New handheld Steam Deck rival is the first powered by Intel Arc & we’re excited

An industrial PC maker is stepping into the gaming market for the first time, with a unique take on the PC handheld – it has an Intel chip in it.

Emdoor, an industrial PC maker, known for its rugged line of tablets and laptops, is taking a strange left turn. They’re entering the gaming market with a new handheld with one of the first devices of its kind to house an Intel Meteor Lake CPU.

Intel Meteor Lake is the laptop line of CPUs for this generation and features Arc Graphics 5 and support for LPDDR5X RAM. It’ll have a max power draw (TDP) of 35W, putting it in line with other handhelds currently available.

There’s no real name as of right now, but the industrial side of the tech world colliding with the gaming side means it’s being dubbed the EM-GP080MTL.

There’s also an 8-inch LCD screen, with a 16:10 aspect ratio at 1920×1200. This is what the Ayaneo 2S runs at, which is what Emdoor appears to be aiming for in terms of the rest of the specs. It’ll feature up to 32GB of DDR5 RAM, with up to 2TB of storage supported via NVMe.

Interestingly, the NVMe will be a full-sized one (2280), instead of the 2230 that has seen a massive boost in popularity thanks to the ROG Ally and Steam Deck.

A vast majority, if not all handhelds at this point, are using AMD’s Ryzen 7840U to power their devices. The performance that the integrated GPU can put out is nothing short of astounding. In our reviews, we’ve found that it’s more than capable of running AAA games at superb speeds.

Intel Arc Graphics 5 onboard new handheld

It’s also going to be the first Windows handheld PC that features Intel Arc Graphics 5, which we know very little about at this point in terms of performance. The teraflops have been compared by WCCFTech, but this doesn’t gauge performance in actual games.

In a demo given to Notebook Italia, Emdoor shows the device playing God of War, and there’s some work gone into a custom front end. We’ve regularly rallied against Windows 11’s experience on these devices, so it’s good to see Emdoor is taking precautions already.

Notebook Italia

One feature we’re already noticing that is a big plus is the double USB-C ports on the device. The Ayaneo 2S has these and it’s incredibly handy to have to avoid dongles.

Emdoor’s EM-GP080MTL is prepping for release in 2024, and we’re especially excited to try a different flavor of handheld APU again after so many years of AMD dominance.