Acer Nitro Blaze 7 Gaming Handheld: Full Specs For The Next Steam Deck Rival
If it were up to us, a product with "Blaze" in the model name would be unveiled on April 20 for obvious (to some) reasons. Missed opportunity aside, Acer has chosen IFA 2024 as the launchpad for its first gaming handheld, the Nitro Blaze 7 (GN771), which is the latest hardware entry in a growing segment that Valve played a key role in popularizing with its Steam Deck.
PC gaming handhelds, while still comparatively few in number, now represent a more expansive landscape with several big brands jumping into the fray. A partial list includes ASUS (ROG Ally and ROG Ally X), Lenovo (Legion Go), MSI (Claw 7 and Claw 8 AI+), Valve (Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED), and now Acer. And of course there are players like Ayaneo and GPD, as well as adjacent solutions like Logitech's G Cloud handheld.
Acer intends to compete with the whole lot of 'em with its Nitro Blaze 7. It features a 7-inch IPS display with a 1920x1080 resolution, 144Hz refresh rate, 7ms response time, 10-point multi-touch support, 500 nits of brightness, 100% sRGB coverage, and AMD FreeSync Premium validation.
Like most of the more popular gaming handhelds, Acer is tapping AMD to power the Nitro Blaze 7, and specifically the company's Ryzen 7 8840HS APU. That's an 8-core/16-thread "Hawk Point" chip based on Zen 4, with a 3.3GHz base clock, up to a 5.1GHz max boost clock, and 16MB of L3 cache. For graphics, the APU sports an integrated Radeon 780M GPU with 12 RDNA 3 cores and a 2.7GHz clock speed.
It's similar in specs and speeds to AMD's Ryzen Z1 Extreme, with the biggest difference being that the Ryzen 7 8840HS has an onboard NPU delivering up to 16 TOPS of performance, and up to 38 TOPS for the chip as a whole. Acer leans into this distinction by calling the Nitro Blaze 7 a "portable AI handheld gaming device."
The Nitro Blaze 7 also offers 16GB of LPDDR5X-7500 RAM, up to 2TB of PCIe 4.0 storage (M.2 2280 form factor), two USB4 ports, a microSD card slot, dual 1W speakers, a 3.5m audio jack, dual digital microphones, hall effect triggers, a fingerprint reader, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 wireless connectivity, and a 50.04Wh battery wrapped in a chassis that measures 25.6 (W) x 11.35 (D) x 2.25 (H) centimeters and weighs 670 grams.
There's no mention of pricing or a release date just yet, though Acer does say the Nitro Blaze 7 will come with three months of PC Game Pass when it makes a retail debut.
