OneXPlayer Mini (Intel i7-1195G7)

Portable systems have appealed to people who want to game on the go since the Nintendo Game & Watch's heyday, and they’ve only gotten more powerful over time. However, there’s always been a gulf between fully functional computers and simple devices that you can hold in your hand (not to mention the lack of physical controls on smartphones). Still, over the last few years, a cottage industry of handheld Windows PCs has emerged, garnering attention from enthusiasts and retro gaming fans who want as much power as possible in a small, battery-powered, screen-and-button-equipped package.

OneXPlayer is one such company producing these systems, and it offers several Windows-powered handhelds in multiple specs and sizes. We tested the Intel i7-powered OneXPlayer Mini, a beefy, little device with a high-resolution, 7-inch screen and respectable specs. It lacks discrete graphics, but its Intel Iris Xe GPU is surprisingly capable. Although its $1,259 price is steep for the 512GB model we tested, it’s in line with other handheld gaming computers and cheap gaming laptops with discrete GPUs.

Unfortunately, the Steam Deck is set to burn that cottage industry down. Valve’s own portable gaming PC offers similar performance for $399 ($649 for the 512GB model), with a superior interface for accessing Steam games, and just as much hacking potential as similar devices. OneXPlayer’s handhelds have been go-to devices for certain gaming enthusiasts due to their rare combination of PC system specs and handheld gaming form factor, but the Steam Deck completely throws off that calculus.

Compact and Comfortable

The OneXPlayer Mini sits squarely between the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck in size, measuring 4.3 by 10.3 by 1.3 inches (HWD) to the Switch’s 4 by 9.4 by 0.6 inches and the Steam Deck’s 4.6 by 11.7 by 1.9 inches. Weighing 21.8 ounces, the OneXPlayer Mini is quite dense for its size; it's nearly half a pound heavier than the Switch, and less than two ounces lighter than the Steam Deck. Its body is plastic, with a matte black finish that feels solid in hand.

The OneXPlayer Mini has a conventional control layout, with off-axis dual analog sticks, A/B/X/Y buttons in an Xbox layout (A on the bottom), a standard direction pad, and two pairs of shoulder bumpers/triggers. It lacks the Steam Deck's touchpads, but it doesn’t place the analog sticks uncomfortably high and parallel with the face buttons and direction pad. The controls feel solid and responsive, similar to the Xbox Wireless Controller.

Besides the active game controls, the OneXPlayer Mini's front holds five menu buttons: the standard start/select (or menu/view, or options/share, depending on your preferred console) buttons near the top, a multipurpose button in the lower-left corner, and keyboard and game assistant (a feature not yet enabled or explained) buttons in the lower-right corner. Front-facing speakers sit below the three bottom menu buttons.

The OneXPlayer Mini's bottom edges holds a USB-C port, a pinhole microphone, and two square notches for an optional keyboard dock. The top edge has another USB-C port, a USB-A port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a power button, and a volume rocker. Vents sit on the top edge and back panel of the system.

The OneXPlayer Mini can be charged over USB-C through either port on the system, though it's a bit finicky in terms of power demands. The system includes a wall adapter with both a 65W PD USB-C port and a USB-A port, but only the former would provide enough power to charge the device. I found no combination of USB-A wall adapter and cable that kept the handheld powered, so make sure you use a properly beefy PD charger.

The Quirks of a Handheld Windows PC

The Intel version of the OneXPlayer Mini features an Intel Core i7-1195G7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and your choice of a 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB of SSD storage. We were sent the 512GB model, which came with the drive pre-partitioned into a 165GB Windows partition and a 300GB Data partition. Although the system can use external storage over USB, it doesn’t have a user-accessible M.2 SSD or even microSD card slot to expand storage. If you want to load it up with games, you should consider getting at least the 1GB model.

The OneXPlayer Mini comes with Windows 11 preinstalled, and this is where a few of the system’s quirks pop up. When I first booted the handheld, Windows 11 launched flawlessly…except the screen was rotated sideways. This wasn't due to automatic rotation in the OS. On a normal PC, fixing this is a simple keyboard shortcut. However, the OneXPlayer Mini's on-screen keyboard doesn’t support those kinds of shortcuts. I had to awkwardly dig into the Windows display settings and manually rotate the desktop, after which the screen worked fine. Fortunately, the touch screen controls worked flawlessly.

With the screen facing in the right direction, I realized what must be a common flaw for Windows-based gaming handhelds like the OneXPlayer Mini: Windows really isn’t intended for a small screen. Even scaling up the display elements to 200%, the Windows 11 desktop was tiny and awkward to navigate. The Steam Deck’s non-Steam KDE environment is also awkward, but that’s a secondary mode to the device’s much more handheld-friendly Big Picture-style mode. 

The display is also a bit cramped for large fingertips, so pairing a mouse or trackball was vital for installing games and software, setting up Epic Game Store and Steam, and just logging into my Microsoft account. Pressing the keyboard button made an on-screen keyboard pop up when I needed to enter login information, but that keyboard often opened over the form I was trying to fill out, and stole the focus from that form in the process. In fact, that made it even harder to type with my fingertip. Fortunately, the keyboard button enables another, more useful feature. Pressing and holding the button switches the game controls from standard XInput commands to mouse inputs, letting you move an on-screen mouse cursor with the left analog stick and click with the A and B buttons. It isn’t as fast as a gaming mouse, but it’s better than a fingertip.

I ended up pairing the OneXPlayer Mini with a wireless keyboard, and using that along with a mouse. Even with my tools connected, I had to uncomfortably lean over the OneXPlayer or connect it to a monitor or TV with a USB-C-to-HDMI adapter (not included) to get anything done with it. So, there are many frustrations that come with installing games on the handheld.

Steam came to the rescue, thanks to its aforementioned Big Picture mode. This interface, designed for use with TVs, is much easier on the eyes on the OneXPlayer Mini’s 7-inch screen than the standard Windows desktop. Plus, it supports gamepads, so you can flip through your game library as if you were navigating on a Nintendo Switch. Steam also supports adding non-Steam games to your library, though you might have to wrestle with them to get them to launch properly in Big Picture (Fortnite required jumping through a few Epic Game Store hoops). And, if you want to use the OneXPlayer Mini as a retro emulation machine, RetroArch has its own handheld-friendly frontend, as well.

The OneXPlayer Mini's Performance

The OneXPlayer Mini is a Windows PC, so we ran most of our usual benchmarks and tests. The Steam Deck, on the other hand, isn’t a Windows system, so only some of our tests offer directly comparable numbers. With that in mind, we also looked at laptops similarly priced to the OneXPlayer Mini.

Starting with PCMark 10, the OneXPlayer achieved an overall score of 5,181 with its full suite of productivity benchmarks, and 1,481 with its storage benchmark. These numbers are a touch behind the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 (5,637 overall, 1,598 storage), but not significantly so. However, they’re quite behind the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7 (6,156 overall, 2,240 storage). The portable system lags far behind the Samsung notebook in Cinebench R23, though, with a multi-core CPU score of 3,580 to the Galaxy Book2’s 8,703 and the Yoga 9i’s 9,164. Additionally, Geekbench 5.4.1 Pro failed to load on the system, so we were unable to get results with that benchmark.

So, for general productivity, the OneXPlayer Mini might be capable in terms of pure power, but video processing will take ages. Unlike laptops with similar components, this device is very clearly not intended for productivity. It lacks a physical keyboard, its screen is too small, and you’d need a USB-C video adapter to make the desktop large enough to work with comfortably.

Portable PC Gaming

Obviously, the OneXPlayer Mini's gaming capabilities are far more important than its productivity chops, and in that field the system’s performance is resoundingly mediocre. In 3DMark, the Night Raid benchmark scores 13,016 and the Time Spy benchmark scores 1,498. This is well behind the Galaxy Book 2 Pro 360’s respective 16,956 and 1,849 scores, and even further behind the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7’s 18,455 and 2,023 numbers. The portable and the notebooks all share the same Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, but the Core i7-1260P CPU in the Samsung and Lenovo notebooks offers more power than the OneXPlayer’s Core i7-1195G7.

For direct gaming performance, the OneXPlayer Mini ran both F1 2021 and Rainbow Six Siege. The games were playable, but they didn't impress on the OneXPlayer Mini. F1 2021 ran at 15 frames per second (fps) at 1080p, which is well below the Steam Deck’s 22fps numbers. Perplexingly, Rainbow Six Siege ran at 38fps at the lowest and highest settings. This could indicate a framerate cap, but 38fps is a strange cap number. We couldn’t run Rainbow Six Siege on the Steam Deck at the time of testing, but the Acer Nitro 5's Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU blows the OneXPlayer Mini out of the water with a 162fps frame rate at ultra quality.

Benchmark qualms aside, the OneXPlayer Mini can run relatively recent PC games. No Man’s Sky runs at 30-40fps with native resolution and the lowest graphical settings; it chugs along at 20fps with high graphical settings. It handheld works, but only about as well as you can expect from integrated graphics.

Monster Hunter Rise performs well enough on the OneXPlayer Mini. At its lowest graphical settings, the game runs at a consistent 60fps. That drops to around 45fps at average settings, and a churning sub-30fps at the highest settings. In short, you'll enjoy playing Monster Hunter Rise on the OneXPlayer Mini, but the system's performance trails the Steam Deck's (it maintained 60fps at average settings on Valve's device).

As a retro emulation handheld, the OneXPlayer Mini is more than qualified. GameCube games played on the Dolphin emulator at 3x resolution (1,920 by 1,584 for a 1080p screen) ran at a rock-solid 60fps. You can expect to see similar performance on the aforementioned laptops, but the OneXPlayer Mini still topped the Steam Deck and its 60fps-with-hiccups 2x Dolphin rendering. There’s enough power in this handheld to run classic games from at least the mid-aughts.

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%, in airplane mode, from full battery power until shut down. The OneXPlayer Mini lasted 5 hours, 44 minutes under these conditions. This is low for midrange laptops (the Lenovo Yoga i9 Gen 7 lasted 14 hours, 53 minutes in testing, though the discrete-GPU-equipped MSI Katana GF66 lasted only 4 hours, 15 minutes), but it seems typical for handheld gaming systems. The Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch OLED Edition can last up to eight and seven hours, respectively. Naturally, playing graphics-intensive 3D games drains the battery much faster than watching video content or playing simple, sprite-based games.

Less Tempting Post-Steam Deck

It’s clear why devices like the OneXPlayer Mini have become a darling of PC gamers and retro game fans. It’s a fully functional Windows PC with solid midrange specs. Although its integrated graphics processor doesn't offer a consistently smooth gaming experience for more recent PC games, it’s more than enough power for retro gaming extending at least into the sixth console generation. These specs in this form factor are rare, which made the OneXPlayer Mini an appealing handheld despite its price.

At least, it was appealing until the Steam Deck launched. Its AMD Zen 2/RDNA 2 SoC gives it comparable gaming power to the OneXPlayer Mini for only $400. The Steam Deck’s single USB-C port causes some consternation, and as a Linux-based system featuring Valve’s own SteamOS operating system, the game compatibility won't be quite as high as the OneXPlayer Mini's Windows 11 OS. Still, the Steam Deck offers surprisingly strong performance for thousands of PC games, including modern ones. Its slightly hidden KDE Linux environment is a hacker's playground, and offers plenty of retro gaming potential thanks to Linux versions of Dolphin and RetroArch. The Steam Deck also lets you install Windows 10 thanks to updated drivers, which arguably makes the OneXPlayer Mini obsolete.

If you want to play a ton of games, including a strong handful of classics, with an even easier interface, the $300 Nintendo Switch ($350 for the superior OLED version) and $200 Switch Lite are both smaller, lighter, and less expensive than either the OneXPlayer Mini or Steam Deck. You can’t run your own software on them or turn them into emulation machines without a lot of risky work involving custom firmware, but they’re excellent in their own right.