AYN Odin 3 Review

The Snapdragon 8 Elite handheld is here

The Snapdragon 8 Elite handheld is here, and it’s called the AYN Odin 3.

All of the power of the most powerful Android processor available, with cooling and you can have a hell of a time playing some games.

That being said, the 8 Elite is still early for a lot of emulators and games, so there’s a lot of compatibility issues to deal with as well that in a lot of cases, don’t make this a better device than a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 or Snapdragon G3 Gen3.

So is the Odin 3 worth your money today – not in one month, or six months, but today?

Price, specs & Display

Besides having the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, the Odin 3 has 8GB/12GB/16GB and 24GB RAM options, with 128GB/256GB/512GB and 1TB storage sizes. The 128GB option is UFS3.1 whereas the others are UFS4.0.

It does have a gorgeous 6” AMOLED 1920x1080p 120hz display, the same that is currently in the AYN Thor and that also does mean you get the same level of image retention that has. It’s important to mention this for anyone that it might affect and would be bothered by image retention. I personally haven’t found it to be an issue on the Thor, or the Odin 3 when actually playing games, but it’s a definite negative to the screen. 

It does have a fingerprint sensor, bringing back the Odin 2 feature and it seems to work quite well with recognizing my thumb, even with the TPU shell attached. 

The fan

We do have active cooling via the fan, which you can set to quiet, smart and sport mode. The fan is a touchy topic, it has a significant high pitched noise that you can hear from multiple feet away and when next to you, is even more of a problem. You would have to go out of your way to not notice the high pitched ringing of the fan and to be clear, it’s most apparent at the highest mode, but it’s audible in Smart mode as well as it ramps up, so there’s no escaping it besides being in quiet mode. 

Normally, for devices like this, I would say you’d never hear the fan due to the games you’re running, but since it’s the 8 Elite and it’s entire purpose is running things like Switch emulation, GameHub and Windows emulation and so on – emulation that basically requires cooling, it is a massive negative for the device to the point where I just can’t use it. 

I will say it’s bad enough that I just leave the device in quiet mode and deal with the heat instead so I don’t have to hear the fan. 

Battery Life

There is an 8000mAh battery, and battery life on this is absolutely fantastic, I did a few tests compared to the Odin 2 Portal which is the closest comparable minus the screen difference. 

Looking at idle drain over a 24 hour period and we have a pretty typical 3-4% on both, nothing really separating them. 

Then the first system test was something light, I picked GBA, standard performance mode, smart fan mode, 100% brightness and 10% audio, and I had to stop the test, it was taking way too long. We’re talking 14+ hours for both, maybe more. 

In Switch, with high performance on, smart fan mode, 100% brightness and 10% audio, using Captain Toad as the benchmark game, battery life was 263 minutes for the Odin 2 Portal or 4:23, but the Odin 3 kept going to 322 minutes or an extra hour basically. That’s crazy efficiency. 

Then I did another test with Gamehub, same game on both, high performance mode on, smart fan mode, 100% brightness and 10% audio, using Dispatch as the benchmark game, battery life was 272 minutes or 4:32 for the Odin 2 Portal and the Odin 3 was 142 minutes or 2 hours 22 minutes. 

I actually did this test twice because it made no sense, but the Odin 3 is using up more battery in GameHub than the Portal and Thor by quite a large margin. 

We have the same settings on all three devices here, Thor, Portal and Odin 3, and the Odin 3 is using an absolute ton more wattage which is causing the problem. The two 8gen2’s are around 10w or less, whereas the Odin 3 during my battery tests was 16-17w and even on camera when trying to record it after, was always higher than the other two. 

I then cross referenced some other devices, and most games seemed to be just the same on all three, but Dispatch and a few others are using a ton more power for some reason so I guess the answer for battery with GameHub is it depends, but it may not always be better than the 8 Gen 2. 

Streaming

One of main benefits to the Snapdragon 8 Elite is its decoding capabilities for streaming with Apollo and Artemis, and combined with the WiFi 7 chip, this is downright the best Android handheld on the market for streaming by a numbers perspective. This beats or matches my ROG Xbox Ally X for streaming numbers, a feat that is just crazy to talk about. Many people might have issues with the 6” screen for streaming, but for straight performance, it’s awesome.

Streaming would be a great reason to buy this, if you’re okay with the 6” screen, since you can keep the fan on Quiet mode and enjoy the decoding benefits. 

And lastly of course, we have the video output which allows you to dock this to a TV, and get up to 4K60 video through it. You can connect multiple controllers, and have a relaxed docked experience, turn on charging separation to keep the battery safe and only charge the device and that all works just fine.

Controls & Ergonomics

When we look at the actual Odin 3, one of the new upgrades here is the full sized sticks or more accurately, taller sized sticks. It does feel like they just increased the pole length, made them taller, and left everything else the same. Like my Odin 2 Portal with the bigger sticks, this feels like an improvement and feels really good.

The dpad seems to be the same as the AYN Thor, and a bit smaller than the Odin 2 Portal, but it’s the same Odin 2 style dpad they’ve been using for years. It’s still accurate, still good to use and not loud at all. 

Speaking of loudness, the buttons are absolutely silent. No noise at all, which should make people happy that found other AYN devices to be too loud. I’m a big fan of the buttons though, once again same as the Thor’s, just without the noise. 

At the top, we have loud clicky L1 and R1 shoulder buttons, and some really good triggers that work for both racing games and shooters. 

All in all, these are awesome controls – it feels like an Odin 2 Portal that’s been compacted into a smaller form factor, but without the offset controls. 

On the topic of ergonomics, I do find that the device is comfy enough for the size, it seems just fine, but the TPU shell that AYN provided completely makes the device comfortable. I hate having to say that an accessory is necessary for comfort, but having used the TPU shell since I got it, there’s no way I’d use this without it. It’s a must have accessory, and with it, it becomes a very comfortable device. 

Speakers

On the speakers front, AYN has always had pretty good speakers – with the Odin 2 Portal having really good speakers for these types of handhelds. That does continue here, have a quick listen.

It’s loud, pretty boomy and sounds pretty good to my ears. 

Performance

And then we get to the performance, and yeah this is where things really get confusing or where the actual trouble is. I think most people know the 8 Elite is still early days, we don’t have mature support for it, and that’s very apparent by the state of emulation on this device.

We have to start with RetroArch, yep you’d think that we could skip the easiest emulators to run, but we can’t. The mGBA core by default black screens, with the game playing in the background. You have to go in and change it to Vulkan for that core to get around it. Not something needed on any other device and there’s likely more cores that need this same switch, although some cores don’t have a Vulkan option.

Swanstation was a similar problem except it crashes RetroArch with openGL, loads with Vulkan. 

Like Nintendo 64 games via any RetroArch cores. They just load to a black screen, with no actual fix as of yet because Vulkan doesn’t fix it. You can use the standalone M64Plus FZ emulator to get around this, but RetroAchievements users will not be happy with that of course or anyone that just wants to use RetroArch for N64. 

There’s a lot more cores in RetroArch, and they may or may not have problems as well. 

Then we get to the individual emulators and let’s start with PPSSPP – and I tried to go through a bunch of different games, looking for what might break, but it seems to run just fine. You can upscale PPSSPP to the moon, the games look great, this all works just fine and we can move on past it. 

Jumping into NetherSX2 for PS2 and this plays great. For example, The Getaway, at least the beginning, is no longer a stuttery mess even on native resolution. This is something that improves upon the Odin 2 Portal and the 8 Gen 2. I was able to clock a lot of games at a 6x resolution with minimal dips, which you wouldn’t really use unless you were docking to a 4K TV, but just to show the power you have here. 1080p, like it’s predecessors is more than capable here minus the usual problem games, but the power of the Odin 3 does help quite a bit. Nether seems to be using a lot of the 8 Elite’s power without any pushback in the games I tested. 

On the opposite end though, we have GameCube and Wii and this is where things get bad. I didn’t have much problem with GameCube games, they all run well, upscaled and perfectly – Pokemon Colosseum had graphic issues with Vulkan, but was fixed with OpenGL. That’s all great and awesome and you can upscale GameCube like PS2 to 1080p and beyond, and have a hell of a time playing games. 

But the Wii was a different story. Games like New Super Mario Bros. had massive graphical glitches, same with Super Paper Mario and so on. These are games that just work on other devices, and they just don’t here due to compatibility. 

If you jump into Dolphin’s settings, and turn on Exclusive Ubershaders, it did end up fixing both, but is now using up some more power to run Wii. 

Turns out, there’s actually two fixes to this – using ubershaders or a setting called Manual Texture Sampling. Neither of these are things you need to do on other devices though, including devices half the cost of this one. 

Switch

Then we jump into Switch emulation, and the 8 Elite continues my most hated trend of you needing to have like four different Switch emulators to test each game to see what works best. On my livestream, I had Eden and Citron, the most up to date public builds, Eden was having massive graphical issues, that sometimes got fixed in Citron, but then there was games that were broken in both. I had games just straight crash in both, which is the usual thing with Switch emulation.

This is with or without custom drivers, didn’t solve it. A member of the Eden team suggested I install the Eden Nightly version and try that, and then other users suggested Kenji NX and some other fork and that’s like six forks, but I can’t count. 

I say all of this to set you up for what you will have to deal with in this scenario with this device, but using the Eden nightly, I had the same exact issues – graphical glitches in each Pokemon game and others, Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom issues, all of it. 

None of these, as of this review, are fixable. So Switch compatibility, currently, is a bit of a mess. 

GameHub

Then we get to GameHub and this is where I had the most success. Games like Metaphor Refantazio, ran out of the box at 40-60FPS which is just insane and played great. Deeprock Galactic Survivor, another game that ran great, but the temps get super hot with GameHub.

Octopath Traveler 2 was playing fine, but with some graphical glitches in certain parts. 

Witcher 3 had some graphical glitching as you can see in the background while playing, which again, seems like something that’s going to happen with quite a number of games, but otherwise seemed to play decently. GameHub didn’t sync my save so I’m just at the start. 

Triangle Strategy as far as I can tell played awesome and this was super cool to see. 

I just bought Dragon Quest 3 HD2D this week and loaded it up, seems to play just perfectly and as usual, this is super impressive stuff. 

Dragon Quest XI S did not play perfectly, it’s playable I think, if you cap it to 30FPS and that’s pretty surprising.

Lastly I tried some Trails in the Sky and that played super well as well. I was actually shocked at how well all of these played, and if the fan wasn’t obnoxious, I may actually have played a few of these on the actual device.

Heat

Important to note – GameHub temps are inaccurate, but AYN’s slideout panel seems to be more accurate to the experience and you generally max out at around 70ish celsius with the fan just blasting. Although I have seen it go as high as 75 degrees. 

One awesome thing – you don’t really feel the heat. You hear the fan, but no heat on the device really, which has been pretty great. 

GameHub became tough to test because I have the Pro model with 256GB of internal storage, and that gets eaten up really quick by these games, but it was super impressive to see these games even running via GameHub, nevermind at really good framerates. Just, heat, they get hot. 

I did a separate video for the Thor on some awesome games that don’t heat the device up to a crazy amount that may help you instead. But otherwise, this is all hit and miss, there’s a lot of games that run, run well and there’s games that don’t even start, but when they do, most run very very well.

The story of the AYN Odin 3

And I guess that’s the story of the Odin 3. When a game runs without issues, it runs very, very well, but it’s hit and miss. More miss than hit. This device is like getting yourself a Ferrari and only being able to drive in a school zone while you wait a few months for the city to expand the roads and then finally a highway in a year or so. 

But by the time the city completes all of that, the new Ferrari is out and it’s better than the one you couldn’t drive for that entire time. 

Where previous AYN Odin series devices like the Odin 2, Odin 2 Mini and Odin 2 Portal were kings of their domain when they came out, this device feels more like a prince in waiting.

For a flagship device, it doesn’t feel like a flagship device and that’s really my biggest problem with the Odin 3. I kept waiting for it to wow me, with something, the same way the Odin 2, Odin 2 Mini, Odin 2 Portal and Thor wow’d me when I got them.

In this case, it should be the power and instead I’m left feeling like all I did was dodge and fix problems the entire time. A device like this should be an improvement over the last, and it’s a bit weird to go from an Odin 2 or Odin 2 Portal where everything just works to its successor where a lot doesn’t.

But I do kind of want to be very clear about something, AYN did a great job here besides the fan and so I don’t blame that all for their choice of processor, or the issues surrounding it. They’re doing everything they can by sending developer units and so on to help with this, and the actual hardware here is great. 

However, even if the 8 Elite was to magically be fixed, I would not be able to live with this fan noise – it is simply just way too much without a way to avoid it. It really is unfortunate to have that be the achilles heel of this device if everything else gets solved. 

The Odin 3 is an early access device – the software is the limitation and any buyers of this will be the type that want to tinker, want to wait for that next new emulator update that fixes the old update, improves framerates by a few and continues that trend.

For everyone else, I highly suggest looking at the AYN Thor or the AYN Odin 2 Portal. In this current state, I would take both of those devices over this – but this may be a device we revisit in six months and see an entirely different story and hopefully at that point, we get an Odin 3 Portal with a working 8 Elite processor. 

For today, reviewing on potential is not something I do and so, there’s no king here, just a prince waiting to be crowned.