One Xplayer Mini Pro review: A powerful, but expensive Steam Deck competitor

Jan 12, 2024

With an AMD Ryzen 7 processor and RDNA2 graphics, the One Xplayer Mini Pro can run a lot of games very well, but it may be hard to justify.

The original One Xplayer Mini that I reviewed earlier this year was a great handheld PC focused on gaming, but this Pro model ups the ante in a few ways. Most notably, it now has an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U, which is a major upgrade thanks to the inclusion of RDNA2-based integrated graphics. This is the same graphics technology inside the Steam Deck, which it makes this a very compelling device.

Indeed, the One Xplayer Mini Pro is very powerful, and it can run all the games I tried on it, though with varying degrees of success. But it was great to find that I could play games on it that I previously could only play through cloud gaming, and you still have that option if you want it. Another big upgrade is the inclusion of hall effect sensor joysticks, which offer increased precision and durability compared to the more common potentiometer joysticks. And, of course, there's RGB lighting this time.

This is a great and very capable gaming handheld, but at the end of the day, if you're looking for a handheld gaming device that's not a Nintendo Switch, the Steam Deck is easily the best option. The price of the One Xplayer Mini Pro is prohibitive for most people, and the Steam Deck has the benefit of having an interface completely designed for a screen of its size. Having to run Windows on such a small screen definitely has some drawbacks.

The One Xplayer Mini Pro is a powerful handheld gaming PC powered by AMD Ryzen 7 processors and RDNA 2 graphics. It also features hall effect sensor joysticks and RGB lighting.

Pros

Cons

Great gaming performance thanks to integrated Radeon graphics

Battery life isn't great for 3D games

Hall effect sensor joysticks are more durable and precise

The price can't compete with the Steam Deck

Very comfortable fit for gaming, plus it's relatively light

The sharp display can impact performance and battery life

The One Xplayer Mini Pro was first announced on Sept. 20, and pre-orders began the next day. You can buy one right now on One Xplayer's website.

The One Xplayer Mini Pro starts at $1,199 MSRP for the base model, which comes with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. From there, you can upgrade the RAM and storage all the way up to 32GB and a 2TB SSD, which will you back $1,549. The starting price is a bit high, but to the company's credit, the storage and RAM upgrades aren't overly expensive.

With a device like this, the design is even more important than it would be with a laptop, and the One Xplayer Mini Pro nails it for the most part. Much like the previous model, the handles on each side have a curved grip, so your hands fit naturally around it. The materials feel solid and the build quality is good, aside from a bit of flex on the back. At 599 grams, the One Xplayer Mini Pro is also noticeably lighter than the Steam Deck, which weighs 669 grams, though it's also much heavier than the 420 grams of the Nintendo Switch OLED model. Still, it's comfortable to hold.

On the topic of design, the One Xplayer Mini Pro looks just like its predecessors, except for one difference. It's a mostly black device with orange accents on some of the buttons, the speaker grills, and around the analog sticks.

It also has RGB lighting on the sides, right where your hands rest. The light can be customized with a few presets in the One Xplayer overlay, though you're only stuck with a few presets. The usefulness of this feature is questionable, especially on a device where battery life is so important, but it does look really nice.

I had a frequent issue where the RGB lights didn't turn on if the device had been plugged into the charger for a long time. Hopefully, there's some kind of update that addresses that, but it's easy enough to fix, you just need to unplug the charger before turning it on, and you can plug it back in once the lights are on.

As for ports, the One Xplayer Mini Pro has two USB4 Type-C ports, though they're limited to 20Gbps. One Xplayer sells a docking station you can use with them, which turns this machine into a proper desktop PC (although you can use any USB-C dock). There's also a USB Type-A port and a headphone jack at the top of the device.

The controls on the One Xplayer Mini Pro feel good with a couple of exceptions. The face buttons and D-pad are all slightly soft, but they still have good actuation and feel comfortable to press. The shoulder buttons (RB and LB) are both very clicky, while the triggers (RT and LT) are comfortable to press with a lot of space for your fingers. They have the right amount of tension, and they don't feel harsh when they're pressed in all the way.

I do feel like the LB and RB are positioned in a way that makes them a little too easy to press accidentally, though. If you rest your index finger along the edge of the device, you may sometimes push it accidentally during tense moments if you tighten your grip.

The analog sticks on the One Xplayer Mini Pro should last a lot longer without drifting.

But let's talk about those analog sticks. The hall effect sensor joysticks are some of the big highlights of this device because just about every other controller, including the Steam Deck's, uses potentiometers, which rely on the contact between two pieces to measure the position of the joystick, which in turn translates to movement in your game. The problem with potentiometers is that the surfaces that make contact are going to wear out over time, and eventually, the potentiometer produces imprecise measurements, which result in unwanted movement — the so-called drift.

Hall effect sensors, on the other hand, determine the position of the joystick by using magnets and measuring the intensity of the magnetic field they produce. This doesn't require contact, which means the analog sticks on the One Xplayer Mini Pro should last a lot longer without drifting. It also results in more precision overall, and it should mean you no longer need to set a dead zone for the analog sticks while playing a game, since there shouldn't be any inaccuracies when measuring the neutral position.

In practice, the joysticks on the One Xplayer Mini Pro feel pretty much like any other joystick, and that's not a bad thing. I did try disabling the controller dead zone in some games and had no problems with unwanted movement. However, I did notice that if you try to press down on them while pointing the stick forward, there's virtually no feedback. You do feel it click when you stop pressing it, but that's not good enough. The button does click properly when it's closer to the neutral position, though.

Keeping in line with previous iterations, the One Xplayer Mini Pro has a 7-inch display with a 16:10 aspect ratio, similar to the Steam Deck. It's slightly taller than a 16:9 screen, which makes it a bit more practical as a tablet, and since it supports touch, it's actually easy to use this way. However, unlike the Steam Deck, which has a resolution of 1280 x 800, the One Xplayer Mini Pro packs a 1920 x 1200 display. The high resolution does mean games look a bit sharper, but I still think that kind of resolution for a screen this small is a mistake.

Having a higher resolution display means it requires more power to drive it, so games will run at lower framerates at native resolution and the battery will drain more quickly. Some people like to poke fun at 720p displays in 2022, but if you want a gaming console that lasts decently long on a charge, it makes the most sense.

Still, this screen is plenty sharp, and it looks good enough for gaming. It's not an overly vibrant display, but a beautiful game like Ori and the Will of the Wisps still looks beautiful on it. It could be better, but it could be worse.

Based on my measurements, the screen covers 96% of sRGB, 80% of Adobe RGB, 82% of P3, and 78% of NTSC. It's not an impressive display, and for how much you're paying for this machine, it's fair to expect better.

As for brightness, One Xplayer touts up to 350 nits, and my unit slightly exceeded that with 361 nits. If you're using the console in bright sunlight, visibility may not be fantastic, but it's mostly mean to be used inside the house most of the time.

However, the contrast of 930:1 at max brightness is not fantastic. It's not atypical for cheaper IPS panels, but again, it would have been nice to see slightly better results at this price.

As for audio, the One Xplayer Mini Pro has a pair of stereo speakers on each side of the display, which are rated at 1.2W. They don't get very loud — even my phone is louder — but I would say it's still loud enough for a device you hold somewhat close to your face while gaming, and I never used it beyond 50% volume.

The configuration One Xplayer sent me to review is an entry-level model, featuring 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. But every model comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U, which includes an integrated Radeon Graphics 680M GPU. This integrated GPU is a huge deal for gaming, and it's the biggest reason I wanted to review this model after the Intel version earlier this year. This GPU is based on the RDNA2 architecture, similar to what's inside the Steam Deck, and it makes a huge difference.

I was able to play Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 without needing to stream through the cloud.

Games that simply wouldn't run on the Intel model are now supported, and they're actually playable. I was able to play Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 without needing to stream through the cloud, and the experience was good. I measured the framerate in a few games using MSI Afterburner, always running at native resolution (1920 x 1200), so here's a rundown of those results.

Game

Graphics settings

Average frame rate

Halo Infinite

Low preset

38FPS

Rocket League

High quality, AA off

60FPS

Apex Legends

High settings

35FPS

Apex Legends

Medium settings

40FPS

Forza Horizon 5

Low preset

60FPS

Forza Horizon 5

Medium preset

49FPS

Grounded

Low preset

24FPS

Grounded

Low preset, FSR Performance

47FPS

No Man's Sky

Standard

47 FPS (with noticeable drops)

Because of the higher resolution of the display, the framerates here are bound to be lower than on the Steam Deck, but I'd consider all of these games playable. The most demanding one was Grounded, which only ran somewhat smoothly with AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) set to Performance, but this created very noticeable visual artifacts. Otherwise, everything ran quite well.

It's worth mentioning that One Xplayer also includes software that lets you change the performance of the CPU and GPU. In all of these tests, the CPU was set to use 15W of power, but it can go up to 28W. I tried this with Halo Infinite and the average frame rate went up slightly to 43FPS, but there's a trade-off in battery life.

I also ran the usual suite of benchmarks to measure the performance, and the One Xplayer Mini Pro performed about as well as you'd expect for an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U. I ran the tests in both 15W and 28W modes, but to keep things brief, the results below are from the 15W runs unless stated otherwise.

One Xplayer Mini Pro AMD Ryzen 7 6800U

One Xplayer Mini Intel Core i7-1195G7

HP EliteBook 865 G9 AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U

PCMark 10 (15W)

5,492

4,862

5,755

PCMark 10 (28W)

6,399

-

-

Geekbench 5 (15W)

1,434 / 6,010

1,545 / 5,152

1,535 / 7,932

Geekbench 5 (28W)

1,514 / 8,075

-

-

Cinebench R23

1,440 / 8,209

1,467 / 4,117

1,506 / 9,908

CrossMark

1,341 / 1,380 / 1,358 / 1,186

-

1,356 / 1,344 / 1,508 / 1,015

3DMark Time Spy

2,063

1,601

2,365

Changing the power level to 28W does result in increased performance in Geekbench 5, and because of that, the One Xplayer Mini can be noticeably faster than larger laptops with the same processor, like the HP EliteBook 865 G9. However, it's noticeably slower in a few tests when set to 15W.

Battery life is where the One Xplayer Mini Pro falls a bit short.

Interestingly, the performance also seems to be unaffected when you unplug the charger, at least when the Windows power mode is set to Best performance. Typically, performance drops a lot when you unplug a device from the charger, but that's not the case here. Performance does go down in the Balanced power mode, though, which makes sense.

It's worth mentioning that the SSD is still a PCIe 3.0 model, so speeds reach around 3,500MB/s. That's still plenty fast, though it would have been nice to see a PCIe 4.0 SSD instead.

Battery life is where the One Xplayer Mini Pro falls a bit short, which is unfortunate for a device like this. That high-resolution display definitely comes at a cost for a device with a relatively small battery. In my YouTube video playback test, it managed 4 hours, 16 minutes, and 21 seconds. In gaming, that goes down even further.

In the tests, I always had the Windows power mode set to Best performance and the display brightness was at what I'd consider comfortable, usually around 30%. Battery saver was also disabled to prevent performance drops while playing, and I did have vibration enabled with the intensity at level 4.

Game

Power setting

RGB lighting

Battery life

Halo Infinite

15W

No

1:36:21

Halo Infinite

28W

No

59:25

Halo Infinite

28W

Yes

59:10

Rocket League

15W

Yes

1:33:38

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

15W

No

1:41:21

Apex Legends

15W

No

1:37:37

No Man's Sky

15W

No

1:39:05

Dead Cells

15W

Yes

2:55:59

Moonlighter

15W

Yes

2:45:05

Halo Infinite (cloud)

15W

Yes

2:59:54

There are a few obvious takeaways here, starting with the fact that the 28W power mode drains battery much more quickly than the 15W mode. Based on Halo Infinite's performance, I'd say the improvement isn't worth it. It's also apparent that games that involve 3D rendering drain the battery far more quickly, which is also to be expected. And for cloud gaming, battery life is actually much better on this model compared to the Intel version I reviewed earlier this year. On the other hand, RGB lighting seems to not have a huge impact on battery life.

There isn't a lot of software preinstalled on the One Xplayer Mini Pro aside from the usual Windows 11 apps. However, there's an app called "oxp," which is an overlay opened by pressing the button on the bottom right, next to the display. Here, you can change the power of the CPU package or adjust the speed of the GPU. You can also manually adjust the fan speed, as well as lower the resolution of the display if you want to get better performance in games.

You can also change the RGB lighting effects, adjust the intensity of the vibration motor, and adjust the brightness and volume. It's nice to have these controls in an easily accessible app while you're in a game.

While it's not really an app, it's also worth mentioning the other buttons next to the screen. The other button on the right lets you bring up the on-screen keyboard, and holding it down enables a special mode where the analog sticks work like a mouse. The left stick controls the cursor and the right stick acts as a scroll wheel, while the A and B buttons serve as a left and right click. The orange button minimizes all your open apps, which can also be useful.

You should buy the One Xplayer Mini Pro if:

You shouldn't buy the One Xplayer Mini Pro if:

For everything I like about this device, I simply can't recommend it to most people. The $1,199 starting price is simply too expensive for what it offers, especially when you look at the Steam Deck and $399 starting point. If you want the same storage, the Steam Deck with a 512GB SSD costs $649, which is still almost half of the One Xplayer Mini Pro.

It's almost impossible to compete with the Steam Deck. Like a console, the Steam Deck is sold on the assumption that you're going to buy games for it on Steam, and Valve gets a cut. That's how most consoles operate, and the hardware is sold at a loss because companies make that money back by selling software. Windows-based handheld PCs simply don't have that luxury. They have to make money on that hardware sale, and these are expensive components.

The only reason you might really want this instead of a Steam Deck is that it's lighter, it has a sharper screen, and it runs Windows out of the box. Still, you're paying a big premium for that privilege, so you have to really want it and have a lot of money.

The One Xplayer Mini Pro is a powerful handheld gaming PC powered by AMD Ryzen 7 processors and RDNA 2 graphics. It also features hall effect sensor joysticks and RGB lighting.

I've been covering the tech world since 2018, and I love computers, phones, and - above all that - Nintendo videogames, which I'm always happy to talk about.