I Love Handhelds, But I’m Worried the RAM Crisis is Going to Kill Them

Over the last five years or so, handheld gaming PCs have become one of my favorite ways to play games. And, it helps that they’ve been getting better pretty much every year, thanks both to more powerful hardware – shout out to the Intel Arc G3 Extreme – and both Microsoft and Valve improving their respective operating systems.

If I was able to totally ignore costs, I’d straight up just say that the handhelds that have come out in the last year are incredible, almost across the board. The Xbox Ally X brought a controller-friendly UI to Windows for the first time and the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, thanks to its incredible innards, is able to play games at higher than minimum settings with a framerate that doesn’t give me motion sickness.

But I can’t ignore the price, can I? Even though the Xbox Ally X somehow hasn’t gone up in price (yet), the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ will set you back $1,799. And for that price, the calculus gets really hard to justify.

Let’s go back in time a little bit. Before the Steam Deck came out, I dabbled with the Nintendo Switch a little bit, but for some reason, most of Nintendo’s games have never really clicked with me. So most of the time I’d buy games I already owned on Steam, like Shovel Knight and Stardew Valley, just for the privilege of taking them on the go with me.

The Steam Deck changed everything. Yeah, it was a little bulkier, but that made it more comfortable in my hands, and I no longer had to re-buy my favorite games just to play them on a handheld. The only real problem was that if I wanted to play a graphics-intense AAA game, I’d have to scale down the resolution and the settings to the bottom, while still living with 30-40 fps a lot of the time.

It was still worth taking my indie games with me, and it even led to me just playing more indies in general, because I could be more flexible with how and when I was playing them. But as time went on, new handhelds to rival the Steam Deck started hitting the market. The original ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go made 1080p gaming a bit more viable, but they were still based on the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme. And while that chip had more graphics cores than the Steam Deck, it was still built on the RDNA 3 graphics architecture, which was already a year old when the Z1 Extreme first came out.

Then, at CES 2025, Lenovo showed off the Legion Go S, which would end up being the first non-Valve handheld officially powered by SteamOS. At Lenovo’s booth, I crossed paths with Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais, who told me for the first time that Valve was waiting for a “true next-generation” chip for the Steam Deck 2. At the time I thought the Z2 Extreme would have been it, but that certainly didn’t end up being the case.

The first handheld I tested with the Z2 Extreme was the Legion Go 2, and it was actually a little bit disappointing. It was faster than the Z1 Extreme, but AMD decided to release its “next-gen” handheld chip with an RDNA 3.5 GPU, rather than opting for RDNA 4. That did lead to better battery life, but there were several tests where the Legion Go 2 was slower than the ROG Ally X, despite the latter’s older chip.

At this point, it was clear I needed to brace myself for a long stretch of incremental growth. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – after all, that just meant that people would be able to get their hands on slightly older handhelds without losing much in the way of performance. But at CES 2026, Intel announced Panther Lake, its new mobile CPU lineup with incredible integrated graphics. From the moment I got my hands on the Asus ZenBook Duo, I knew I wanted that chip in a handheld.

Gaming hardware has grown more expensive than ever across the board. Luckily, the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ came out about 6 months later with the Arc G3 Extreme, which is basically a Panther Lake chip with some of the CPU cores disabled. That handheld blew every Z2 Extreme-powered device out of the water, but unfortunately it also came out during the ongoing RAM crisis, when gaming hardware has grown more expensive than ever across the board.

I’m not sure how much the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ would have cost in the before-times, but its predecessor, the MSI Claw 8 AI+, launched for about $899 before seeing its price jump up a few times in 2025. The 8 EX AI+ does wipe the floor with its predecessor, and even has a much better software experience, but I’m not sure it justifies more than double the price.

But at the very least, the Claw 8 EX AI+ can at least claim that it has the absolute best performance in a mainstream handheld gaming PC. That alone might convince people with deep enough pockets to make that investment, at least for now.

In a similar story, in recent months the Lenovo Legion Go 2 exploded in price too. Lenovo’s OLED-strapped handheld now costs $1,999 on Best Buy, even more expensive than the Claw 8 EX AI+ despite its weaker performance. You can find Lenovo’s handheld on Best Buy for $1,334 as an open-box model, but that’s with the weaker non-extreme AMD Ryzen Z2.

It’s not just the fancy top-end handhelds that have been going up in price, either. I just knocked the incredible Steam Deck off my list of the best handhelds for the first time since it came out in 2022, because it just got too expensive. Valve raised the price by up to $300, so you now have to spend $789 at minimum to get your hands on a new, non-used one. That’s just not worth it, at least in a world where the non-X Xbox Ally still costs $599.

Asus’ two Xbox handhelds are the only bright spot for handhelds right now. Whether you have the budget for a $600 handheld or a $1,000 one, the Xbox Allies are the only decent deal right now. But I can’t shake the feeling that Asus is eventually going to raise the prices on those too. Asus has already raised the price in some regions, according to Windows Central, even though the US is exempt so far.

Just like with the Steam Machine, RAM makes up more of the cost of a handheld gaming PC than a more powerful rig, just due to the lower cost of the chips. If the cost of 32GB of RAM goes from $150 to more than $400, that’s going to raise the price on an $800 handheld more than it would a $3,000 tower with an RTX 5080. We’ve already seen the Steam Deck’s demand crumple after Valve raised the price, and while I haven’t seen any data on the Lenovo Legion Go 2, I can only imagine that’s slowed down as well.

Before the prices started going up, something like the Steam Deck was appealing as a secondary device, that’s certainly how I used it. But once you start nearing a thousand bucks, it’s only natural to expect something with a bit more oomph to it. Now, with prices being the way they are, more powerful hardware is also getting more expensive, so the difference between a handheld and a tower hasn’t actually changed all that much. But, it sure seems like it has, and that feels like Kryptonite to handheld PCs in general.

It’s tempting, then, to just hide my head in the sand until the RAM crisis abates. But I’m increasingly skeptical that prices are going to go back down. The big three RAM companies have already reportedly sold through their manufacturing capacity for 2027, so memory prices aren’t going to let up any time soon. So I’m stuck in this weird place where I’m super excited to see what future handhelds are able to do, but terrified at how much they’re going to cost. Because if they get too expensive, we might get to the point where the Lenovos and Asuses of the world no longer deem handhelds viable.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra