PC-Handhelds mit "Harnbeuteln". Ist es eine technische Einschränkung oder eine Innovation?

Friends who follow the smartphone industry must know that in the past two or three years, the battery has been one of the areas with the fastest progress in smartphones and has brought the most obvious improvements to the user experience.

For example, among the new smartphones launched this autumn, most of them will have a battery capacity starting from 6,500mAh or even 7,000mAh. Some specific models may even directly exceed 10,000mAh, achieving a battery life of four or five days, or even about a week in typical usage scenarios. Against this technological background, even if some manufacturers claim in their promotions that their new phones "can get rid of the dependence on power banks", it won't be considered a boast.

However, in such a situation, if a manufacturer still presents an external battery pack like a "urine bag" as an "innovation" for its new product, I wonder if you will, like us at San Yi Life, feel a sense of dissonance with the times.

It should be noted that our use of the term "urine bag" does not express a subjective negative attitude. As those with a little experience know, in the past when smartphone batteries were generally not very durable, many heavy users were used to connecting a power bank to their phones when going out with their phones for a long time. Therefore, the term "urine bag" is less of a derogatory term for this usage and more of an expression of contempt for the "lifestyle" of some users who were overly dependent on their phones and power banks at that time.

Behind the quirky design, there are actually "hardships"

At this point, it's obviously necessary to give you a brief introduction to the background of this matter. As you can see now, the device that is clearly connected to an external battery pack with a charging cable is not a phone but a PC handheld game console.

More specifically, this handheld console called the "GPD Win5" runs the Windows operating system, and its processor is the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395, which has a theoretical TDP of over 100W and no manufacturer has ever dared to "fit" into a handheld console before.

So, what does this mean? By comparing it with the "most powerful platform" in the current PC handheld console industry, the AMD Ryzen Z2E, we can see that the MAX+ 395 has 50% more CPU cores than the Z2E, nearly five times the CPU cache, 100% more memory bandwidth, and the peak computing power of its integrated graphics is nearly 300% that of the Z2E.

Obviously, GPD stuffed the AI MAX+ 395 processor, originally designed for laptops and small workstations, into the handheld console to "make a big splash" and take the performance throne in the current PC handheld console field. Especially when first-tier manufacturers like ASUS, MSI, and Lenovo have entered the market, for second- and third-tier brands like GPD and AYANEO, "stirring things up" in terms of hardware configuration and creativity is almost the only way to maintain user loyalty.

However, the AI MAX+ 395 is a high-power chip with a starting TDP of 55W and a maximum of 120W, which makes its heat dissipation design much more difficult than that of the Ryzen Z series processors specifically designed for PC handheld consoles (the solution adopted by big manufacturers), which start at 28W and have a maximum of 35W. To fit a heat dissipation system that can "tame" this super-large chip into the handheld console, GPD's engineers had to design a unique "backpack battery" for this console. That is, the battery is not inside the device but is installed on the back like a "back clip".

Obviously, the backpack battery is not aesthetically pleasing and also affects the grip. So, allegedly after "listening to the suggestions of internal test users", GPD's engineers designed a connecting cable that can be fixed to the battery. Thus, there came the joke at the beginning of this article about the "handheld console with a urine bag".

Actually, for a product like the GPD Win5, this is clearly not a very elegant solution. But for a manufacturer of GPD's scale, it may be the most innovative design they can come up with that meets the expectations of their users.

A struggle of a small factory? We actually think it's very meaningful

So, can we completely blame this design on the helplessness of small factories? It seems not. According to the latest PC market report released by the statistical agency JPR, in the second quarter of 2025, both the GPU shipments and the independent graphics card coverage rate in the global PC market have increased significantly.

This seems to indicate that in today's PC market, whether for "AI training" or gaming purposes, consumers' purchasing behavior is further raising manufacturers' expectations for the GPU performance of devices. To put it more bluntly, since everyone is buying discrete graphics cards, in the long run, the hardware performance requirements, especially the GPU performance requirements, of future PC games will inevitably increase.

As we all know, the current "PC handheld consoles" are actually based on the chip solutions of low-power ultra-thin laptops. Even the "flagship handheld console platform favored by big manufacturers" like the Z2E only has a GPU specification that is about 1/10 of the current top discrete graphics cards and 1/2 of the mainstream mid-range discrete graphics cards.

The problem is that the screens of current mainstream PC handheld consoles often follow the solutions of small and medium-sized tablets, with a resolution even higher than that of some low-end laptops, and the screen size is mostly concentrated in the range of 7 to 8 inches, unlike the real "handheld game consoles" in the past, which generally had screens of less than 4 inches.

In short, at present, "PC handheld consoles" actually suffer from a lack of performance objectively. They often need to lower the resolution or use "cheating" methods like frame interpolation to run large-scale games. Unless you really buy these devices just to play very old games, as time goes by, the performance shortcomings of PC handheld consoles when facing new games will only become more and more prominent.

In this situation, although the way GPD forced the higher-power AI MAX+ 395 into the handheld console may not be elegant, it is actually more forward-looking than the "big manufacturers' products" with low power consumption and low performance. To be honest, no matter how elegant the appearance and good the grip of big manufacturers' PC handheld consoles are, if the performance is insufficient, they are just "pretty but useless". Instead, they are really not as good as the small factory's solution, which, although radical and a bit rough in design, at least "can play".

[The pictures in this article are from the Internet.]

This article is from the WeChat official account “San Yi Life” (ID: IT - 3eLife). The author is San Yi Jun. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.