Asus ROG Ally X overview: one of the best Home windows gaming handheld by a mile

The Asus ROG Ally X is one of the best a Home windows gaming handheld has ever been. It’s bought essentially the most snug grip, the smoothest gameplay, and the longest-lasting battery — three of the weather that make a PC gaming expertise actually moveable for me.

Most of that is no shock: It’s easy as a result of Asus makes the one handheld that pairs AMD’s highly effective Ryzen chips with a variable refresh fee display, which higher syncs up together with your recreation. It’s bought longer battery life as a result of Asus now stuffs an 80-watt-hour pack in there, the most important we’ve seen in a handheld so far. The battery’s so massive, you possibly can hold that AMD chip buzzing at increased energy ranges for increased framerates.

However what would possibly shock you is that this: the Ally X is the primary handheld I can advocate alongside my gold normal for handhelds: the Steam Deck OLED. That’s, in case you’ve bought just a few additional payments burning a gap in your pocket, don’t thoughts wrestling with Home windows, and belief that Asus has truly discovered its buyer help lesson.

My ROG Ally X overview unit arrived simply earlier than I went on trip — the proper alternative to check its large 80Wh battery. As of in the present day, I’ve spent greater than 24 hours taking part in precise video games on the Ally X.

At first, the battery life didn’t look like something particular. Once I navigated the Japanese highschool demon drama of Persona 3 Reload at most brightness within the automobile and on the seashore, I bought 2.5 hours per cost. That’s not sufficient to final the drive from Northern California to Southern California, not less than not with out an exterior battery. I did get a whole extra hour in Dave the Diver in comparison with the Lenovo Legion Go, however my complete runtime of three hours, 19 minutes nonetheless paled compared to the Steam Deck OLED’s complete of 4 hours, 42 minutes. 

However once I fired up extra demanding video games, the Ally X pulled far forward. I bought almost a whole additional hour of Armored Core 6 (2h59m) and an additional half-hour of Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2h41m) at 720p and medium spec, utilizing the Ally X’s default energy mode. That’s one of the best I’ve seen handheld for video games that intensive! 

Then, I performed two full hours of some of the demanding PC video games presently in existence: Alan Wake II.

Technically, the ROG Ally X is the primary handheld that even begins to fulfill Alan Wake II’s system necessities. It needs 16GB of system reminiscence and 6GB of VRAM, and it’ll throw errors at launch in case you’re brief; on the unique ROG Ally and Steam Deck OLED, which need to share 16GB between system reminiscence and GPU, the sport is a uneven mess.

However the ROG Ally X has a full 24GB of shared reminiscence, and it exhibits! At a 540p render decision, upscaled to 1080p with AMD’s FSR 2.1 tech, I may truly delve by the sport’s lush, eerie forest with out desirous to throw my handheld towards the wall. The sport did dip as little as 29fps in fight, however I noticed a easy 35–45fps simply working round.

It felt playable sufficient that I lastly sat down and beat the sport on Ally X — and I had sufficient battery to take action for 2 full hours utilizing the Ally X’s 25W “Turbo” mode.

As you possibly can see in my comparison screenshots, the sport’s solely working 5fps sooner on the Ally X when Saga’s standing nonetheless over this corpse. However once we’re taking part in a recreation that may dip under a easy 30fps if not for that increase — on a handheld with VRR and Low Framerate Compensation that works proper right down to 30fps — it makes all of the distinction on this planet.

In recreation after recreation, benchmark after benchmark, the Ally X produces the smoothest gameplay I’ve seen from any handheld, even within the valleys and caves of Shadow of the Tomb Raider the place the Legion Go technically produces extra frames per second. That’s as a result of Asus’ display is dynamically working to easy issues out. (Even the Steam Deck OLED’s brighter, extra colourful, and faster-responding OLED panel can’t match it there.)

Talking of benchmarks, Alan Wake II isn’t the one recreation the place the Ally X pulls forward. Regardless of having the identical AMD Ryzen Z1 Excessive chip as the unique ROG Ally, the sooner reminiscence, extra environment friendly cooling, and energy tweaks make their mark.

Whilst you ought to notice that the Ally X now defaults to a brand new 17W “Efficiency” mode slightly than 15W, I’m getting higher numbers in nearly each recreation with the newer handheld, no matter wattage.

See how Returnal is now hitting 38fps in my 720p benchmark within the 25W “Turbo” mode, up from 33 with the unique Ally? Like Alan Wake II, I wager meaning it’s lastly pleasant on a handheld.

However once more, energy is simply half the efficiency story. A yr in the past, the unique ROG Ally drained its 40-watt-hour battery pack at 40–50 watts in Turbo mode, that means you’d get lower than an hour of gameplay in case you ran the Ally that quick away from a charger. With the Ally X, I’m draining an 80-watt-hour battery pack at 33–40 watts in Turbo mode, usually giving me two full hours in a worst-case state of affairs.

I’m not even seeing any slowdown because the battery reaches empty — it’s good all the best way right down to the three % mark, when it places itself in hibernation, and I can start taking part in once more at full velocity nearly as quickly as I plug into the wall.

Even configured to its lowest wattage of 7W TDP, the Ally X isn’t as power-hungry as the unique. Balatro gave me over eight hours of magic roguelike poker at 50 % brightness, by draining beneath 10 watts the entire time. To this point, my finest consequence was complete battery drain of seven watts in Slay the Spire, down from 9 watts with the OG Ally. At that fee, the Ally X ought to be capable to play for 10 total hours earlier than shutting down.

I’m not going to rehash every thing I already advised you in regards to the ROG Ally X in my early hands-on — there are such a lot of substantive little modifications they deserve their very own story, and I’ve already written that one. However I think you could have three distinct questions that deserve solutions right here:

• How are the revised ergonomics and different bodily modifications?
• Can Home windows actually be so unhealthy that you just’d select a Steam Deck with worse efficiency?
• Why belief Asus when it dodged our SD card reader defect questions and its buyer help popularity is in the bathroom?

I discover the ROG Ally X a lot extra snug to carry than the unique, regardless of its extra weight. The meatier grips, triggers, and pebble-shaped omnidirectional again buttons now not have any protrusions to get in the best way. The joysticks and bumpers really feel tighter and extra premium, the face buttons have a deeper (although noisier) throw, and the D-pad has gone from meh to fairly first rate — although I’m already getting an annoying squeaky sound once I press the down arrow. The fan can also be genuinely quiet, not that it was a difficulty with the unique.

It’s additionally good to have twin USB-C ports for charging and peripherals, even when I haven’t but been in a position to hook up a Thunderbolt eGPU (Asus tells me there’s a driver concern with AMD eGPUs in the meanwhile).

However I vastly desire the Steam Deck’s symmetrical analog sticks, which at all times lie proper beneath the place my thumb naturally lands, as an alternative of the Ally’s offset proper analog stick that makes me uncomfortably shift my grip. I miss the bigger display I get on different handhelds and their much less cramped 16:10 facet ratio.

And I can’t stand that Home windows nonetheless can’t reliably make a gaming handheld and reliably get up once more. The Nintendo Change does it completely, and the Steam Deck does it almost completely, however I couldn’t hold monitor of the variety of occasions Home windows determined it may now not acknowledge my fingerprint on the sensor or black-screened my recreation, or the Ally X merely awakened once more the second I set it down, or Asus’ Armoury Crate settings app merely forgot my decisions (like whether or not to activate my joysticks’ RGB lights) on wake.

I’m comfortable to say that Armoury Crate has truly improved tremendously over the previous yr — the sport launcher now intelligently types my video games, lets me simply map buttons and gyro controls for effective aiming, and seamlessly downloads updates (together with BIOS updates) with out navigating to an internet site or separate app.

But it surely’s nothing in comparison with the benefit of use of SteamOS and its compatibility with generations of older PC video games due to group help — and Home windows itself is extra of a pig than ever. I spent almost 45 minutes ready for obligatory updates and clicking by undesirable presents for varied Microsoft merchandise earlier than I may use the Ally X for the primary time.

Did I get a joystick-navigable digital keyboard or PIN display or a pre-mapped Alt-Enter shortcut for my bother? Nope — as an alternative, Asus added a Copilot shortcut, there’s a duplicate of Outlook sitting on my taskbar, and OneDrive is on by default. The one mercy is that Microsoft Groups doesn’t launch on startup this time.

So far as the entire SD card scenario, Asus has solely advised me that it’s not the identical reader because the outdated one which it received’t admit has a difficulty — it’s the one it makes use of on laptops. That’s considerably reassuring, I assume. I haven’t but had points taking part in video games from SD after per week of play, in case you’re questioning.

The ROG Ally X doesn’t verify all of the packing containers I personally want in a handheld. The one-two punch of efficiency and battery life is tempting, however not tempting sufficient to steer me away from a $549 or $649 Steam Deck OLED that can play my legacy library of Steam video games extra simply, then reliably fall asleep once I need to put it away. The client help controversy is simply another reason to hesitate.

However in case you should have Home windows or play the newest video games on the go, the Ally X is one of the best Home windows handheld but. I hope it normalizes greater batteries and VRR screens, and I hope Asus will severely think about a SteamOS model, too. I hope to check it with Bazzite, an unofficial SteamOS clone, later this yr.

Pictures by Sean Hollister / The Verge