This Project on Kickstarter Promises a Handheld Gaming PC

Wire

This Project on Kickstarter Promises a Handheld Gaming PC

A handheld PC project on Kickstarter has just hit €191,188 of its €250,000 goal. The proposed handheld SMACH Z is being engineered to take on AAA game titles straight off of your Steam Library. Utilising AMD’s powerful embedded low-powered System-on-a-Chip, and with a 5-hour battery life, the SMACH Z looks like an interesting project to say the least.

Here are the some of its specifications:

CPU: AMD Merlin Falcon RX-421BD (12-15w) SoC at 2.1 GHz
Cores: 4/4
iGPU: Radeon R7 at 800 MHz
RAM: 4GB (SMACH Z) || 8GB (SMACH Z PRO) DDR4 2133 MHz
HD: 64GB (SMACH Z) || 128GB (SMACH Z PRO)
Screen: 6” FULL HD (1920×1080). Capacitive touch-screen.
Battery: 5 hours of gaming.
MicroSD Card Slot.
USB 3.0 type C.
HDMI video output connection.
Wi-Fi connectivity 5.0 Ghz. 4G LTE mobile network connectivity (PRO model only)
Bluetooth connectivity.
Front-camera 1.3-megapixels (PRO model only)

*Some specifications depend on the project’s ‘Stretch goals’ on Kickstarter

When pre-ordering SMACH Z you can choose between Windows 10 or Linux.

Windows 10: With Windows you have more compatible games and programs. However we won’t be able to adapt the OS to our console, so it may not be as easy to use as the Linux based system.

Linux (SMACH Z OS): We’re able to modify and adapt the OS to SMACH Z creating a better interface and experience. We recommend choosing Linux for better performance. More and more games are becoming compatible with Linux with time; now are about 2,500.

The key scheme will make use of two haptic touch pads, a joystick (clickable), 4 action face buttons, 4 trigger buttons and 2 additional action buttons in the rear-back. Anyone will be able to create their own custom control schemes. The touch pads are also buttons with different areas of detection, so they can be used in many ways. If you are a “classic” gamer, and you prefer more traditional controls… you can use the Z-Pads add-ons. They are adapters to configure the SMACH Z controls by attaching them to either touchpad. This simple yet magic solution will permit you to play with a real D-Pad on your SMACH Z, add a second stick or add more buttons.

Versions specs comparison:

SZ PRO: 8GB RAM vs SZ: 4GB RAM.
SZ PRO: 128GB HD vs SZ: 64 GB HD.
SZ PRO: Front-camera vs SZ: No camera.
SZ PRO: 4G connectivity vs SZ: Only WIFI.

The following benchmarks have been run on the final hardware of the SMACH Z PRO: Merlin Falcon RX-421BD (12-15w) SoC at 2.1 GHz with Radeon R7 at 800 MHz and 8 RAM, running on Windows 10.