Acer Brings Two New Nitro Gaming Handhelds To CES
Handheld gaming PCs have seen a huge resurgence over the past couple of years thanks to the Steam Deck, and now Acer is bringing two more to market at CES with the Nitro Blaze 8 and the Nitro Blaze 11. As you can guess, the numbers denote the sizes of the display that come with each unit.
Acer makes lots of PC gaming products already, and three of its biggest competitors in the space, ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI, all have their own gaming handhelds. ASUS and MSI even have revised models that have been released, and Lenovo is rumored to be announcing a new one in the near future.
These two new models won’t be Acer’s first time targeting handheld buyers. However, its first unit, the Nitro Blaze 7, hasn’t even been released yet. It was announced back in September 2024 at IFA, but Acer never confirmed a price or availability. It’s also worth noting that these two new handhelds will be adding more choices for consumers. And that’s potentially a good thing. It is possible, however, that too many choices could overwhelm consumers and cause them to go with a competitor.
Then again, Acer is also the only major brand making a handheld with a massive 10.95-inch display. So maybe it’ll be able to carve out a piece of the pie in that niche market segment.
The Acer Nitro Blaze 11 handheld is HUGE
Right now most handheld gaming PCs are sitting around the 8 or 8.8-inch display size mark. You’ll also find options at 7 inches. These are all from major brands like MSI, ASUS, Lenovo, and Valve with its Steam Deck. Even Acer’s own Nitro Blaze 7 has a 7-inch display. Between these major brands though, none of them are going any bigger. Until now. The Acer Nitro Blaze 11 comes with a staggeringly huge 10.95-inch display.
That doesn’t sound too big considering plenty of people play mobile games on a tablet, and some tablets get as big as 12 inches. In the grand scheme of things though, a nearly 11-inch handheld gaming PC just appears bigger, perhaps because of the extra hardware and the integrated controllers.
Either way, this isn’t the handheld for those who want to be ultra-portable. Its bigger size and stature are going to make it a lot tougher to fit in a bag. And just to carry it around you might need to settle for using a backpack or messenger bag. All of this aside, the bigger display is probably going to make games look amazing while you play them. The screen also has a 2560 x 1600 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. If you want a higher refresh rate, the Nitro Blaze 8 goes up to 144Hz, and its display is 8.8 inches with the same resolution.
Disappointingly, both models only come with a 55Wh battery. And that bigger display is likely going to require more juice to provide players with any sort of longevity for demanding games. Time will tell though. In terms of other specs, it has 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 2TB of storage. So it’s certainly impressive on the storage front.
The Nitro Blaze 8 has mostly the same specs
Other than the screen size, refresh rate, and weight, the 8.8-inch model is mostly the same when it comes to hardware. Both devices use the AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS CPU and the Radeom 780M GPU. The RAM and storage are the same, they both support Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, and even have the same speakers and button placements. That being said, the Nitro Blaze 11 does have one unique trick in that its controllers are detachable.
Overall, they’re the same device with just a few tweaks. Mostly surface-level tweaks at that. It’ll be interesting to see which handheld out of the two does better for Acer. In terms of availability, Acer says both handhelds will launch in Q2 2025. The Nitro Blaze 8 will start at $899.99, and the Nitro Blaze 11 will start at a whopping $1,099.99. Both should be available from Acer and retail partners.
