A Chinese modder named Qingchen DIY has built a handheld gaming PC that’s a fever dream for gamers who want raw power. This custom built device is made from the guts of a high end gaming laptop and leaves commercial handhelds in the dust. With a 12.5 inch 4K touchscreen and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU it’s a experiment of what happens when you don’t compromise on specs for portability.
This handheld is huge, it stretches the very idea of what “portable” means. The 12.5 inch IPS display, borrowed from a Dell laptop, has a crisp 3840 x 2160 resolution, every game is a visual feast. Flanking the screen are game controllers with dual analog sticks, D-pad, action buttons and six extra function keys, you have every input you need. It’s a design that demands to be held with both hands, not a sleek Switch clone but a hulking tribute to unapologetic performance.
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Inside, the hardware is a spec sheet of a top tier gaming laptop. An Intel Core i9-14900HX processor with 24 cores—8 performance and 16 efficiency—powers the system, paired with the RTX 4090 Laptop GPU with 9,728 CUDA cores and 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM. Add 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM and a 2TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD and you have a machine that laughs at demanding titles. Qingchen DIY kept the laptop’s original mainboard and cooling system, a smart move that keeps the GPU below 72°C and the CPU around 65°C even when playing Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K and 60 FPS.
Gaming on this beast is a revelation. God of War (2016) runs over 100 FPS in 4K, Horizon Forbidden West doesn’t even break a sweat. The cooling system, lifted straight from the laptop chassis, keeps these temperatures manageable, but the 174W power draw means the 50Wh battery drains fast. You’ll want to keep this plugged in for long sessions but the trade off is a handheld that can rival a desktop rig.Portability comes with compromises. The device keeps the laptop’s ports—HDMI, Ethernet, USB Type-C, Type-A and an SD card reader—so it’s versatile but huge. You won’t be slipping this into your pocket, this is a handheld for sinking into an armchair or sprawling on a couch. The design, built on a Tongfang chassis, prioritizes function over form but there’s a certain charm in its utilitarian bulk.
What’s cool is Qingchen DIY turned a laptop into something entirely new, since by keeping the original hardware, no custom engineering was needed, just controllers and that big screen. The result is a proof of concept that challenges what a handheld can be. Commercial handhelds like GPD Win 5 or AYANEO Next 2 use integrated graphics like AMD Radeon 8060S, this one uses a discrete GPU. If a modder can build this, what’s stopping NVIDIA from building a dedicated handheld chip? Their upcoming N1-series could in theory be tailored for this form factor.
