ROG Xbox Ally X Review
Conclusion
Conclusion
A lot of the design choices of the ROG Xbox Ally X are excellent. We love the clear screen. It’s bright, the colours are rich, and there is no smearing or ghosting. Everything you want a screen to be. The Xbox button and trigger layout is still our favourite, even if here the triggers are closer to those on the Dualshock than the full-on Xbox controller. The lighting is a nice touch without being blinding. We especially enjoy the amount of texturing keeping it in your grip at all times. It’s odd that pressing the Xbox button often also leads to pressing the Armory Crate button. We appreciate ASUS love for their software but we don’t need to tweak things so often we want one of our few buttons dedicated to it. It certainly feels an odd choice to put them so close together.
We have to say that the performance was surprisingly good when in portable mode. Clearly there is a lot going on behind the scenes to ensure high performance. The literature speaks a lot about it automatically tuning your game, and we’re pretty sure it’s got some dynamic resolution scaling going on. But it still all looks pretty good. Naturally your mileage will vary dependant upon your game of choice. We’ve deliberately tested with some taxing titles. If you treat it like a Steamdeck – lots of Metroidvanias, emulators and the ilk – you’ll have a blast.
Turn It Up
Should you want a bit more visual fidelity then the obvious answer is to plug it in. The clock speeds, and storage speed, ramps up considerably. Anyone who has ever owned a laptop can attest to how much better the performance is when plugged in. Strictly speaking desktop PCs have better performance when plugged in too, albeit for different reasons. What you end up with is a product which gives you a minimum of nearly 3 hours of battery life in hardcore gaming, and obviously more on less demanding titles, yet can run hard when you’re near a plug socket. It’s all things to all people. At this price it needs to be.
The cooling is particularly great. Not in pure temperature terms. We ran at 80° nearly all the time. But you don’t remotely notice holding it. Anyone who tried the previous Ally will tell you how warm it got. This is as cool when you pick it up as it is after an hour swatting your enemies. Credit to ASUS for that and how quickly it disperses any heat it does generate. The speakers are also fantastic. Unlike a lot of portable systems headphones aren’t a given. You can use them if you wish and you can run with the built in speakers and don’t lose anything. Other than the respect of your fellow train dwellers.
Wrap Up
Obviously we have the Ally X for review this past fortnight and we can’t claim to know how the plain Ally performs. However, we know how this does. Whilst it is great in both handheld and mains powered modes, we’d be cautious about losing any extra performance or storage. The regular Ally has a lot less grunt and half the storage capacity. Battlefield 6, Borderlands 4 and Forza Horizon 5 would basically fill it up. It might be £300 cheaper, but we can extrapolate from our experience and say you need to go with the Ally X. With a Thunderbolt 4 port and UHS-II MicroSD port it’s built for more storage with the minimum of fuss. If you didn’t know then UHS-II allows over 300MB/s transfers. Not slow.
Finally, if you do choose the ROG Xbox Ally X path, you’ll get a quality built system that has performance and usability built into its DNA. It’s unquestionably excellent and deserving of the ROG name, winning it our OC3D Enthusiast Award.
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