GPD’s monster Strix Halo handheld requires a battery ‘backpack’ or a 180W charger

Yesterday, I mentioned how GPD is teasing the most potent handheld yet made — a GPD Win 5 that will house the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip, with AMD’s most powerful integrated graphics yet, inside a PlayStation Vita-shaped machine.

If you’ve been wondering how that huge chip could even fit, handheld expert Cary “The Phawx” Golumb now has the answer: the 7-inch handheld will apparently have no internal battery taking up space. The Win 5 is designed to either be plugged into the wall, with a gaming laptop sized 180-watt charger providing the juice — or powered by a big 80 watt-hour external battery “backpack” that will (only? additionally?) sold separately.

We can see the full spec sheet for the new Win 5 in the Phawx’s video, and as he notes, GPD had to make its Win 5 larger than the Win 4 even before you add that backpack battery.

While the Win 4 is a compact 6-inch handheld with a 45 watt-hour pack, the Win 5 with its 7-inch screen will be narrower but thicker than the Asus ROG Ally X handheld — which is an apt comparison, considering that handheld similarly pairs a 7-inch screen with an 80 watt-hour battery pack.

Here, though, the battery will add extra girth: it’s roughly 4 inches (110mm) wide and tall, and 0.7 inches (18mm) deep; it’s not clear how it attaches yet, as GPD has only shared the one dark video of the Win 5 filmed from the front, but the spec sheet mentions a “Battery to Host Dedicated Connector” as an accessory, so it might require plugging in a cable.

If you’re curious what the handheld’s controls might look like in better light, I tried brightening it up:

Other intriguing things we can see in the full spec sheet include:

• A 120Hz variable refresh rate screen, where the Win 4 was limited to 60Hz
• Two configs: AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (16C/32T/ Radeon 8060S) or AI Max 385 (8C/16T/ Radeon 8050S)
• 32, 64, or even the full 128GB of unified memory AMD offers for these chips
• USB-4 with 100W PD charging and 8K/60 DP output
• Two fans and four heat pipes for cooling
• An optional HDMI and USB dock with a “battery charging slot,” presumably for the external battery
• No mention of any integrated keyboard, whereas previous Win devices had a hidden keyboard underneath a sliding screen

You can peruse the whole sheet at your leisure in the Phawx’s video or the screenshots we took from Phawx (with his permission) below. Be sure to tap a couple of times to make them large enough for full reading.