Asus Rog Ally X Quicklook

Audio transcription

"Hello everyone and welcome to another Gamereactor Quick Look.
It's time for a new ROG Ally.
I know that a lot of people expected a ROG Ally 2, but it seems like we are waiting a bit on that one, possibly for AMD to introduce the new Strixpoint mobile APUs."

"So the point is that while this is called the ROG Ally X, not 2, an X would possibly suggest a change of the, basically an alteration of the basic SoC that, well, basically governs how much power and what kind of graphical settings and performance sort of ratios you can expect."

"But this is the very same SoC that the normal Ally uses, which leaves us with a question, what makes this an X?
Well, there are some really key things that the X does a lot better than the regular Ally, and we'll get to this in a little bit."

"First and foremost, the actual form factor has been changed to make it better for people with big hands like myself, and it's basically just a way for it to make the ergonomics feel a little bit more pronounced."

"So there is more stuff here.
It's also a little bit heavier, but that's for a completely different reason, which we'll get to.
It's overall just more ergonomically sound, less sharp."

"It doesn't dig into the palm of your hands when you use it as much.
I think that it's rather ergonomic now.
I would have loved to see it to be sculpted even more, which would possibly have made it even bigger, because the more you sculpt for your hands, the more plastic needs to be there to accommodate that."

"And this is still like a flat design.
I'm pretty sure you can see it here, that even though that there is added sculpture here to make it more comfortable to grasp, it's still pretty flat, meaning that it feels like you're holding a flat piece of plastic."

"But it is more comfortable, I will say, even over longer gaming sessions.
But the reason it's more heavy is because instead of a 40-watt battery or 40-watt-hour battery in the original ROG Ally, this has an 80-watt-hour battery, so double the size."

"That's incredible.
That does not mean that this is like a handheld gaming PC that runs all day, but it does mean that you should add at least a couple of hours of basic usage to the battery expectancy that you're going to get every single day."

"And it also depends on what kind of power profile you use, of course, and what kind of game you're running.
Well, it depends.
But a doubling of the battery is something that we see very rarely in consumer electronics in general, so it's awesome to see here."

"Really good move from Asus, which means that this gets close or even passes the Steam Deck OLED in some cases, which is really cool.
It also now comes with a terabyte SSD."

"That's a PCIe NVMe M.2 2280, which I think is the same one, basically.
It also has exactly the same screen.
That is weird to me because you can't see it right now, obviously, but there is actually, there was this on the original Ally as well, quite a lot of bezel on this piece of glass right here, meaning that this is not the amount of screen that you have available to you, which is what it looks like when it's turned on."

"There's a lot of thick bezel here, and it would have been lovely for sort of a small in-between generations upgrade to say, we've reduced the bezels with 30%, 40%, 50%, whatever.
But it's exactly the same, both the lens, screen lens, and the panel itself, meaning it's a 1080p panel running at 120 Hz, and it's 7 inches, which is fine."

"I mean, a lot of gaming PC handhelds have a 7-inch screen, has this screen, in fact.
But it is good, and the screen wasn't an issue to start with, so it's fine that it's being reused."

"And there's also, you should remember, there's 24 GB of DDR5 RAM running at 7,500 microtransfers per second this time around.
So, better ergonomics, much bigger battery, more RAM, it's all good, basically."

"There is one huge issue with this, and it's not Asus' fault.
It is Windows 11 as a platform to run a proprietary software suite on top.
Now, remember that most of the time when you use this, you press one of these, I believe it's this one, to launch the Armoury Crate software that's specifically made for the Ally and the Ally X that helps you basically have a pooled library of games to choose from, and you can boot in and out of those without seeing much of Windows 11."

"But make no mistake, Windows 11 is there.
That means that you set this up like you set a laptop up with awkward hand gestures on the touchscreen in order to put together a pen.
It thinks it's a laptop and tries to tell you that you should import data files from other Windows-based laptops that you've used."

"It's not an elegant solution.
And at times, you're forced into a regular Windows 11 desktop mode, which is not nice.
It does not work without a keyboard and trackpad in my eye, and it's just an inelegant solution, particularly when you're going up against other handhelds like a Switch or a Steam Deck, which has a proprietary software suite custom-built and designed for that platform."

"But if you can live with that and you want the broad compatibility that comes with a Windows-based handheld, it's hard to argue against this.
See you on the next one."