So far 2022 has had a focus on lightweight portable gaming. We've seen the successful launch and continued support of Valve's Steam Deck as well as some lovely looking little gaming laptops announced. Streaming games has also seen a tonne of attention to make gaming even easier on the go, no matter your hardware.
Then there's even specialised accessories like these cool wearable glasses screens to go with all that. But apparently none of this is quite enough for PC maker Zotac.
Zotac is usually known for its graphics cards, mini PCs, and of course, making PCs into VR backpacks. It definitely made sense with efforts like its previous VR backpack, especially before wireless Virtual Reality was really able to take off. But in this, the year of portable PC gaming, otherwise known as 2022 it seems an odd choice. Still the madlads have done it once again but there are some interesting changes to the hardware.
As HotHardware details, the new Zotac VR Go 4.0 houses a previous gen Intel Core i7-11800H CPU paired with the interesting choice of an RTX A4500. That's a workstation level GPU with 20GB of GDDR6 memory. This is something you'd be more likely to see developers, engineers, and other designers after rather than gamers.
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The backpack PC comes with 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB M.2 SSD that can be expanded. There's also plenty of ports including a memory card reader, which further points to a portable workstation more than it necessarily screams VR game machine.
To power this there are two 6,000 mAh batteries that can be hot swapped. They're said to give about 50 minutes total game time all up. That's not heaps but you could always pack a few extras for long haul trips. Though that will bring the price even higher on what we already expect to be a pretty pricy piece of kit.
This is a super niche machine. It boasts bringing high-end quality PC Virtual Reality to a more portable machine. Given things like the Oculus Quest 2 exist and do an excellent job, that's already a pretty niche market Zotac is targeting. Add the odd specs to the package and this is definitely one of the weirder prebuilt backpack PCs we've seen.
