With Valve's Steam Machine and Steam Deck changing the landscape of handhelds and mini gaming pc's, we wanted to see what CES was saying would be the future of these gaming rigs.

Las Vegas

At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, manufacturers unveiled a range of advanced gaming handhelds and mini PCs, with notable entries from Thunder Robot, 1X Player, and Minisforum. The Thunder Robot Mix Gaming 2, featuring a discrete RTX 5070 Ti and 32GB RAM, is currently only available in China, with global expansion delayed by RAM shortages and high prices.

The 1X Fly Apex from 1X Player and the Minisforum G7 Pro also drew attention for their high-end specs and performance, though both face similar challenges with RAM supply and pricing. The market is increasingly focused on convenience and flexibility, with many devices running Windows and offering various configurations, but high costs and supply chain issues remain key hurdles for widespread release.

Look at future of handhelds, mini gaming PC's at CES 2026

With the Steam Machine coming up and gaming handhelds basically everywhere, we want to see what the future holds with mini PCs and other handhelds. And we have a small handful here at CES, so let's check it out. ♪♪ One of the standout mini PCs here at CES is the Thunder Robot Mix Gaming 2. Now, the reason why this is a standout, it is technically the smallest mini PC to fit a discrete RTX 50 Series graphics card in it. This one is packed with a 5070 Ti, but it also has an Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU with it, 32 gigs of RAM, and a 1-terabyte SSD. Now, Thunder Robot did say that while this is available in China, they are exploring expanding to North America and other regions, but the problem is the RAM shortage and RAM prices, and they're trying to find a good timing for bringing this over to the States and other regions. So that is kind of a microcosm of how the RAM shortage and the RAM prices spiking have affected other manufacturers in putting out their products, and this has 32 gigs of RAM, and that's not gonna come cheap. If anyone knows what it's like to build a PC or the current market when you're looking for pre-built PCs, that's what's spiking the prices, and so Thunder Robot is kind of waiting in the wings for global market conditions to kind of settle before they explore putting this out. So they are aiming for sometime this year, but again, it's kind of unpredictable times for PC manufacturers and anyone who puts RAM in their products. Of course, with the advent of the Steam Machine looming, many PCs are kind of getting a lot more traction. Of course, this looks different from the Steam Machine. It's a lot taller. It's more of a tower, but when it comes to volume and size, it does kind of match up with that, just vertically, but this is gonna be a lot more powerful than a Steam Machine, by virtue of it having a discrete RTX 50 series card. But again, like I said, we're not even sure if it's gonna come out or when it's gonna come out stateside, so stay tuned for that. Here at the 1X Player booth, we have the 1X Fly Apex, which is a pretty high-end gaming handheld, and we've seen so many gaming handhelds now from Asus. We have the Steam Deck, of course the Switch 2, but this is a PC running on Windows as if it was an Asus ROG Ally. Very similar to that in terms of setup, but this is an eight-inch screen running an AMD AI395-plus CPU, and with a 120 hertz refresh rate screen. I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 on it, and it's kind of the standard benchmark for a lot of handhelds. I ran the benchmark at 1200p resolution as well, with high settings, and it was getting around 50 to 60 FPS, so the performance is definitely there. When it comes to the ergonomics, it's a bit bulky because it is also using an eight-inch screen, but it does look good, and it runs really well, and another thing too is that they have a proprietary port in the back, so if you wanna add a battery charging pack to the back, you can get higher wattage, better performance. It does run a little hot, but this is one model that they have available. There's another model that they have available on Indiegogo and on their website that has water cooling, and you would have to get their separate Frost Bay water cooler if you wanna do that. That'll get you higher wattage, better cooling, which means you can pump out better performance from the processor, but that does kind of defeat the purpose of a gaming handheld, right? Of course, we're not able to test battery life, and that's a huge thing, which is why that battery pack is kind of important to this whole thing. It is kind of a selling point for the handheld, but again, that adds weight. In terms of ergonomics, the buttons feel good. They're a little small, but I was able to get around in Cyberpunk, I was playing it myself, so the performance is there. The ergonomics, I've had better, especially in light of the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally, where the ergonomics feel like a full controller. I think the standard is a lot higher these days, so you're gonna see a lot of these at CES and a lot of people putting out their own handhelds using AMD's AI Max 395 plus processor, so high performance isn't really the key thing anymore. We know we can get performance out of games now. Now it's all about how convenient is it to use? Is it running Windows, is it running SteamOS? Are you able to configure things the way you like with Linux and all that? Of course, that's all configurable if you know how to do that, but it does come packed with Windows, so you do have to kind of work around the headaches of using a Windows platform. So for the One X Fly Apex, there's a lot of different models that you can get, depending on what you want in terms of RAM or storage, but you're going to be paying quite a bit for this. The starting model is around $1,500 and goes upwards of $2,000, and if you want the liquid-cooled version, that is going to be a little bit more expensive, about $100 to $150 up per model, depending on the specs that you want to get, and of course, you're going to want to get the cooler with it if you're going to take advantage of that. So this is one of the more expensive gaming handhelds out there. Like I said, the performance is there, and all the extra stuff on top of it is kind of what you're buying into and what you're paying for, and in the market of all the handhelds today, it is stiff competition, but it is doing something different, and you need to stand out in some way. One of the other new mini PCs we're seeing here at CES is the Minisforum G7 Pro. Now, Minisforum has been making mini PCs for a while, but this is a new model that is due out next month, and it has a sleek, tall, slim build, so it's a little different from what you've seen from maybe some other mini PCs they've built or across the board, and definitely different from the Steam Machine. This runs Windows also, and it has an RTX 5070 laptop card and an Intel Core i9-14 series CPU. The problem is, with a lot of these pre-built PCs, is the RAM shortage and RAM pricing has impacted how much it's going to be. Minisforum is not talking about pricing quite yet, even though it's out soon, but that is also due in part to the RAM spikes. But I was playing Black Myth Wukong at 1080p, high settings, and getting upwards of 90 to 100 frames per second, and that's kind of what you expect from a high-end laptop running a 5070 graphics card. But if you are interested in mini PCs, Minisforum's doing this for a while, and the G7 Pro is one of their nicest builds yet. The future of gaming in handhelds is actually a lot more exciting, because Intel's putting out their own chip, and we have that story on IGN.com. And for everything else in the world of gaming and tech at CES 2026, stick with IGN.

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Breakdown