Ayaneo presents the Air, its new PC/portable game console to meet the Steam Deck

Just a few months ago, the Chinese manufacturer Ayaneo was still living a relatively quiet life in the peaceful market for gaming console-shaped laptops. Then Valve’s Steam Deck arrived. And it’s an understatement to say that it shook everything thanks to its incomparable performance / price ratio – and despite many small criticisms addressed elsewhere. More was needed to discourage Ayaneo which has just unveiled the Air, a new line of machines placing itself at the “entry level” in its catalogue.

There is no doubt that the Ayaneo Air was designed in full awareness of this competition from the Steam Deck, since the manufacturer’s communication places a strong emphasis on its own characteristics. The first is its lightness: weighing between 398 g and 450 g depending on the configuration chosen, the machine swims in the same waters as a Nintendo Switch (420 g for the Oled model with its joy-cons attached), and well in below the 670 g of the Deck.

This is certainly at the expense of the size of the screen, 5.5 inches diagonal “only”. However, the latter wants to seduce the crowds thanks to the use of Oled technology and its generous definition of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The manufacturer does not specify whether it is a PenTile or RGB structure panel. We pin our hopes on this second possibility, insofar as a PenTile structure at 404 dots per inch would result a priori into a very noticeable parasitic grain in the display. A small oddity should be noted in the technical sheet: the manufacturer thinks it good to boast a color temperature of… 8500 K, that is to say a good distance from the 6500 K standardized by the BT.709 and BT standards. .2020 and therefore indicating a significant blue drift. It only remains to hope that the machine will also offer a more neutral display mode.

Three denominations and a multitude of possible configurations

Spec-wise, the Ayaneo Air comes in a slew of configurations organized into three major variants. The “standard” Air model is surrounded by the entry-level Air Youth and a premium Air Pro version. The Youth and standard models are built around an AMD Ryzen 5 5560U APU with six Zen 3 CPU cores (12 logical cores) at a nominal frequency of 2.3 GHz, and six Vega 8 graphics units at 1.6 GHz. The Pro model is offered either with this same 5560U, or with a Ryzen 7 5825U – which goes to eight CPU cores at 2 GHz and eight graphics units at 2 GHz. The higher energy consumption of this chip is the reason why the Air Pro is a little bulkier than its congeners: its thickness is 21.6 mm at the center of the machine, against 17 mm for the Air and the Air Youth. The difference does not really have an impact on the portability of the machine, since it chooses to offer thick ergonomic handles on the edges.

It should also be noted that the Air Youth is significantly restricted compared to its congeners when it comes to RAM. Not only does it only have 8 GB of LPDDR4x instead of 16 GB, but it also has to make do with operating at 3200 MHz instead of 4266 MHz – which should significantly limit the computing power that can be extracted of the CPU.

Performance that should remain a little short compared to the Steam Deck

All these figures, it must be said, are not particularly exciting on paper, and the performances are likely to appear very pale compared to those of the Steam Deck. If the CPU part of the equation should hold up pretty well, the same is not true on the GPU side. The fault is the use of the aging Vega 8 architecture, whose energy efficiency is largely outpaced by the RDNA2 architecture used by the “custom” chip of the Steam Deck (as well as by the PS5, the Xbox Series X/S and AMD RX 6000 graphics cards).

Concretely, the example of the Ayaneo Next, already equipped with the Ryzen 7 5825U and marketed since last February, gives us an idea of ​​what to expect. The latter only produces in-game performance roughly equivalent to that of the Steam Deck at best, provided you set its nominal TDP to a maximum of 25W, compared to 15W for the Deck’s Van Gogh APU. That same 15W is also the maximum allowed by the standard and Youth variants of the Aya Neo Air, while the Pro goes up to 18W. Either way, that should result in frame rates well below the bar. placed by Valve.

Finally, on the software side, the Air retains what some will consider to be a critical advantage over Valve’s approach: the machine comes standard with Windows as its OS, which ensures perfect software compatibility with virtually all PC games and launchers currently in circulation. Overlaid on it is an Ayaneo OS overlay promising the user access to all of their games and all system settings via an interface tailored to the machine, without having to go through the office.

The first wave of a new generation of Ayaneo machines

The first shipments should take place in September 2022 following a “pre-order” phase via a participatory participation campaign set up on the Indiegogo platform. Pricing ranges from $549 for the Air Youth all the way up to a whopping $1,399 for the most complete Air Pro configuration (Ryzen 7 chip, 2TB storage).

In parallel, Ayaneo (decidedly talkative) also announced the existence of a relatively mysterious Air Plus, which we know will be equipped with a 6-inch 1080p LCD screen and an AMD Mendocino APU. The latter is this time from the same family as the Van Gogh APU, and therefore uses RDNA2 graphics units… whose number, according to the latest rumors, would only be two instead of the eight of the Steam Deck. Suffice to say that we should not expect miracles in the latest AAA games. But that would only be in line with the machine’s very affordable price positioning, starting at $289. A few days earlier, at the other end of the spectrum, the manufacturer also vaguely announced the Ayaneo2, which it presents as the very first machine equipped with the next-generation AMD Ryzen 7 6800U chip (eight CPU cores Zen3+, 12 RDNA2 graphics units) with an entry price of $1300. For these two models, no launch date is announced, otherwise a very vague “end of 2022”.