Asus ROG Ally X review: the best Windows handheld, if you can afford it

"Again, but better" has become the maxim of post-Steam Deck portable PCs. Or, to be more specific, post-Steam Deck OLED ones. Now that Valve have shown it’s possible to quickly turn around an upgraded handheld without enraging owners of the original, Lenovo have hinted at a new Legion Go, MSI have revealed an improved Claw, and Asus have released this here ROG Ally X. A ROG Ally, again – but better? Yes, it is, in almost every way except the speed at which it’ll plunge you into financial destitution.

There’ll be time later to moan about the £799 / $800 asking price, I’m sure, though in fairness it does pay for a heap of enhancements. Including some that address the original ROG Ally’s most acute pain points: the battery size is doubled, the thumbsticks feel more solid and grippy, and the microSD card slot no longer sits directly above an internal hotspot, thus sparing the ROG Ally X its predecessor’s embarrassing overheating issues.

The APU goes unchanged – it’s the same AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme you get in the higher-end ROG Ally models – but RAM gets a boost from 16GB of LPDDR5 to 24GB of LPDDR5X, and the standard SSD capacity has jumped from 512GB to 1TB. It’s a physically bigger (and faster) drive, too, being of the same M.2 2280 form factor that you probably have in your desktop PC, rather than the dinkier, slower 2230 drives that most handheld PCs use. I approve the addition of a second USB-C slot, too, replacing the old ROG XG Mobile docking port that hardly anyone could use with a universal connector that everyone can.

While some of these hardware tweaks could be blamed for the ROG Ally X’s newfound chunkiness – it’s both visibly thicker and noticeably heavier than the ROG Ally – they also produce a handheld that’s ultimately nicer to use. Those thumbsticks could have been pulled off a luxury gamepad, unlike the plasticky originals, and the less cramped interior – aided by the addition of a third exhaust vent on the top edge – seems to helps the ROG Ally X run cooler and quieter. The enlarged outer shell also allows for bigger shoulder buttons, which I found far less prone to trapping my bratwurst fingers on top of the triggers. True, it is heftier in the hand, but hardly any more so than a Steam Deck.

The switch from a 40WHr battery to an 80WHr one also pays dividends to battery life. As in, literally doubling it. Grand Theft Auto V could wear out a fully-charged ROG Ally in just 1h 36m, but on the same settings (and the default Performance power profile), the ROG Ally X kept going for 3h 12m – exactly 100% more. Forza Horizon 5 came extremely close to matching the feat, with its full-to-empty uptime rising from 1h 29m to 2h 55m.

In my book, this is the ROG Ally X’s greatest triumph, not least because the Steam Deck OLED finally has a true rival on endurance. A portable device without good battery life is in conflict with its own nature, and for all that talk about thumbstick texture and cooling vents, nothing makes a device like this feel more convenient than drastically extending its lifespan. On these grounds, the ROG Ally X is instantly more appealing than the fast-burning original.

A more surprising, though hardly less welcome improvement is that of actual game performance. Turns out that RAM upgrade does some serious work, with the ROG Ally X repeatedly producing framerate gains of 10% or more over the original (and further widening its lower-resolution lead over the Steam Deck).

On top of your games lasting longer and running better, the ROG Ally X makes them load a little faster as well. That new 1TB SSD, besides being more capacious and easily to find replacements for, beats both the Steam Deck and the first ROG Ally on speed: it loaded a Shadow of the Tomb Raider save in 13.4s, besting the ROG Ally’s 14.6s and the Deck’s 15.9s, and its 7.7s time to boot up Aperture Desk Job edged out their respective 8.1s and 10.8s times to boot.

Even the screen is better, and I don’t even recall this being an advertised improvement. It’s still a 7in, 1920x1080, 120Hz LCD panel – that much is unchanged – but I measured its peak brightness at 532cd/m2, so it’s a touch more luminous than the original’s 501cd/m2 display. It also covers a few more colours in the RGB gamut, covering 97.1% to the first ROG Ally’s 93.6%, and sports a marginally superior contrast ratio of 1311:1 to 1239:1. The catch here is that the Steam Deck OLED smokes both Asus models, with its unbeatably deep blacks and 984cd/m2 peak brightness – the latter also enabling HDR support in certain games. Still, it’s another tick in the ROG Ally Upgrades column.

Whether these refinements justify the demand for seven hundred and ninety-nine of your English pounds, well, that’s another matter. You couldn’t expect Asus to make the changes they have and then knock the ROG Ally X down to a pittance, but it is a full £200 more than the ROG Ally, the same amount over the Lenovo Legion Go, and £230 more than a top-of-the-line, 1TB Steam Deck OLED. I’ve ran the numbers and can confirm that these are all very, very big ones, especially knowing that – again – the ROG Ally X is more of a redesign than a generational do-over. Looking at the changes individually, the only one that’s truly transformative is the battery life lengthening, and that’s a benefit that the Steam Deck OLED has been providing for ages. And at least that comes with a case.

The ROG Ally X does have the Deck family beat on game compatibility, its Windows 11 OS being completely devoid of the anti-cheat and launcher disharmony that SteamOS can still suffer from. It lets you freely play your Game Pass games too, something that’s only possible on the Steam Deck if you resort to always-online cloud streaming.

Yet Windows still has problems of its own when deployed on a handheld like this, from the general discomfort of navigating a fully desktop-styled OS with thumbsticks and a touchscreen to the repeated appearance of bugs. For all SteamOS’s shortcomings, it’s polished to a sheen and feels fundamentally better-suited to handheld use. On several occasions with the ROG Ally X, I’ve seen games flipped into tiny windows without prompting, or launchers simply fail to launch anything. Also, it’s not a bug, but I’m starting to question the value of the ROG Ally X’s integrated fingerprint reader when Windows 11 almost always asks for a PIN to sign in.

The Steam Deck OLED’s contrasting ease of use, and more sensible pricing, thus make it the better of these rejigged portables. Though as spenny as it is, the ROG Ally X is at least the finest of the Windows handhelds specifically. It’s obviously several steps up from the original, and on balance, its battery, performance, and build quality upgrades outweigh the uniqueness and flexibility of the Legion Go. I would like to have a full-on, arms-flailing tantrum on the desk of whoever decided it should cost the better part of a grand, but I guess you can’t have everything.

This review is based on a retail unit provided by Asus.