I've been a fan of Ayaneo products for the last couple of years. They're well-made, often pack thoughtful accessories in the box (like USB-C to USB-A adapters and multiple plug adapters), and the products themselves are often unique, too. One of my favorite devices I've ever reviewed has been the Ayaneo Flip DS, and one of the best gaming handhelds I still own to this day is the Ayaneo Kun. As a result, when I was offered the Ayaneo 3 for review, I was immensely excited to try it out.

Like nearly every other Ayaneo device before it, the Ayaneo 3 is absolutely fantastic. It fixes the main issues people experienced with Ayaneo handhelds before it, packing fantastic speakers that are the best I've used on any handheld and an improved thermal dissipation so no one part of the device gets too hot. You can even pick up a set of additional controllers to replace the ones in the Ayaneo 3, too, depending on the games that you're playing. It crushes the Steam Deck in every aspect, spec to spec, but there's one major Achilles heel of the Ayaneo 3: the price.

To be clear, if money is no object and you want to get a new gaming handheld, the Ayaneo 3 is one of the best you can get on the market these days. Detachable controllers, a fantastic screen, top-tier performance, and so much more make this the absolute king of gaming handhelds. However, despite its complete dominance compared to the competition, it's significantly more expensive than alternatives. We're talking roughly $900 at full retail price for this device (though it starts at $700 as part of an early-bird deal, before rising to $800 on the company's IndieGoGo campaign), which is nearly twice the price of a Steam Deck OLED.

As a result, while the Ayaneo 3 is fantastic in its own right, that starting price puts it in a territory where it's competing with gaming handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally X and the Lenovo Legion Go. Plus, the starting model is fairly basic in terms of specifications. It comes with 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and the AMD Ryzen 7 8840U, so performance isn't really all too different from what you'll get from those devices. It's a complicated, fantastic, and expensive product, and we'll get into all of it in the course of this review.

About this review: We received the Ayaneo 3 with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and an OLED panel from Ayaneo for the purposes of this review. The company had no input into its contents.

Pricing, availability, and specifications

The Ayaneo 3 starts at $699 in its early-bird pricing for the AMD Ryzen 7 8840U model with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The modular controller kit will also see you back $99 in early-bird pricing. Those starting prices rise to $899 and $139, respectively, with a maxed out version of the Ayaneo 3 packing the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, 64GB of RAM, and 4TB of storage setting you back $2099 at full retail cost.

Keep in mind as well that if you import this device to the United States under new tariffs (HTS 9903.01.20), you will pay an additional 10% on top of existing tariffs that were placed on devices imported from China. In theory, this could mean paying an additional $400 on the highest-end model purchased at retail price, so long as those tariffs are correctly applied.

Design and build quality

Beautiful and ergonomic

Ayaneo has always done a good job when it comes to design and build quality, and the Ayaneo 3 is no different. It feels more premium than the Asus ROG Ally and the Steam Deck, both of which are already well-built handhelds. It uses a soft-touch plastic like its predecessors, with good weight distribution throughout and an ergonomic shape.

It has two USB4 USB-C ports (one on the top and one at the bottom), an OCuLink port, a headphone jack, a fingerprint sensor in the power button, and a microSD card slot at the bottom. There's also a button at the bottom to change how the inputs are recognized. They can be recognized as a keyboard and mouse or as an Xbox controller, and pressing the button will switch between them. The joysticks and triggers are Hall Effect, meaning there's no risk of joystick drift, and I haven't had any issues with dead zones either. Finally, the speakers are front-facing on the bottom left and the bottom right, and they sound fantastic.

These speakers are a big improvement over the Ayaneo 2S, and to go a step further, they're the best speakers I've used on a gaming handheld. They get plenty loud with no distortion, and there's no risk of covering them up with your hands or in a blanket if you're gaming in bed or on a couch. The vibration motor is similarly improved. I disabled it on the Ayaneo 2S because it was loud and borderline useless for true haptic feedback, whereas it's actually decent here.

The display is a big step up, too. We got a unit with a 1920x1080 OLED display, which gets up to 800 nits of brightness and up to a 144Hz refresh rate. The LCD version of this display can go up to 120Hz, goes up to 500 nits of brightness, and also supports VRR. For the most part, I'd rather have an OLED panel instead of an LCD panel, even if the LCD panel has VRR support.

The biggest downside of the Ayaneo 3 is its battery, coming in at a rather measly 49Wh. Competitors like the Asus ROG Ally X pack a massive 80Wh battery. You won't get long gaming sessions with TDP maxed out on this device, though the HX 370 chip is more power-efficient than the 8840U variant. Plus, Ayaneo has an option called "Bypass charging" in the settings so that you can play this directly off of the included wall charger instead of using the battery if you wish.

Finally, Ayaneo has packed gyro controls in this device that actually work. I had immense trouble with gyro controls in past Ayaneo devices, but they work perfectly here. There's no option to enable them when you're pressing on the thumbstick (like the Steam Deck), but you can enable them so they're only active when holding down a trigger button if you don't want them on all of the time. For games like DOOM: Eternal, I find gyro controls to be significantly better when aiming, but games like Little Kitty: Big City are easier to control without it.

Magic Module controls

The most unique part of this device

The most interesting part about the Ayaneo 3 is its Magic Modules. These are modules that you can use to swap out the physical controllers that are in your handheld, replacing them with controllers that might have a different thumbstick, a touchpad instead of a thumbstick, or even a fighting game button layout if you want to play games like Street Fighter or Tekken. It's a really cool concept, and I'm so impressed with how it's been done here.

To disconnect the currently connected controllers, you need to use AyaSpace to eject them. I haven't been able to find any way around this, and it's quite a strange omission given that Ayaneo typically loves to pack everything and the kitchen sink in these devices to appease enthusiasts. There's no physical control to eject them, so without AyaSpace, there's no hope of popping them out. I'm sure there'll be a third-party solution eventually (after all, it's likely just a call to a driver to release them), but it's a strange thing to leave out.

On that note, these are still just recognized as an Xbox 360 controller by default. That's both a good and a bad thing; it's good in the sense that they'll work with anything that supports an Xbox 360 controller, but it's bad in the sense that you're limited by what an Xbox 360 controller can do. The touchpad, when in Game Mode (which maps everything to an Xbox control for you), will act as a joystick, meaning when you swipe across on it and stop moving, you'll still continue turning in-game as if it were a joystick you held in place. I remapped the touchpad in keyboard and mouse mode to use it as an actual mouse, but it seemed as if that remapping wasn't respected by the system until I restarted the device. Even with that, you'll still need to then remap other inputs, too, just to make desktop mode work in those games.

Still, even with those limitations, the ability to swap out controllers is undoubtedly cool. There are genuine uses for this, and I have faith in Ayaneo to improve the experience as time goes on. After all, AyaSpace is already in a much better position than it was when I first started using it on the Ayaneo 2S. AyaSpace 3 is one of the best game overlays I've used on a gaming handheld, beaten only by the Steam Deck and all of its software integrations.

Performance and battery life

Marked improvements

The Ayaneo 3 that we're reviewing has the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 inside, marking a significant departure from the typical Z1 (Extreme)/7740U/8840U that you'll find in most handhelds. Those chips all perform similarly to each other, whereas this is a newer generation of CPU. I used Cyberpunk 2077 as my primary benchmark, so that you can get an idea of how it performs in a reasonably intensive game.

First and foremost, I ran the game with the Ayaneo 3's TDP set to 35W, and the game's graphics set to ultra. This is a fairly unreasonable workload, especially given that you wouldn't expect most gamers to want to max out a game like that on the go in order to preserve the battery. The graph above shows the frametime chart when running the game's built-in benchmark, with my data showing 99% of frames were drawn at 69.31ms or quicker.

This is pretty impressive, so I switched to a workload likely more representative of what someone might want to play on the Ayaneo 3. I set the graphics preset to Steam Deck, and decreased the wattage to 17W using its "Balanced" power mode.

This is a completely playable experience, which is incredible when compared to the likes of the 7840U. My data showed that 99% of frames were drawn at 61.76ms or quicker, making it a completely playable experience at 30 FPS.

At 1080p, you would need a higher wattage to achieve the same performance on the Asus ROG Ally without any additional trickery like using FSR or frame generation. You could run the game at 720p for an even better experience at 17W.

Finally, I tested Cyberpunk 2077 on the Steam Deck preset at 8W just to demonstrate how it runs. To be clear, this was not a playable experience, really, as 99% of frames were drawn at 176.79 ms or quicker. This is equivalent to roughly 6 FPS, but I was running the game in 1080p, and again, I wasn't using any additional features like FSR or frame generation. Do I think Cyberpunk will ever be playable at this TDP on the Ayaneo 3? Probably not, but it comes close enough to give you an idea of the level of performance you can get out of the Ayaneo 3 at lower TDPs, especially when compared to competitors.

In terms of battery life, the Ayaneo 3 disappoints. As I already mentioned, it packs a rather measly battery when compared to the competition. While the fact that you can play many games at a lower TDP than you could on competitors softens the blow significantly, it's still disappointingly small. I suppose the justification for it might be that at a lower 17W TDP to get the same performance in Cyberpunk as you might on a competitor at 25W essentially grants the user a battery life better than those competitors. Despite that, it still can't make up for the massive battery delta between this device and the ROG Ally X or even the MSI Claw 8.

On the bright side, Ayaneo's inclusion of a bypass charging mode in order to run the handheld off of a power connector directly is fantastic and can go a long way when it comes to preserving your battery's health. That, and a built-in software limitation so that you can limit the battery percentage when charging can protect your battery.

Finally, Ayaneo has a number of options here to modify your performance further, including changing the clock speed of the CPU and GPU or increasing your VRAM in settings.

AyaSpace 3 and Windows 11

AyaSpace 3 has improved by leaps and bounds since the first iteration I used with the Ayaneo 2S. It's no longer laggy and slow like it used to be, and the translations have been improved significantly since that iteration. It's still a little bit clunky, but it's actually one of the better software suites I've used on one of these handhelds. You can control practically every aspect of the device, which I also greatly appreciate from Ayaneo, as many options are clearly integrated in order to cater to enthusiasts who want to get even more out of their device.

There's also a new True Pause function, which will pause non-foreground processes in order to free up resources. For example, if you were playing a game but wanted to take some time to look something up, the game would be paused on a process level in order to prevent it from draining resources in the background.

One of the best features Ayaneo has implemented though is the button to switch between desktop and game mode. There's a new third option, custom mode, which will activate keyboard and mouse emulation on the desktop and turn back into an Xbox controller when you enter a game. That means you don't need to switch between them all the time manually, and it's actually been pretty reliable in my testing since I started using this device.

Should you buy the Ayaneo 3?

The Ayaneo 3 is a bit of an enigma of a device. It's powerful, it's beautiful, it's sleek, it's innovative... but it's expensive. You're going to be spending a lot of money to pick up one of these — so much, in fact, that you'll be spending probably twice the price of a Steam Deck at retail price and a significant chunk more than the likes of the Asus ROG Ally, too. With the HX 370, it's one of the most powerful gaming handhelds on the market, but that doesn't mean there won't be alternatives in the future.

As a result, as much as I love the Ayaneo 3, it's hard to recommend, thanks to the price alone. If money is no object, then I wholeheartedly recommend this gaming handheld, but I know that isn't the case for most people. That's also why I wouldn't buy it; there are significantly cheaper options available to me, so if I were to purchase a gaming handheld, I just couldn't justify it. That's not the same for everyone, though; maybe you feel like the price is worth it to you. After all, price judgment is inherently personal.

The Ayaneo 3 is a premium product at a premium price, and as always, the biggest criticism when it comes to Ayaneo products is the pricing. I love it, and I'll continue to use it, but the price makes it prohibitive for the general masses.

You should buy the Ayaneo 3 if:

• You want one of the most powerful gaming handhelds on the market
• You want controllers that you can swap out for different games
• You want a sleek gaming handheld

You shouldn't buy the Ayaneo 3 if:

• The cost seems too high