ASUS ROG Ally X Review

Introduction

ASUS—arguably the largest PC component vendor in the world—was the first big-name PC brand to throw down the gauntlet to Valve and the Steam Deck with the original ROG Ally. Two years later it’s clear that the risk paid off, considering the ROG Ally is now, hands down, the most popular Windows PC gaming handheld. A year after the ROG Ally debuted, ASUS introduced a souped-up version of the device in the form of the ROG Ally X.

Saying that we’re late to the ROG Ally X party would be a gross understatement. But hey, we now have a sample we’re going to use in our handheld performance benchmarks, so why not put it through our usual gauntlet of tests and benchmarks, see how it fares, and whether the ROG Ally X still is the best PC handheld on the market for gamers who don’t mind Windows.

At the heart of it all is AMD’s Z1 Extreme APU, made of eight Zen 4 CPU cores that pack 16 MB of L3 cache, a base clock of 3.3 GHz, and a max boost clock of 5.1 GHz. The iGPU part of the APU is a Radeon 780M, comprising 12 CUs based on the RDNA 3 architecture. Together, the CPU, iGPU and 24 GB shared memory combine to form a still potent platform, despite being released more than two years ago.

Aside from the Z1 Extreme, the ASUS ROG Ally X also features a beefy 80 Wh battery, a 120 Hz 7-inch screen with VRR support and 24 GB of LPDDR5X memory working at 7500 MT/s, besides improved ergonomics over the original ROG Ally. Our system comes with 1 TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage in the convenient M.2 2280 standard, RGB-lit thumbsticks, two USB ports one of which is a full-fledged USB4, and Wi-Fi 6E. Before we show you the packaging, we’d like to thank ASUS for providing the review sample.