After plenty of teases, announcements and several direct hands-on previews, it’s finally here. The first ever handheld partnered devices between ASUS and Xbox – the ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X. While I’ll be taking a deeper look at the standard Xbox Ally at some point in the hopefully near future, today it’s all about the more powerful, and equally more expensive Xbox Ally X. In this ROG Xbox Ally X review, I’ll be taking a look at how the device holds up under everyday use, from battery life, comfort, and of course, how the games perform for the average gamer. We’ll also be checking out the already seen ‘Xbox Full Screen Experience’ in it’s shipping form. Does this handheld PC truly deliver a console-like handheld experience? Let’s find out.
Handheld Hardware, Console Comfort
As someone who already owns an ASUS Ally X, the ergonomic improvements to the ROG Xbox Ally X are, speaking frankly, excellent. I’ve tried a heap of different handheld machines, from the Switch 2, the Steam Deck, the Legion Go and my original ROG Ally X. This new handheld has them all beat in terms of overall comfort – yes, it’s heavier than something like a Switch 2 and a Steam Deck, but it feels so good to hold – the team have done good stuff here. The new Xbox-pad-like contoured grips are super comfortable in extended sessions, and if you’re a regular Xbox player, your brain is going to accept and love how it feels overall.
There are some oddities here though. New to the device is a dedicated ‘My Library’ button situated on the right side of the screen, with a dedicated ASUS ‘Command Centre’ button on the left. These are all fine and useful, but they’re placed above the standard Xbox Menu/View buttons. I lost count the number of times I accidentally hit the Library button when I thought I was pressing Menu – and it kicked me out the game I was playing, interrupting whatever I was doing. Xbox have also brought their impulse triggers along for the ride, and they work exactly as you’d expect them to.
| ROG Xbox Ally X | |
|---|---|
| Operating System | Windows 11 Home |
| Processor | AMD Ryzen™ AI Z2 Extreme Processor |
| Memory | 24GB LPDDR5X-8000 |
| Storage | 1TB M.2 2280 SSD for easier upgrade |
| Display | 7″ FHD (1080p) IPS, 500 nits, 16:9, 120Hz refresh rate, FreeSync Premium Corning Gorilla Glass Victus + DXC Anti-Reflection |
| I/O ports | 1x USB4 Type-C with DisplayPort™ 2.1, Power Delivery 3.0, Thunderbolt™ 4 compatible, 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C with DisplayPort™ 2.1, Power Delivery 3.0, 1x UHS-II microSD card reader (supports SD, SDXC and SDHC; UHS-I with DDR200 mode), 1x 3.5mm combo audio jack |
| Network & communication | Wi-Fi 6E (2×2) + Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Dimensions | 290.8 x 121.5 x 50.7mm |
| Weight | 715g |
| Battery | 80Wh |
| Input Controls, Comfort & Grip | ABXY buttons, D-pad, L & R impulse triggers, L & R bumpers, Xbox button, View button, Menu button, Command Center button, Library button, 2x assignable back buttons, 2x full-size analog sticks, HD haptics, 6-Axis IMU, Contoured grips |
| What’s in the Box? | ROG Xbox Ally X 65W Charger Stand |
Under the hood, there’s a pretty powerful handheld setup. We’ve got an AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor, and it’s paired with 24Gb of LPDDR5X-8000 Memory and a meaty 1TB M2 SSD to store all your games. The front facing speakers are nice and punchy, and thankfully not too ‘tinny’ either, and as the device has bluetooth, you can pair your preferred headset of choice to it and listen to your games audio privately – or just use the good old 3.5mm Jack – that works too!
The ROG Xbox Ally X ships with the same screen on the previous Ally X – a 120hz 7″1080p IPS screen. It’s no OLED, but it is bright with the only downside being it’s size, and the whopping great bezel around the edge. I would have preferred an 8″ screen with the same features, but it is what it is. We’ve also got an 80Wh battery, to keep those sessions going for a decent amount of time – depending on what kind of game you’re trying to play, but we’ll get into how it all holds up in a bit. Before we talk about the games, lets focus back in on the interface with which we’ll access them, and other digital storefronts.
The Xbox Full Screen Experience – was it worth the wait?
Microsoft have made a fair amount of noise about the Xbox Full Screen experience on these new devices. The intent here is to remove the very worst aspects of handheld gaming on Windows. The main issue being of course, Windows itself. As someone who owned the original ROG Ally X, I can speak from experience. Any time Windows 11 appeared, from logging in, using the god-awful virtual keyboard, to various ‘necessary’ background tasks sucking up precious system resources, gaming on Windows 11 handhelds was a painful experience to the detriment of the PC handheld market. Many PC handheld manufacturers created their own bespoke front-end interfaces to ease that pain, but as my father always says “there’s only so much lipstick you can put on a pig“.
The Xbox Full Screen experience is designed to usher in a more consistent and far more console-like way of interacting and playing games on these types of devices. Initial impressions are indeed, rather positive. The intuitive keyboard interface from the Xbox console has successfully made it’s way across, and the new Xbox Home Screen is fairly simple to navigate with a controller. Pressing the Xbox Nexus button brings up a compact game-bar, which is very reminiscent of its console cousin. This can be navigated by the right and left bumpers, with a widget style approach that can be customised as you would like. Want to track performance? You can turn on a ‘performance’ widget which will attach itself to the game-bar until you choose to close it. Want to track achievements? Just turn on the widget.
By default, the game-bar came preloaded with irritating things most gamers won’t want to see – like Microsoft‘s Game Assist and Gaming Co-pilot integration. You can deactivate and remove these which naturally, I did. ASUS‘ ‘Command Centre’ has now been fully integrated, and provides quick routes for gamers to change the performance profile, control input mode and various other customisable options directly into it. You can also go straight into settings with options to connect Bluetooth devices, Wi-Fi, turn off your mic, and enable other widgets should you desire them. From the Game bar, you can launch directly into other digital storefronts – be it Steam, Ubisoft, EA and more. Launching into these shows the PC seams a bit, with splash screens and loading occasionally appearing in a very windows like interface. Steam‘s Big Picture mode is a god-send here, and can even have customised animated intros when it first boots up.
As well as supporting the in-built controller, the ROG Xbox Ally X also supports some touch gestures – swipe from the left, and you’ll pull up the Xbox game-bar. Swipe from the right, and you’ll get Windows 11’s notification centre. If you need to interact with Windows, it is relatively simple to do a swipe from the bottom of the screen will bring up the Xbox Full Screen experience version of Task Manager. Here you can see what applications are running and close them as necessary and you can also transition to the Windows desktop. Once here, you can change to the desktop control mode via the command centre and use the right stick as a mouse. Be warned – if you want to go back to the Xbox Full Screen Experience you can; but a full restart is required for optimised performance.
All of this is genuinely a vast improvement on what we had before, but after spending a week or so testing the ROG Xbox Ally X, I can’t help but feel that it is still woefully inconsistent. It’s easy to get lost as you navigate a somewhat confusing grid of clickable buttons, made worse by occasional performance issues where either a) it stops responding to any input or b) hangs entirely then just as you’re about to consider restarting, replays all of your button presses in a cacophony of animation as the system plays catch-up. Yes, the performance gains by booting straight into the Xbox full-screen are there, and yes, the UI is a so much better than anything that has come before, and as such is very impactful. Regardless, it can’t completely hide Windows 11 from annoying you every now and then. Through software Microsoft are trying to force different UI’s and different programs to work together, and the results aren’t always fantastic.
Let’s Play some Video Games!
Outside of all the marketing buzzwords and noise about whether this is or is not “an Xbox”, the primary focus as always should be on the games. With some seriously meaty specs and powerful technology in the ROG Xbox Ally X, I have been both delightfully surprised and a little confused by some of the performance I’ve seen. Yes, as well as native gaming, it obviously supports remote play to your local Xbox, as well as Xbox Cloud Gaming, should you prefer to game that way for console-only releases you own.
When it comes to native games, I’ve tested a wide variety of different titles, from classic indies to AAA behemoths, and for the most part the result is clear. This is an impressive machine, capable of delivering some surprising levels of performance. One quick caveat; in order to capture ‘direct’ gameplay footage, I have the Xbox Ally X running into an Elgato 4K60 Pro and am running the majority of game footage you’ll see here at the 17W Performance Profile, as this is likely to be the standard scenario for most gamers.
I am no Digital Foundry, so don’t expect deep technical analysis here – for example I’m not even sure if having the capture card and in effect another monitor plugged affects performance to any great degree, so bear that in mind. The other important thing to note is you’re seeing a recording of that footage, and it doesn’t take into account the VRR nature of the screen on which you’re playing – what might look ‘choppy’ on YouTube may look surprisingly good on a 7″ screen.
Playing Your Favourite Indie Games
For most gamers, indie games are going to take up the lion’s share of the types of titles played on any handheld machine, and outside of some seriously unoptimized outliers, the Xbox Ally X handled pretty much everything I threw at it, with very little that disappointed me here. For any games that are ‘Xbox Play Anywhere’ that you already own on Xbox, expect things like cloud saves and cross-progression to be the norm, and when you don’t have those things, you’re going to really miss them.
Whether you want to play Balatro or Blue Prince on Xbox Play Anywhere, or Hades 2 and Shinobi on Steam, the Xbox Ally X handles these sorts of games really well. Most of the time you can even set the performance down to the ‘Silent – 13W’ Profile and enjoy plenty of gaming time without having to put the device on charge. One game I tried that was a bit of an outlier was Giant Squid‘s Sword of the Sea, which is not very well optimised for handheld play. It was enormously difficult to get it to perform well. So much so, that the only way I could achieve a higher frame rate was to set everything to low, and set the screen itself to render at 720p. The reality is that even if it’s an indie title, some games just need more optimisation to run well on these sorts of devices.
Playing More Demanding Games
From a larger, more demanding perspective, the ROG Xbox Ally X does a surprisingly good job at playing ‘AAA’ games on the go. From single player, open-world games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Assassin’s Creed Shadows, to Xbox first-party experiences like Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite, I was able to persuade the Xbox Ally X to consistently play these games at fairly decent frame-rates on the ’17W Performance’ Profile. Unfortunately, AAA gaming is where the console experience starts to falter a bit. This is not a console – it’s a handheld PC. As such, you can regularly expect to experience things like shader compilation, irritating PC-style notifications, and frankly occasionally lengthy loading times, depending on the game.
Forza Horizon 5 on first testing ran incredibly well. However, on later attempts to test and record more footage, the game repeatedly crashed whilst attempting to load into the open world. There was no error message or explanation, it simply worked one day, and not the next. At a whopping 140Gb, I didn’t really fancy trying to redownload the game.
Halo Studios’ (previously 343 Industries) Halo Infinite runs well once you get into it and can tweak the settings a bit. But again, the PC nature of this handheld rears its ugly head. On every boot of the game, I would be confronted with an error message that the game could not find a supported graphics device, suggesting the GPU in the ROG Xbox Ally X did not support minimum requirements. This notification could not be dismissed by using the built-in controller – I had to manually use the touchscreen. Once running though, I was able to get the campaign hitting 60FPS and looking pretty nice too – Halo is quite good fun on a handheld!
CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 is a demanding open-world title that performs incredibly well on the handheld. Optimisation efforts from the developer are well documented with an in-built “Steam Deck” pre-set available to achieve reasonable performance. Without frame generation, the game achieves a reasonably stable 45FPS and thanks to the Xbox Ally X’s VRR 120Hz screen, it really does look remarkable. Turning on frame generation via AMD’s FSR 3.1 produces a consistent 55-60 FPS but there’s a trade-off in responsiveness and how the game feels to play. From my point of view, I’d leave frame generation off on this one, and take advantage of the Xbox Ally X’s VRR screen.
Insomniac’s Spiderman Remastered is extremely performant on the handheld, and looks and plays great. While it’s perfectly playable at 30FPS at 1080p, you can actually drop the rendering resolution to 720P and achieve a near 60FPS target, if performance is more important to you. Obviously, if you’re an Xbox fan and haven’t yet played some of Sony’s console exclusives like Spiderman, God of War and The Last of Us – the ROG Xbox Ally X certainly is a viable way to do so.
EA’s Battlefield 6 is another surprisingly performant game on this capable handheld, and makes Battlefield 6 on the go a genuinely viable option. Initially, I had a number of concerns as the game frequently had problems in booting up, including a missing *.dll file error message and other PC issues. While I was able to solve these sorts of problems, they may stump a console-first player, with daunting registry edits required to get the game they want to play running. This again shows the very PC-like nature of the device, and I think many console only players are going to struggle with these sorts of problems. Once I’d fixed them, Battlefield 6 on the go became plain sailing. From a performance perspective, if you are running the game on the handheld’s turbo mode, 60FPS is more than possible.
A Doorway to the past…if you want it to be
I think we’ve established thus far, that despite the naming conventions and marketing buzzwords, this is a PC. As such, it comes with a whole heap of caveats and general usability issues that from a console purist’s perspective, cannot be ignored.
However, this also means that it comes with a large number of benefits and options to tweak and adjust the experience to your liking. As an open platform it also means having the freedom to indulge in other methods of entertainment, including looking back to video game history. After a bit of research and tinkering, I installed a program called Emudeck and supplied myself with a 1TB SD card to give myself some extra storage. This neat program helps to enable system emulation across a multitude of classic, retro consoles – enabling gamers to play a huge number of classic titles from console gaming’s past.
An Ally in Everyday Life
I’ve been using the ROG Xbox Ally X as my daily gaming device for the better part of a week, and I’ve put in some serious hours on this thing. For the majority of my indie game play time, I was able to push easily past the four to five-ish hour mark without the machine dying on me, and if a game was performant enough using the 13W Silent profile, sometimes significantly longer, which was a genuine surprise.
AAA games are significantly more demanding, and see the battery drop much faster, but even then, you should be able to squeeze a couple of hours and maybe a bit more out of most demanding titles before you’ll need to plug the ROG Xbox Ally X back in for a top up.
Again, Windows 11 rears its head when it comes to putting the system to sleep, and I’ve had some frustratingly inconsistent results. One night, I didn’t shut down and just put it to sleep – when I awoke 6 hours later, it had lost just 2% of battery! Amazing. The next night, I did the same thing – it lost 20% while I was asleep – not so great. Pending further improvements, my advice would be to just shut this thing down at night and not rely on Windows 11’s ‘Sleep Mode’.
One big thing I’ve noticed is lack of font/UI size increases in games. Many titles have UI elements that are just too small to comfortably read on a 7″ screen, and it can be very frustrating, depending on the game and the visual design. Hopefully that’s something developers will bear in mind. One other thing to note is I do love how versatile the ROG Xbox Ally X is. Besides being able to dock the device and plug it in to a monitor or TV, I’m also able to plug my XREAL glasses in and play on a giant virtual screen, which made for an excellent Battlefield 6 experience with my own personal TV to enjoy the game on. Damn I look cool.
Is this for you?
So, should you pick one of these up? Should you go for the cheaper Xbox Ally? I’d love to test how capable the Xbox Ally is in practice compared to this more powerful device, but sadly, we weren’t able to source one in time for this review, so no comparisons from me unless that changes in the near future. I find that device interesting, because its price point is closer to something like the Switch 2, which is more palatable. But if you’re on the fence – is the Xbox Ally X the handheld for you?
It honestly comes down to the sort of gamer you are. If you’re deep within the Xbox eco-system, and love the idea of playing your Xbox games (from this generation) on the go, maybe? If you utilise services like Xbox Play Anywhere, and like the idea of accessing multiple store fronts and building your PC game collection, it certainly is a cool, if expensive option. But you should prepare to deal with all sorts of PC and Windows 11 related issues that can and will crop up should you jump on this bandwagon, and not expect a true ‘console-like’ experience. It certainly won’t replace your Xbox console.
The ROG Xbox Ally X. Is it an Xbox? I don’t think so. It’s a $1000 dollar PC handheld that has a distinct Xbox flavour. A capable and extremely comfortable PC Handheld with some great design ideas that bring Xbox and PC closer than ever before, and is one of the best handheld PC experiences to date. Despite the software effort though, Windows 11 is still the primary cause of many of the machines woes, even with all the freedom the more open, PC platform provides. It’s certainly an interesting transitionary step for Microsoft and Xbox, but I think it needs a few more updates for the potential to be truly realised.
Hardware provided for this review by Microsoft
ROG Xbox Ally X
PROS
- Feels really great to hold
- Game Performance is great
- Plenty of options for a tinkerer
- Emulation works great
- Battery holds up well in most scenarios
CONS
- Windows still gets in the way
- UI Bugs galore
- Screen feels a touch too small
- Super Expensive
Nice review. This device isn’t for me, and that’s fine - I can move on with my day and keep on playing my console games.
It does leave me just slightly wary of the degree that this device is potentially representative of Microsoft’s future console plans. If it transpires that the next Xbox is just a Windows PC, with a mildly Xbox flavored skin over it, but really still a Windows PC - then no, that is not on.
Those little issues, is the reason why Xbox needs to maintain it’s own hardware.
This is a good first step, but they still have a ways to go to sell it to their console user base. Once they start shipping their next Xbox.
Great review. As a console only player, I’m not sure what to think. Was hoping for a more console experience. Terrified of tinkering/troubleshooting. I likely won’t get this device and will wait to see how this develops within their next console/pc strategy. Then I’ll make a decision.
I wonder if they will do some kind of roadmap for the windows full screen experience. Like is this it, or are they hard at work fixing issues Jon mentioned? I’d like to know if they are like this functionality is where we are today but our short/long term goals for this ui are x, y, z.
Congratulations still catching up on the review.
Great review.
This is one review that you can’t look at the number and call it a day. The reflection to it is what matters more and even then, the number is just a number. I have seen other reviews with high praise because of what they wanted out of it. It’s this kind of review that you would need to see if it can translate you. To me, I am accustomed to the flaw with previous device I have, so the pros speak more to me. All in all, solid review with reasonable pros and cons that can speak with audience who is deciding to get one or not.
Fantastic review. To me this sounds like a big step forward from Xbox and Microsoft in Windows PC Gaming and that’s genuinely great. Windows gaming is already one of the biggest gaming platforms and continues to be one of the fastest growing markets. It’s great that Microsoft is utilizing Xbox finally to really capitalize on it. This still seems like early adopter tech and software that will improve. I’ll be watching the future PC OEM plans and public rollout of Xbox Full screen experience. For now I’m happy on my OG Legion Go.
Now that said, this also all brings back my concerns with a “hybrid” Xbox windows PC, because what does that mean? Is it a highly optimized fork of Windows 11 (like the OG was) that will just have an updated architecture to make developing for PC and console easier? Is it the same Xbox software we’re used with more happening behind the scenes to push Xbox Play Anywhere and ecosystem unification? Is it a device that dual boots a proper Xbox OS and Windows 11? Or is it something just like this which just tries to brute force windows to play nice?
Xbox Full screen experience seems fantastic for PC and PC gamers, but it would also be a major step backwards for the existing console experience. I hope they leverage their strengths where they are strengths is all. And I expect them to. This full screen experience sounds like fantastic software for PC gaming. And heck, I really hope Microsoft learns from It and introduces more modes to windows (like a tablet mode) or they could bring back windows phone through it, who knows.
If anything, this could be like a prototype or beta towards to their next gen console. All they have to do is research, survey, and update accordingly.
Great review and shows the potential of what the Xbox/PC console hybrid can be when it releases in Fall 2026/2027 which makes me very excited. Handheld itself seems sweet but isn’t for me.