The Ayaneo Kun does almost the king of portable gaming PCs. I mean, that’s what the company is aiming for with a name like that, and it comes so damn close, but there are little things that get in the way of me giving it an unqualified recommendation as the absolute best.
Having to strip it almost completely to replace a small rubber grommet is just one of the things that gave me pause in my time testing the mighty coin-marked device. Then I pick it up again, the big, bright screen beaming towards me, the pleasing curves settling into my grip, and I get back to playing my PC games on a setup that feels more mobile than any gaming laptop that I used.
One of the things I’ve enjoyed seeing happen in the wearable device market over the past twelve months is the extent to which companies have tinkered with creating a multitude of different devices that are essentially based on the exact same silicon. The AMD Ryzen 7 7840U (and occasionally the Ryzen Z1 Extreme) chip has been the SoC de jour for almost all the handhelds you can buy right now. We’re starting to see some Intel Meteor Lake-based offerings, but AMD largely has a monopoly on your portable hardware.
So manufacturers have done different things. Ayaneo itself has a wide variety of devices, from the small Air 1S to the Flip in two different designs, and the Slide. Perhaps the Kun is the most traditional of the bunch, but it has its own claims to innovation, of which the unique 54W mode on its 30W APU is just one of them. It’s big too, with a large 8.4-inch screen, although it still feels good in the hand in a Steam Deck-like way and I’ve spent many hours in bed playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on this beautiful machine without taking my hands off.
Kun specifications
APU: AMD Ryzen7 7840U
iGPU: Radeon 780M
Memory: 16|32|64GB LPDDR5-7500
Storage: 512GB|1TB|2TB|4TB SSD
Screen: 8-inch IPS
Solution: 2560×1600
Battery: 75Wh
Price: $1329 (32GB/2TB unit)
It’s also the only handheld I’ve seen so far that has adopted Valve’s use of dual trackpads and can work with them. The Kun’s size means it can get away with sticking two pads, one under the left D-pad and the other under the right thumbstick. At first they were all unusable, but a recent update has made the trackpads much more responsive and much more like the kind of pad you’d find on a laptop. Just, you know, Real small.
When you use a Windows-based handheld they are very useful, if only for the ease of navigation in those clunky launchers that cling firmly to the idea that if you play a PC game you are going to use a mouse as your primary input, whatever happens. I get it, I love a good gaming mouse too, but it does make the handheld gig more difficult.
The core specification itself is impressive; In addition to the ubiquitous Ryzen 7 7840U and its 780M iGPU, I have 32GB of LPDDR5-7500 and a 2TB Lexar SSD, and that gives me an eight-core, 16-thread machine with the heart of a seriously powerful PC. That’s not necessarily what you want from a portable gaming PC where the priorities are more about portability and battery life than linear performance – just ask the Steam Deck OLED – but Ayaneo also packs a sizable battery in the Kun stopped.
That means we can get within a two-hour chunk of silicon in the PCMark 10 gaming battery life test, even with the machine running at 30W.
In terms of gaming performance, however, I might have hoped for a little more. Ayaneo has gotten a lot out of its cooling and its mega TDP limits of 54W, but no matter what, I can never get class-leading gaming performance out of the device. Even against handhelds with the same essential core specs, like the OneXPlayer 2 Pro, it’s generally ahead.
It’s certainly there, and optimizing the game settings yields impressive 1080p gaming performance (and very occasionally reasonable 1440p framerates), but never the outright best.
Where it is downright best, however, is in the configuration software. Ayaneo also has the absolute best handheld PC control software out there, even compared to the deep integration Valve has between SteamOS and Deck. This allows you to tailor your experience to what you’re playing, to get the most battery life out of the Kun while still enjoying a healthy frame rate.
If I want the full power of the AMD APU I can leave it at 30W and push the Radeon 780M graphics chip to its maximum, or if I’m bouncing around the Sword Coast via GeForce I can turn it down to a paltry TDP of 5W and the battery lasts forever.
But if you want the FULL power of the AMD APU, Ayaneo gives you that 54W mode… which I can’t in good conscience recommend. Not because it seeps through your battery, or makes you nice and warm, but because it does nothing. Well, nothing good. If there were instances where you’d gain another 10% performance it would have been a great dock mode to deal with if you plugged it in, but that’s not the case. Occasionally I’ve seen an extra handful of frames per second to go balls to the wall in terms of disruptive power in the Ryzen silicon, but more often than not gaming benchmarks took a dip when I had it in what I called ‘Extreme’ called, pushed. ‘ mode in the AyaSpace app.
My first impression when I took it out of the beautiful packaging was, “Wow.” My second was, “That D-pad is sticky and gross.”
I also found that the device was quite fragile in terms of functionality. I seemed to experience more instability and flaking when switching between the 54W mode and more sensible presets. I ended up renaming it from ‘Extreme’ to ‘Unwise’ and probably won’t use it again.
That’s a shame, because overall the device itself is a pleasure to use and I was hoping for some serious performance improvements. It feels great in the hand – although fiddling with my Steam Deck OLED recently reminded me how well balanced Valve’s machine is – and the standard performance is excellent. It’s a handheld that has almost the perfect premium aesthetic. I like the way it looks… but there are obvious things that let it down.
The most obvious is the damn D-pad. My first impression when I took it out of the beautiful packaging was, “Wow.” My second was, “That D-pad is sticky and gross.”
Buy as…
✅ You want a handheld with a large screen: The Kun is large, but actually very nicely shaped. The 2560 x 1600 resolution is a bit much for the 780M iGPU, but the 8-inch scale isn’t and it’s a joy to game on.
✅ You are looking for a nice device: I mean, come on, it’s a real head turner. Especially in that white with blue fading to green accents. Yum.
Don’t buy if…
❌ You expect perfection: At this price you should be, and there are annoying fast things that still happen.
❌ You expected the 54W mode to beat: It doesn’t deliver the extra performance that I hoped would put it head and shoulders above the competition in gaming.
In fact, the D-pad is so sticky that Ayaneo had to release a fix due to “a manufacturing defect in the gasket.” And that means you have to strip your device almost completely to get to the back of the D-pad and replace the little rubber disks that sit underneath the actual rocker itself. Ayaneo sends the solution to everyone involved, which is great, but it does require a lot of disassembly and I can’t see people being comfortable with that with their $1,300+ machine.
Although you can get a good look at it, and from that angle it looks just as premium. I wish the D-pad wasn’t still so damn sticky even after all that stuff.
And while the 2560 x 1600 screen is very bright, there’s a certain lack of color, which led me to dig into the Radeon settings to increase the saturation a bit to compensate. It’s also just a 60Hz panel, which certainly helps battery life, but not the premium aesthetic.
It’s those little frustrations and the flakiness seemingly inherent to the 54W mode that means I can’t quite give it the glowing recommendation as today’s ultimate premium handheld that I expected when I first started playing with it . It’s still a great device, with the absolute best Windows software of any handheld out there, and I’ll continue to use it. But Ayaneo asks you to accept some lingering weaknesses and the high price tag, and I want it to be perfect for that kind of money.