Asus ROG Ally X review: peak handheld performance

Asus’ third variation of its Ally handheld, the ROG Ally X, is lastly right here, and our testing reveals it’s a genuinely spectacular, and highly effective, transportable gaming PC regardless of not really enhancing upon the AMD Z1 Excessive APU from the unique. As an alternative, upgrades are made to the RAM, the battery capability, and the general design and effectivity of the cooling system.

The Asus ROG Ally X is well among the finest handheld gaming PCs, changing the Ally Z1 Excessive because the strongest different to the Steam Deck OLED. That being mentioned, the Home windows working system remains to be an enormous weak spot for the transportable, and it throws up challenges that left me annoyed with the unrealized potential of this in any other case very spectacular {hardware}.

Specs

Design

Many features of the ROG Ally X’s design are carried over from the unique mannequin, such because the asymmetrical thumbsticks, Xbox-style face buttons, and 4 operate buttons which embody a devoted Asus fast menu and Armory Crate buttons. One improve is a brand new eight-direction d-pad versus the four-direction possibility on the OG Ally.

On high of the hand held, there are actually two USB-C ports, with the left one supporting Thunderbolt 4, so you’ll be able to cost and join different units on the identical time. Additionally alongside the highest are the quantity controls, the facility button/fingerprint sensor, a 3.5mm jack port, and a microSD card slot. This slot now not sits over a warmth vent, which means the danger of your storage playing cards melting has been eradicated.

Elsewhere, the grips of the Ally X are much more pronounced in comparison with the unique mannequin, permitting for a much more comfy and pure grip. These adjustments do result in a weight enhance of 70g over the Ally, whereas the shell additionally will get ever so barely thicker, however maintains the identical width and peak. This transformation wasn’t meaningfully noticeable to me, however the additional weight is a ten% enhance so that you may really feel it somewhat on longer gaming periods.

Working System

The ROG Ally X makes use of Home windows 11 as its working system, and it’s the largest blocker to this handheld being a real competitor to the Steam Deck. The place Valve’s handheld excels is the benefit with which you’ll be able to obtain, boot, and play most video games. No such simplicity could be discovered on the Ally X.

With the Ally X, Asus tries to make this course of easy with its Armory Crate interface, bringing collectively your Steam, GOG, Xbox, and Ubisoft libraries into one central location so you’ll be able to boot them simply and get your video games downloaded. Nevertheless, the method is stuffed with jank, together with how if you happen to’re too desperate to boot Steam by way of Armory Crate, it would by chance boot the common model of Steam as a substitute of doing it in Massive Image mode. Additionally, the GOG launcher seems to don’t have any controller navigation, which means it’s awkward to navigate and discover what you need to play. Regardless of this, it’s an enormous win for the Ally X to have on the spot entry to a number of libraries with out having to fret about desktop modes or twin booting working methods.

When utilizing the fast menu to entry options from Armory Crate when in a recreation, it will probably actually mess up the controller inputs. At occasions I might convey the menu up however would nonetheless be controlling the sport, having to shut and re-open the menu a number of occasions to get it to work correctly. Different occasions, when closing the menu after making adjustments, the sport would now not register the controller inputs and as a substitute change to mouse and keyboard enter, resulting in a full recreation restart being wanted, which is much from excellent.

There may be additionally no different to Proton, the compatibility software that takes video games and makes them run higher on the Steam Deck (and Linux basically). The absence of such a software means discovering one of the best in-game settings is a major activity, and I spent far too lengthy benchmarking video games at three completely different resolutions to seek out which labored greatest. Some video games, like Cyberpunk 2077, have a Steam Deck setting baked in, however that is of little use to the Ally X given the facility differential and native decision variations.

Exterior of gaming, the Home windows OS is helpful for basic shopping or video playback if that’s what you need to do with the Ally X, however for my part, Home windows is and continues to be the largest weak spot of any gaming handheld it’s featured on.

Show and Sound

One of many largest calls for from Ally followers previous to the reveal of the X was an OLED show. Sadly, Asus didn’t ship on this, as a substitute bringing over the very same 7-inch, 120Hz LCD show from the Ally.

That being mentioned, the standard of shows is quite a bit nearer than I believed it might be. The Ally X’s 1080p, 120Hz show crams in much more element compared to the 800p, 90Hz Steam Deck OLED one, and this considerably offsets the distinction in colour high quality. Plus, the Ally’s display features a variable refresh price (VRR), which might make for smoother-looking gameplay. All in all, I might really give the general benefit to the Ally X when evaluating the 2, and that’s an enormous feather in Asus’ cap.

Asus additionally advantages from its GameVisual know-how, which lets you decide from a variety of profiles primarily based on the kind of recreation you’re enjoying to boost the Ally X’s show high quality. On high of profiles for recreation varieties, like racing or FPS, there’s additionally an eyecare mode and a profile arrange particularly to boost video playback if you wish to use your Ally X to observe motion pictures.

The audio system on the Asus ROG Ally X are implausible, reaching an 81.3dB excessive and 71dB common when recorded from 20cm away whereas enjoying Cyberpunk 2077. The sound high quality, even at full quantity, is crystal clear, with distinguishable lows the place bassy tones dominate, and better tones, like sharp breaking in automobiles, are distinct and don’t wash out into changing into squeaky. This implies you don’t have to fret about needing a headset to get a good audio expertise from the hand held.

By comparability, the Steam Deck OLED solely reached highs of 67.7 dB with a median of 58.4dB beneath the identical situations, however the basic high quality ranges had been comparable, so in sensible phrases they’re on a par – except you’re within the behavior of blasting your gaming handheld at peak quantity.

Storage

The Asus ROG Ally X solely is available in a 1TB SSD mannequin. This capability could be expanded by way of microSD card, similar to the unique Ally, however what’s completely different with the X is that you could now use as much as a 2280 M.2 SSD as a substitute of being restricted to the a lot smaller 2230 normal. Which means nearly any SSD in our greatest gaming SSD information would match, although solely the slower choices can be wise for a transportable machine like this, because the quicker ones run scorching and devour extra energy.

As beforehand talked about, the microSD card slot has been adjusted to take away the danger of overheating and melting playing cards. Due to the a number of USB-C ports, it’s additionally doable to broaden your storage by utilizing a dock, with out impacting your skill to successfully cost the Ally X.

Efficiency

The Asus ROG Ally X is, no doubt, a much more highly effective machine than the likes of the Steam Deck, and this reveals within the gaming benchmarks that I’ve run to date. Testing Cyberpunk 2077, F1 24, and Callisto Protocol, it’s clear that the Ally X is a handheld that may maintain its personal.

This elevated efficiency is basically all the way down to the 24GB LPDDR5-7500 RAM, a substantial 8GB and 900MHz enhance over the bottom Ally handheld. As much as 8GB of this reminiscence could be assigned to the Ryzen Z1 Excessive APU as VRAM for graphical processing by way of the Armory Crate settings menu. That is the setting I additionally used for testing.

All benchmark exams had been run at 720p, 900p, and 1080p throughout the low, medium, and excessive graphical presets. Every recreation was additionally examined at every of the 4 TDP settings that the ROG Ally X has to supply. It’s doable to create customized TDP profiles, however this testing was greatest left to the 4 gaming presets.

The largest takeaway from these benchmarks for me is that the 900p decision is the candy spot for the Ally X, with one of the best stability of efficiency and visible constancy. It’s good to have the ability to push 1080p in indie titles that aren’t graphically taxing, however the compromises wanted to attain a excessive degree of element in triple-A video games aren’t definitely worth the marginally improved visuals on this 7-inch show.

The truth with any handheld gaming PC is definite video games gained’t be capable of push past a secure 30fps, and Callisto Protocol was a very good instance of this. Whereas the sport couldn’t crack anyplace close to 60fps throughout any decision or graphical preset, I might a lot fairly lock the Ally X to 30fps and play the sport with smoother efficiency and respectable visuals than chase the next quantity and undergo efficiency dips because of this. Plus, if you happen to go for one of many decrease TDP profiles, you’ll get that bit additional battery life for no significant draw back.

Throughout testing, one explicit situation that got here to gentle with the ROG Ally X is its skill to answer TDP adjustments. Each time I might swap between settings, there was a considerable delay within the Ally X transferring to the brand new setting. I initially puzzled whether or not the delay was simply within the real-time monitor reporting the decrease TDP, however after working some benchmarks, it grew to become clear that the real-time monitor was correct and it was, at occasions, taking as much as ten minutes for the Ally X to vary the TDP degree.

A method the Home windows OS works within the ROG Ally X’s favor is with recreation compatibility. Whereas the aforementioned Proton software does extra than simply make video games work higher on Linux, there’s merely no want for such a software on the Ally X. Each recreation works nicely with Home windows, which means the one potential barrier stopping a recreation from working correctly is whether or not it has controller help and runs quick sufficient to play correctly. Even when controller help isn’t current, you’ll be able to join a mouse and keyboard to the Ally X fairly simply and use a dock, or the included stand, to prop your handheld up when you play.

Battery Life

The Asus ROG Ally X’s battery life is way improved over the unique mannequin, and the 80Wh battery is at the moment the most important obtainable in a handheld gaming PC. The precise size of life relies upon completely on the TDP settings you utilize and the actions you’re taking with the Ally X.

On the 25W TDP setting, enjoying a reasonably gentle recreation like Hades 2, you’ll be able to count on round two hours and 45 minutes of gameplay at 1080p, with the thumbstick LEDs turned off. This extends as much as 5 hours when enjoying at 720p and utilizing the 13W setting whereas additionally retaining the thumbstick LEDs off. Extra demanding video games will drain the battery rapidly resulting in far too many ranging outcomes to precisely seize. The ability draw of a recreation could be discovered within the real-time monitor if you happen to’re interested by which video games are probably the most power-hungry.

When testing the informal battery lifetime of the ROG Ally X, utilizing it just for shopping and video playback, the battery life prolonged to only over eight hours on the 13W TDP setting. This may be additional prolonged to shut to 10 hours by deciding on the Home windows TDP setting, though this could solely be discovered hidden away within the Armory Crate settings menu.

In contrast to the Steam Deck, there’s no technique to show the anticipated play time remaining within the battery life, which is a disgrace, however you’ll be able to nonetheless observe the battery life as a share utilizing the fundamental setting throughout the real-time monitor.

The cost time of the battery will depend on whether or not you’re sitting the Ally X down and leaving it to cost or plan to play it whereas it costs. You possibly can nonetheless recreation on the 13W and 17W settings whereas charging, however this delays a full cost being achieved. Asus kindly despatched alongside a ROG 140W charger which can get the Ally X as much as a full battery in an hour because of its new 100W max charging velocity, however the pre-packed 65W charger nonetheless does the job from flat to totally charged in just below two hours.

All in all, the 80Wh battery is an enormous enchancment over the unique mannequin, and the likes of the Steam Deck, which might attain as much as six and a half hours playtime when testing Hades 2, however the Steam Deck’s max TDP is 15W, and it’s native decision is much decrease, making the Ally X’s battery all of the extra spectacular.

Worth

The Asus ROG Ally X retails for $799 (£799) and is out there from the likes of Greatest Purchase and Asus’ web site. Within the field, you get the Ally X console, a charging adaptor, a cardboard stand, and your instruction/guarantee manuals. There isn’t a case or different equipment included with the hand held.

I reached out to Asus to make clear the state of affairs with circumstances and it got here again letting me know particular Ally X circumstances can be obtainable quickly, however till then, the Ally X will match into any formally licensed ROG Ally circumstances in the interim.

Asus lowered the ROG Ally Z1 Excessive mannequin to $649.99 to create higher worth for its now mid-range console. The usual Z1 mannequin could be discovered for $399.99, however I wouldn’t suggest this given the appreciable energy lacking from its APU.

Options

Steam Deck OLED

In case you actually don’t need to have to consider whether or not a recreation will work correctly, and have already got a good library of video games inside Steam, it’s arduous to argue in opposition to the Steam Deck OLED because the go-to handheld gaming PC for many gamers, particularly when it’s $549.99 MSRP is a lot extra interesting.

Verdict

The Asus ROG Ally X is a robust handheld gaming PC, taking an already established APU within the AMD Ryzen Z1 Excessive and providing it further help within the type of quicker, and better capability RAM. Design tweaks additionally make the Ally X match and really feel higher in hand, however the usage of the Home windows working system means every part else stands upon weak foundations.

Asus’ Armory Crate software program helps ease this ache considerably however doesn’t go far sufficient to simplify the core gaming operate, making the ROG Ally X arduous to suggest in case your absolute major focus is simply transportable gaming, fairly than a barely extra general-purpose transportable platform.