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A couple of months ago, Intel announced a couple of new chips for handheld gaming PCs, the Intel Arc G3 and G3 Extreme. It was certainly exciting to have something new on that front, given we've been seeing mostly the same silicon crammed inside such devices for a very long time. But at the time I warned that signs pointed towards yet more prohibitively expensive price tags. And now we're seeing Acer's pricing for its new Predator Atlas 8 handhelds, it's safe to say I was unfortunately right.
As spotted by KitGuru and confirmed by yours truly, the UK pricing for these handhelds, containing new Intel Panther Lake chips and expected to launch in October this year, ranges from £1,000 to £1,500. The cheapest has a regular G3 chip, 16 GB of memory, and a 512 GB SSD. You can up the memory to 24 GB for another £100.
A G3 Extreme version with a 1 TB SSD and 24 GB of memory will be able to be nabbed for £1,300, and bumping that up to 32 GB of RAM will get you up to the top £1,500 price tag.
Converting those figures to dollars, that makes for a handheld that ranges from (roughly) $1,300 to $2,000. Though of course prices don't usually track exchange rates exactly.
Yep, that's pretty expensive. But it's also par for the course for handhelds now, it seems. Our Dave has actually just reviewed an MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ CG3EM featuring a G3 Extreme chip and that, too is in this ballpark. It's $1,800, a figure I noted as being likely back in May, given currency conversions of EU/AUS retailer listings.
At Computex in June, MSI told us that it was targetting $1,500 for the Claw 8 EX AI+, but that also came with the caveat that was depending on market forces. And those market forces have not been kind, as evidenced by the subsequent price change. Again, not unexpected, but as with memory prices in general, just an unfortunate reality of the industry right now.
To be clear though, the G3 Extreme chip is incredibly performant, with its 12 Xe cores helping the new Claw handheld handily beat others like the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X in the games we tested at 1080p. So it's not quite as bad as paying so much for a non-G3 Extreme handheld. And it's certainly not as expensive as, erm, some options we're seeing surface.
But it's still mighty expensive. When the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X launched we thought that was expensive at $1,000, and now we reckon it's the best handheld gaming PC on the market because all the rest are just so damn expensive. It's a shame, given the handheld market for a while was looking like a decent entry into PC gaming. Now the market is looking more like an ultra-niche luxury one.
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