How We Verify Settings

How We Gather Settings

For each game-and-handheld combination, we collect recommendations from across the web rather than leaning on one write-up. That means community optimization guides, forum and subreddit threads, detailed blog posts, and video transcripts — wherever real players have shared what actually worked for them.

Pulling from many sources is the whole point: it lets us see where people independently agree on a value, and where a single guide is an outlier.

How We Extract Them

When we pull a setting out of a source, we preserve the original wording. A TDP figure, an FPS cap, a graphics preset, or a scaling option always traces back to a real quote in a real source. We don't paraphrase numbers into existence or "round" a value to make a page look tidier — if a source said 12W, that's what's recorded against it.

Verification — Faithful to the Source

Every value is checked back against the source text it came from. If a setting can't be traced to a real source — if it looks like a misread, a hallucinated number, or a value nobody actually recommended — it's dropped before it ever ships. The bar is simple: a published setting must be something a real source genuinely said.

Corroboration — the "% Corroborated" Badge

A setting is marked corroborated when independent sources agree on it — either one high-trust source, or two or more separate domains that landed on the same value on their own. The % corroborated figure you see on each page is the share of that page's settings confirmed this way.

Single-source values aren't hidden — they can still be useful — but they're flagged with a small dot as "worth double-checking," so you always know which numbers have backup and which rest on one report.

What We Publish — the Bar

We only publish a game-and-device page when it has a substantial, corroborated core: a real performance target plus enough settings, several of them independently corroborated. Pages that don't clear that bar are held back rather than shipped thin.

That's why coverage is uneven on purpose — some games show only one handheld, and some aren't up yet at all. We'd rather have a gap than publish a page we can't stand behind.

Freshness

Each page carries a "Verified <month year>" badge. Settings drift as games ship patches and as drivers and firmware change, so a value that was right on release can quietly go stale. We re-check pages over time and update the badge when we do, so the date tells you how current the advice actually is.

Independence

HandheldHQ is reader-supported through affiliate links — see our Affiliate Disclosure for the details. Those relationships never change which settings we recommend. Settings come only from the sources described above, never from a store, a brand, or a payout. If a configuration isn't worth recommending, no affiliate link makes us pretend otherwise.

About HandheldHQ

HandheldHQ is an independent project built to make handheld PC gaming setup trustworthy and fast: real settings, cross-checked across sources, free to read, with no sign-up. If you've ever lost an evening chasing conflicting advice across a dozen tabs, this site exists to give you back that evening.