Asus ROG Ally X review: the best Windows gaming handheld by a mile

The Asus ROG Ally X is the best a Windows gaming handheld has ever been. It’s got the most comfortable grip, the smoothest gameplay, and the longest-lasting battery — three of the elements that make a PC gaming experience truly portable for me.

Most of this is no surprise: It’s smooth because Asus makes the only handheld that pairs AMD’s powerful Ryzen chips with a variable refresh rate screen, which better syncs up with your game. It’s got longer battery life because Asus now stuffs an 80-watt-hour pack in there, the biggest we’ve seen in a handheld to date. The battery’s so big, you can keep that AMD chip humming at higher power levels for higher framerates.

But what might surprise you is this: the Ally X is the first handheld I can recommend alongside my gold standard for handhelds: the Steam Deck OLED. That is, if you’ve got a few extra bills burning a hole in your pocket, don’t mind wrestling with Windows, and trust that Asus has actually learned its customer support lesson.

My ROG Ally X review unit arrived just before I went on vacation — the perfect opportunity to test its massive 80Wh battery. As of today, I’ve spent more than 24 hours playing actual games on the Ally X.

At first, the battery life didn’t seem like anything special. When I navigated the Japanese high school demon drama of Persona 3 Reload at maximum brightness in the car and on the beach, I got 2.5 hours per charge. That’s not enough to last the drive from Northern California to Southern California, at least not without an external battery. I did get an entire additional hour in Dave the Diver compared to the Lenovo Legion Go, but my total runtime of 3 hours, 19 minutes still paled in comparison to the Steam Deck OLED’s total of 4 hours, 42 minutes. 

But when I fired up more demanding games, the Ally X pulled far ahead. I got nearly an entire extra hour of Armored Core 6 (2h59m) and an extra half-hour of Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2h41m) at 720p and medium spec, using the Ally X’s default power mode. That’s the best I’ve seen handheld for games that intensive! 

Then, I played two full hours of one of the most demanding PC games currently in existence: Alan Wake II.

Technically, the ROG Ally X is the first handheld that even begins to meet Alan Wake II’s system requirements. It wants 16GB of system memory and 6GB of VRAM, and it’ll throw errors at launch if you’re short; on the original ROG Ally and Steam Deck OLED, which have to share 16GB between system memory and GPU, the game is a choppy mess.

But the ROG Ally X has a full 24GB of shared memory, and it shows! At a 540p render resolution, upscaled to 1080p with AMD’s FSR 2.1 tech, I could actually delve through the game’s lush, eerie forest without wanting to throw my handheld against the wall. The game did dip as low as 29fps in combat, but I saw a smooth 35–45fps just running around.

It felt playable enough that I finally sat down and beat the game on Ally X — and I had enough battery to do so for two full hours using the Ally X’s 25W “Turbo” mode.

As you can see in my comparison screenshots, the game’s only running 5fps faster on the Ally X when Saga’s standing still over this corpse. But when we’re playing a game that would dip below a smooth 30fps if not for that boost — on a handheld with VRR and Low Framerate Compensation that works right down to 30fps — it makes all the difference in the world.

In game after game, benchmark after benchmark, the Ally X produces the smoothest gameplay I’ve seen from any handheld, even in the valleys and caves of Shadow of the Tomb Raider where the Legion Go technically produces more frames per second. That’s because Asus’ screen is dynamically working to smooth things out. (Even the Steam Deck OLED’s brighter, more colorful, and faster-responding OLED panel can’t match it there.)

Speaking of benchmarks, Alan Wake II isn’t the only game where the Ally X pulls ahead. Despite having the same AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip as the original ROG Ally, the faster memory, more efficient cooling, and power tweaks make their mark.

While you should note that the Ally X now defaults to a new 17W “Performance” mode rather than 15W, I’m getting better numbers in almost every game with the newer handheld, regardless of wattage.

See how Returnal is now hitting 38fps in my 720p benchmark in the 25W “Turbo” mode, up from 33 with the original Ally? Like Alan Wake II, I bet that means it’s finally enjoyable on a handheld.

But again, power is only half the performance story. A year ago, the original ROG Ally drained its 40-watt-hour battery pack at 40–50 watts in Turbo mode, meaning you’d get less than an hour of gameplay if you ran the Ally that fast away from a charger. With the Ally X, I’m draining an 80-watt-hour battery pack at 33–40 watts in Turbo mode, generally giving me two full hours in a worst-case scenario.

I’m not even seeing any slowdown as the battery reaches empty — it’s good all the way down to the 3 percent mark, when it puts itself in hibernation, and I can begin playing again at full speed almost as soon 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 original. Balatro gave me over eight hours of magic roguelike poker at 50 percent brightness, by draining under 10 watts the whole time. So far, my best result was total battery drain of 7 watts in Slay the Spire, down from 9 watts with the OG Ally. At that rate, the Ally X should be able to play for 10 entire hours before shutting down.

I’m not going to rehash everything I already told you about the ROG Ally X in my early hands-on — there are so many substantive little changes they deserve their own story, and I’ve already written that one. But I suspect you may have three distinct questions that deserve answers here:

• How are the revised ergonomics and other physical changes?
• Can Windows really be so bad that you’d choose a Steam Deck with worse performance?
• Why trust Asus when it dodged our SD card reader defect questions and its customer support reputation is in the toilet?

I find the ROG Ally X so much more comfortable to hold than the original, despite its additional weight. The meatier grips, triggers, and pebble-shaped omnidirectional back buttons no longer have any protrusions to get in the way. The joysticks and bumpers feel tighter and more premium, the face buttons have a deeper (though noisier) throw, and the D-pad has gone from meh to quite decent — though I am already getting an annoying squeaky sound when I press the down arrow. The fan is also genuinely quiet, not that it was an issue with the original.

It’s also nice to have twin USB-C ports for charging and peripherals, even if I haven’t yet been able to hook up a Thunderbolt eGPU (Asus tells me there’s a driver issue with AMD eGPUs at the moment).

But I vastly prefer the Steam Deck’s symmetrical analog sticks, which always lie right under where my thumb naturally lands, instead of the Ally’s offset right analog stick that makes me uncomfortably shift my grip. I miss the larger screen I get on other handhelds and their less cramped 16:10 aspect ratio.

And I cannot stand that Windows still cannot reliably make a gaming handheld Go the Fuck to Sleep and reliably wake up again. The Nintendo Switch does it perfectly, and the Steam Deck does it nearly perfectly, but I couldn’t keep track of the number of times Windows decided it could no longer recognize my fingerprint on the sensor or black-screened my game, or the Ally X simply woke up again the moment I set it down, or Asus’ Armoury Crate settings app simply forgot my choices (like whether to turn on my joysticks’ RGB lights) on wake.

I’m happy to say that Armoury Crate has actually improved tremendously over the past year — the game launcher now intelligently sorts my games, lets me easily map buttons and gyro controls for fine aiming, and seamlessly downloads updates (including BIOS updates) without navigating to a website or separate app.

But it’s nothing compared to the ease of use of SteamOS and its compatibility with generations of older PC games thanks to community support — and Windows itself is more of a pig than ever. I spent nearly 45 minutes waiting for mandatory updates and clicking through unwanted offers for various Microsoft products before I could use the Ally X for the first time.

Did I get a joystick-navigable virtual keyboard or PIN screen or a pre-mapped Alt-Enter shortcut for my trouble? Nope — instead, Asus added a Copilot shortcut, there’s a copy of Outlook sitting on my taskbar, and OneDrive is on by default. The only mercy is that Microsoft Teams doesn’t launch on startup this time.

As far as the whole SD card situation, Asus has only told me that it’s not the same reader as the old one that it won’t admit has an issue — it’s the one it uses on laptops. That’s somewhat reassuring, I guess. I haven’t yet had issues playing games from SD after a week of play, in case you’re wondering.

The ROG Ally X doesn’t check all the boxes I personally need in a handheld. The one-two punch of performance and battery life is tempting, but not tempting enough to steer me away from a $549 or $649 Steam Deck OLED that will play my legacy library of Steam games more easily, then reliably go to sleep when I want to put it away. The customer support controversy is just one more reason to hesitate.

But if you must have Windows or play the latest games on the go, the Ally X is the best Windows handheld yet. I hope it normalizes bigger batteries and VRR screens, and I hope Asus will seriously consider a SteamOS version, too. I hope to test it with Bazzite, an unofficial SteamOS clone, later this year.

Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge