“Back again, but better” has become the motto of post-Steam Deck portable PCs. Or, more accurately, post-Steam Deck OLED PCs. Now that Valve has shown that you can quickly reimagine an improved portable without angering owners of the original, Lenovo has hinted at a recent Legion Go, MSI has revealed an improved Claw, and Asus has released this ROG Ally X. The ROG Ally, back again—but better? Yes, it is, in almost every way except the speed with which it will drive you into financial misery.
I’ll have time to moan about the £799/$800 price tag later, I’m sure, though to be fair, it’s worth the hefty improvements. Including some that address the original ROG Ally’s most glaring issues: the battery has doubled in size, the thumbsticks are sturdier and grippier, and the microSD card slot no longer sits directly above the internal access point, sparing the ROG Ally X the embarrassing overheating issues of its predecessor.
The APU remains unchanged—it’s the same AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme you get in the more high-priced ROG Ally models—but the RAM increases from 16GB LPDDR5 to 24GB LPDDR5X, and the standard SSD capacity increases from 512GB to 1TB. It’s also a physically larger (and faster) drive, using the same M.2 2280 form factor you probably have in your desktop, rather than the smaller, slower 2230 drives most laptops utilize. I also support the addition of a second USB-C port, replacing the venerable ROG XG Mobile docking port that almost no one could utilize with a universal connector that anyone can utilize.
While some of these hardware improvements could be blamed on the ROG Ally X’s newfound solidity – it’s both visibly thicker and noticeably heavier than the ROG Ally – they also result in a handheld device that’s ultimately more enjoyable to utilize. Those thumbsticks could be pulled out of a premium gamepad, unlike the plastic originals, and the less restricted interior – aided by the addition of a third vent on the top edge – seems to facilitate the ROG Ally X run cooler and quieter. The enlarged exterior also allows for larger shoulder buttons, which I found to be much less likely to pinch my bratwurst fingers on the triggers. It’s heavier in the hand, yes, but no heavier than the Steam Deck.
The move from a 40Wh battery to an 80Wh also pays off in terms of battery life. Literally, doubling it. Grand Theft Auto V could drain a fully charged ROG Ally in just 1h 36m, but with the same settings (and the default performance profile) the ROG Ally X ran for 3h 12m – exactly 100% longer. Forza Horizon 5 came incredibly close to matching that feat, with its full-to-empty runtime increasing 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 real rival in terms of durability. A portable device without good battery life is at odds with its own nature, and for all the talk about knob texture and vents, nothing makes such a device feel more comfortable than drastically extending its lifespan. For these reasons, the ROG Ally X is immediately more appealing than the quickly-burning original.
More surprising, but no less welcome, are the improvements in game performance. It turns out that the RAM upgrade does a stern job, with the ROG Ally X repeatedly achieving frame-rate increases of 10% or more over the original (and further increasing its lower-resolution advantage over Steam Deck).
In addition to making games run longer and run better, the ROG Ally X makes them load a bit faster. In addition to being more capacious and easier to find replacements for, this recent 1TB SSD beats both Steam Deck and the original ROG Ally hands down in terms of speed: it loaded a Shadow of the Tomb Raider save in 13.4 seconds, beating ROG Ally’s 14.6 seconds and Deck’s 15.9 seconds, and its 7.7-second boot time beat their 8.1-second and 10.8-second times.
Even the screen is better, and I don’t recall that being the claimed improvement. It’s still a 7-inch 1920×1080, 120Hz LCD panel—that much remains unchanged—but I measured its peak brightness at 532 cd/m2, so it’s a tad brighter than the original’s 501 cd/m2 display. It also covers a few more colors in the RGB gamut, covering 97.1% versus the first ROG Ally’s 93.6%, and has a marginally better contrast ratio of 1311:1 to 1239:1. The catch is that the Steam Deck OLED outshines both Asus models, with its unparalleled deep blacks and peak brightness of 984 cd/m2—the latter of which also enables HDR support in some games. Still, it’s another point in the ROG Ally’s Improvements column.
Do these improvements justify the need for seven hundred ninety nine your British pounds, well, that’s a different matter. You can’t expect Asus to make the changes it has and then drop the price of the ROG Ally X to a pittance, but it’s a full £200 more than the ROG Ally, the same more than the Lenovo Legion Go and £230 more than the top-of-the-range 1TB Steam Deck OLED. I’ve crunched the numbers and can confirm that these are very, very immense sums, especially knowing that – I’ll repeat – the ROG Ally X is more of a redesign than a generational re-run. Looking at the changes individually, the only thing that’s Really transformative is the extended battery life, and that’s a benefit the Steam Deck OLED has been providing for ages. And at least that’s what comes with the case.
The ROG Ally X actually beats the Deck family in terms of game compatibility, and its Windows 11 operating system is completely free of the anti-cheat and launcher disharmony that SteamOS can still suffer from. It also allows for free play of Game Pass games, something that is only possible on Steam Deck if you utilize always-on cloud streaming.
However, Windows still has its own issues when deployed on a handheld device like this, from the general discomfort of navigating a completely desktop OS with sticks and touchscreens to recurring bugs. For all of SteamOS’s shortcomings, it’s polished to perfection and feels fundamentally better suited for utilize on a handheld device. On a few occasions, I’ve seen games on the ROG Ally X turn into petite windows with no prompt, or launchers simply fail to launch anything. Beyond that, 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 log in.
The contrasting ease of utilize and more reasonable price of the Steam Deck OLED make it the better of these repurposed portables. While high-priced, the ROG Ally X is at least the best of the Windows portables. It’s certainly a few notches better than the original, and overall its battery, performance, and build quality improvements outweigh the Legion Go’s uniqueness and flexibility. I’d love to have the full, hand-waving hysteria of whoever decided it should cost the better part of a thousand sitting on my desk, but I guess you can’t have everything.
This review is based on a retail sample provided by Asus.
