AYN Odin Pro Review – Excellent high performance Android handheld game console

We know it’s been out for a while now, but we finally have the AYN Odin Pro handheld game console for sale, the first store apart from AYN to do so. So let’s check out what all the fuss was about in our AYN Odin Pro review.

AYN Odin Pro Review Video

Unboxing the AYN Odin Pro

We start our AYN Odin Pro review with the unboxing. Inside we have the AYN Odin Pro portable game console itself. We will take a closer look at it shortly.

Underneath is a user manual in English and Chinese. It’s got everything you need to get up and running. And last but not least there is a USB Type-C charge cable.

AYN Odin Pro Overview

Next in our AYN Odin Pro review we have a closer look at the Android handheld. The AYN Odin Pro Android mobile game console is available in three colours; Black, Cold grey and Clear white. It measures around 8.8 x 3.7 x 0.5 in (22.4 x 9.5 x 1.5 cm) and weighs around 365g.

The AYN Odin Pro display is a 5.98” IPS touchscreen with a 1080×1920 resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio. The maximum brightness and colours are very good compared with other Android handhelds.

On the sides of the screen there are dual analogue controllers, D-Pad and the usual gaming buttons. There is also a Home button just above the gaming buttons. Around the analogues and sides of the handheld are LED lights which can be customised in the settings.

Along the top we have Left and Right Shoulder and Triggers which feel responsive. Under the protective cap are Micro HDMI for TV or monitor output and a micro SD card slot. There is a volume rocker and power button to the right side.

On the bottom is a USB Type-C 3.1 port where you can charge the device.

And on the back are two Macro buttons which can be configured.

Android OS

The Odin Pro compact gaming device comes with the standard Android 10 apps you would expect to find on a clean install. You will need to install any apps such as games and emulators yourself. The Google Play Store app is installed so you can download the majority from there, or use Chrome to download from other sources.

The pull down menu has some options for the handhelds operation. From here you can choose between three performance settings; Standard, Performance and High Performance. There are also two fan speed settings; Sport and Smart. You can also take screenshots, and hide the overlay graphic.

The overlay software is pretty good. There is a slider to change the brightness, enable and disable screen mapping and notifications and shortcuts to other tasks on the AYN Odin Pro. 

The screen mapping software is similar to the Anbernic and Retroid handhelds. You drag the icons representing the game controls to areas on the screen and map them to a button. It is all very easy to do and we did not run into any issues with the games we tried.

Video output via micro HDMI is also supported. it supports up to 1080P resolution which is very good as some of the other handhelds only supported 480 and 720P.

AYN Odin Pro Technical Specifications

CPU	Qualcomm Snapdragon SD845 with Quad core Kryo Gold @ 2.8Ghz and Quad-core Silver @ 1.8GHz
GPU	Adreno 630 @ 787 Mhz
RAM	8GB LPDDR4x
STORAGE	Choice of 128GB or 256GB
DISPLAY	5.98″ IPS LCD touch screen. 1080×1920 resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio, 369 PPI, Dragontrail glass for protection
VIDEO OUTPUT	Micro HDMI output
AUDIO	Qualcomm Aqstic Audio Codec and Speaker Amplifier (2x1W)
WI-FI	2.4/5G WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
BLUETOOTH	5.0
PORTS	USB Type-C 3.1, Micro HDMI, 3.5mm audio jack
OS	Android 10
BATTERY	6600mA
CHARGING	Quick Charge 3.0/4.0+
SIZE	8.8 x 3.7 x 0.5 in (22.4 x 9.5 x 1.5 cm)
CASE COLOURS	Black, Cold grey & Clear white
WEIGHT	365g
OTHER FEATURES	Game Launcher, Screen Mapping, OTA updateable firmware

As part of our AYN Odin Pro review we also test the battery life, fan noise and temperatures. We ran the Antutu benchmark on a loop with the highest performance settings and the battery lasted around seven hours. Sitting idle on high performance settings with the screen on full brightness got us a massive 15 hours.

We tested the fan noise and temperatures while running the Antutu benchmark. We got the highest fan noise of 52 decibels and the highest temperature of just 40 °C. It is very quiet and runs very cool!

System Benchmarks

Next in our AYN Odin Pro review we are running the 3DMark, Geekbench and Antutu system benchmarks. We will be comparing with other Android based handhelds, but please note their benchmarks are older and there may be some minor differences in compared performance. 

Geekbench

First up is Geekbench which runs a series of tests on the CPU in single and multi-core performance.

The high performance GPD XP+ keeps its first place position, though good luck finding one to buy now. The Odin Pro has a very comfortable lead in second place over the three Tiger T618 based processors found on the Retroid Pocket Flip, Retroid Pocket 3+ and Anbernic RG505 handhelds.

Antutu

Next is Antutu which is a mix of CPU and GPU performance.

Unsurprisingly the GPD XP+ keeps first place, the Odin Pro takes second and the three Tiger based handhelds make up third place downwards. 

3DMark

And our final benchmark is with 3DMark and the Sling Shot benchmark.

The XP+ takes first place, in our tests it maxes out and no score is given so we have put 8000 for the sake of it. And again in second place is the AYN Odin Pro portable gaming system followed by the usual suspects.

Benchmark Summary

Just a small benchmark summary for this AYN Odin Pro review. The high performance GPD XP+ was always going to win this war, but getting hold of one is hard and they are more expensive. The Odin Pro mobile game console remained in second place, well above the Tiger T618 handhelds which is good to see.

You are looking at an average of 55% performance difference over the T618 based handhelds, which goes as high as 99% difference on 3DMark.

Emulator Performance

We continue our AYN Odin Pro review with some emulator performance tests. These tests were run on the High Performance setting with the fan on Smart Mode. For pretty much everything up to Dreamcast and PlayStation 1 era you should have no issues at all with emulator performance on Normal performance settings. We set up RetroArch and tried a few 8 and 16 bit consoles and they all ran perfectly. Let’s take a brief look at some of the more demanding systems

Dreamcast

We tried a few games and had a solid 60 frames per second on everything we tried. There were no issues at all with the performance, everything ran great.

PlayStation 1

Like the Dreamcast everything runs at a solid 60 FPS on the PS1. You can, if you wanted to, increase the graphics settings resolution scale up to 1080P to make the graphics look far nicer than the original low resolution.

Dolphin

Overall the Dolphin emulator performance is very good. For many games we had it running at full frames per second. But we did also see quite a few 60 FPS games dropping to as low as 40 frames per second now and again.

PlayStation 2

You will have mixed success with PlayStation 2 emulation. For the more demanding games you can lower the rendering resolution and see if that works. You will find that many will not run at full speed though. For less demanding games you can quite happily run them at full speed and native resolutions.

PlayStation Portable

PSP emulation overall works excellent. You should not have any issues with the vast majority of games. Depending on how demanding the game is you can increase the upscaling for improved rendering and keep a solid 60 frames per second.

Citra

The performance for the Citra emulator will massively depend on the game you are playing. Shader caching will slow down the performance and often cause lags in games. Performance does improve when the shaders are cached but you will still get some occasional lags and slowdowns. For less demanding games you will find a more enjoyable experience with faster performance.

Vita3K

The Vita emulator also has mixed performance and will depend on the game you are playing. Lower demanding games are very playable and providing they are compatible with the emulator you will have few issues. The more demanding games will however run very slow.

Final Thoughts

We summarise our AYN Odin Pro review with our final thoughts. The AYN Odin Pro portable game console really surprised me on how solid everything felt. The build and quality of the handheld itself is excellent and definitely feels more premium than say the Anbernic handhelds. 

The operating system coming with a clean install is both good and bad. I like the clean install as I can install what apps I want without having the junk. Others may want everything set up ready to go for ease of use or time saving for example.

The overlay software works great and I had no issues setting up screen mapping for the games I tested. There’s plenty of settings specific to the handheld to tinker with. And having HDMI output means you can also enjoy games on a larger display.

I found it hard to dislike anything with the Odin Pro portable gaming system, everything works exactly how it should. With it only supporting Android 10 means you wouldn’t be able to officially run YuZu, but the games would not run that well anyway. All in all, it’s a really solid handheld with great performance, miles in front of the Tiger T618 based handhelds!

You can learn more and buy the AYN Odin Pro here. Use the discount code AYN5OFF for a 5% discount. Please note the code may expire after one month, and it can not be used during store sales or promotions.

That wraps up our AYN Odin Pro review, what do you think of the handheld game console? Let us know in the comments.