inch display is sharp enough at normal viewing distances that I don't consider it's 1280 by 800 resolution to be a problem. And the speakers are markedly better than first gen. The point where I would consider them to be actually usable for gaming. The problem is that because these types of games typically target the lowest common denominator for hardware, they also run great on the original Neo or on just about anything, making the cost of the 2021 Pro really hard to justify. That's where we get into big use case number two, emulation. Now in theory, any modern PC is so much more powerful than a console from a couple of generations ago that running those games should be easy, right? But in reality, emulating functions that are not built into a machine's hardware can be extremely demanding. And this is where the additional horsepower of the Neo 2021 Pro is most felt. Older consoles like the Super Nintendo, PlayStation 1 and even PlayStation 2 run with ease. Check this out. I've got Final Fantasy X running at six times the original resolution with a widescreen hack. That's right, that's not a PC port. That's the PlayStation 2 version. And since I'm able to run this with the SOC limited to just 11 Watts, I'd expect anywhere from three and a half to four hours out of the 57 watt hour battery, or maybe more depending on the screen brightness. Side note, I actually found the indoor sweet spot for the screen was about 20%. And even at minimum, I found it too bright at night. I also wasn't impressed with the amount of corner backlight bleeds. So I think there is some room for improvement here. The thing is, as soon as you get into emulating anything more modern though, it gets a bit dicey for a couple of reasons. First up is the fact that the original hardware that you're trying to mimic is much more powerful. And second is that even for a four year old console like the Nintendo Switch, the enormous reverse engineering efforts of a project like Yuzu just plain take a lot of time, which is why the IONIO Pro's performance is so impressive. I did have to crank it up to its 20 watt TDP profile and wild fan mode, which admittedly isn't the greatest experience if you're not wearing headphones due to the NEO Pro's poorly implemented fan speed control. But it flipped and ran. For best performance, I turned Mario Tennis Aces down to about three quarters resolution and enabled AMD's FSR to smooth out the jaggies. Now please note the flickering lines are a known issue on AMD GPUs and the Yuzu team is aware of them, but that shouldn't undermine the impressiveness of the performance that we're seeing here. Of course, Mario Tennis Aces isn't the most demanding Nintendo game out there. Let's go back a generation to the Wii U version of the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild running in Cemu. Breath of the Wild is a 30 FPS game. So that's our target to ensure that the physics is running in real time. And at 20 watts in the wild fan profile, it actually runs really well, just about locked at 30 FPS. In fact, if we're willing to accept a couple of stutters here and there, like you'd get on the original Nintendo Switch, we can turn it down to even 15 watts and still have an acceptable experience. This is actually a good time to talk about the tool that I just used to do that. It's called IaSpace and it's a utility that Ia built to make controlling the system a little bit more convenient. Just hit the keyboard shortcut key on the right to bring it up over top of any borderless windowed game or application. It has an included joystick to mouse utility that automatically switches modes reasonably well, bar some windows navigation issues. And within the slide out here, you've got volume, brightness, power profiles and a resolution changer up top. I actually really like this overlay. And then the bottom buttons here are configurable in the main application, which is accessed by long pressing. You can also use IaSpace to browse your installed games. Right now they support Steam and Microsoft games, though supposedly support for other launchers is coming. And you can also add EXCs for unsupported applications like emulators, though I didn't see an obvious way to change the icon, which I would like to do. You can also fine tune the system to a surprising degree in here. The Neo Pro 2021 got upgraded linear actuators for its rumble that I actually found to be too strong out of the box. Thankfully, you can turn them down and they feel great on the middle setting. Since we're in here, by the way, the ability to recalibrate the joysticks is a huge deal. We haven't talked about it much on this channel, but joystick drift is a problem that affects basically every modern console or controller to some degree. Even a perfectly designed stick will eventually drift as the internal components wear out. So being able to re-center them in software is an exciting idea that I kind of hope will become more widely adopted in the future to keep otherwise good controllers out of landfills. Just like our merch is always gonna stay in the landfill, check out, we got blank hoodies. We're doing really cool printing on them, lttstore.com. As for how good the controller is, I give it a B minus. Obviously, some of my issues stem from the cramped Nintendo Switch style layout, but as someone who spent many hours on the Switch, that wasn't my main problem. Compared to the original IONEO, the new leadership over there has a preference for longer travel buttons that I just don't share. I found the new ABXY and D-pad switches mushy and unresponsive, and I would like to see them changed or at the very least implemented in a way that makes them swappable. Thankfully, the joysticks felt comfortable and accurate throughout my time with them, and the new analog triggers are an absolute godsend if you enjoy racing games. That alone was enough for me to retire my Founders Edition for good, and it gets better. The only real way to play AAA games on previous handheld PCs was streaming from a cloud gaming service or a nearby desktop, and that changes with the NeoPro 2021. You name it, it runs. Not at the highest details, mind you, but turning down eye candy like shadows and texture quality is a lot less noticeable on a seven-inch screen than it is on a 24-inch screen, and everything from Doom Eternal to Forza Horizon 5 to Halo Infinite ran without complaint at anywhere between 30 to 60 FPS. That's a freaking game changer, and the craziest part is this is just the beginning. AYA has the new NeoNext coming out very soon that upgrades the CPU cores to Zen 3. It is a huge boon for emulation and boosts the clock speed of the onboard Vega 8 graphics. Now, I'm hesitant to recommend that one just yet since I actually find myself using the dedicated keys for Escape, Control-Alt-Delete, and Windows quite often, and it eschews most of those, but I'm gonna reserve judgment for once I have hands-on with it, which should be pretty soon. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though. I already talked about the loud fan in the wild 20-watt profile, but what I haven't discussed yet is the weight or battery life. Perhaps the biggest ergonomic challenge is that compared to a device like the Switch OLED, the NeoPro 2021 is heavy, to the point where I would almost never recommend using it without a surface to rest your hands on. Also, while the battery life was more than acceptable in the more economical profiles, we looped F1 2021 at the highest performance profile and got just around two hours of battery life. There's no performance drop-on battery, which is good, but that's less per charge than the notorious Sega Game Gear, and obviously it's a lot less than the Switch if you don't mind being stuck with Nintendo games. So I can understand then why some folks might look at this and say, over $1,000, why wouldn't I just buy a Switch for a few hundred? That's fair, but I can also see the other side of the argument, where one might hook up a bunch of mismatched controllers to game with their friends or upgrade this baby. It would be a little more accessible. I ended up snapping a couple of the clips, but I put an eight terabyte freaking SSD in here. Isn't that crazy? Or you could even put the Retro Power in its included dock to use it as a full-fledged PC. The wild card here is the Steam Deck, of course, which comes at a much lower price, and hopefully I'll be able to preview it for you soon enough, but who knows when that's actually gonna ship. Valve. But I know what I'm gonna tell you about our sponsor, Exter. Exter Smart Wallets are high-end trackable wallets crafted to keep your valuables safe, slim, and stylish. Their premium leather is sourced from LWG gold-rated tanneries. 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