Asus ROG Ally X Review: Superb Improvements (But It’s Still Super Expensive)

The Asus ROG Ally X is still an indulgent portable gaming platform at its price, but it’s also a massive improvement on the original ROG Ally.

Pros	Cons
Significantly improved battery life	It costs HOW MUCH?
Full Windows gives access to a massive games library…	…But also all the problems of Windows at this size
Easy control choices for many games…	But not all of them, especially if they needed any kind of mouse control

Score: 3.5/5

 

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In this review

Asus ROG Ally X Specifications
Asus ROG Ally X Design
Asus ROG Ally X Performance
Asus ROG Ally X Battery
Asus ROG Ally X Conclusion

The second generation of Asus’ ROG Ally portable gaming system, the ROG Ally X, builds on the original and fixes a couple of its most glaring flaws, especially the issue of battery life.

However, it’s still very expensive for a portable gaming machine, and for many people that will be the most significant barrier to adoption to overcome.

You’re getting pretty good value for money in gaming laptop terms, but the fact that this isn’t an actual gaming laptop but is still a Windows PC makes for an challenging balance between the immense library of available games… and the rather more open question as to whether they’ll actually run nicely in the first place.

Asus ROG Ally X Design

I was a little late coming to a review of the original ROG Ally, which itself was nearly exactly a year ago.

In that year in design terms, not that much has changed between the ROG Ally and the ROG Ally X excluding a coating of black paint. That’s more than just an aesthetic issue in my eyes, as the all-white design of the original ROG Ally did make me wonder about how grubby it might look over time.

Still, you’re faced with a Switch (or Steam Deck, though Valve’s take on portable gaming is still officially MIA on Australian shores) style portable gaming console built around a 7 inch FHD (1920×1080) Gorilla Glass Victus Display, surrounded by twin thumbsticks, a D-Pad and an ABXY button layout on the face. At the upper sides there’s dual triggers, while the back features two single – and slightly lonely – customisable buttons.

Plus ça change, as they say, though while again I’m late to the ROG Ally X party, I suspect Asus has done some work here in improving the robustness of the controls on this generation.

I’ve no doubt that the model that I tested last year had gone through a number of reviewers before it landed on my desk, and I noted then that I could already feel a little lightness in the button response and travel in the thumbsticks.

That’s much less apparent in the ROG Ally X, though I suppose it’s also equally feasible that the prior reviewers were a less brutal bunch. Still, I do hold to the general observation that this is a device that will eventually break – entropy gets to everything – and the path to repairs and refurbishments isn’t all that clear.

Asus ROG Ally X

Performance

Under the hood, the ROG Ally X… runs the same processor as its predecessor did, being based around an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme Processor. Where Asus has made changes is by increasing the RAM up to 24GB and by doubling the SSD size to a tasty 1TB – and with a faster SSD to boot. Hmm, there’s an unintentional Windows pun there.

In all honesty, I didn’t fully benchmark the original ROG Ally, partly because I figured that knowing how well it managed spreadsheets probably wasn’t the point, but also because running regular apps and benchmarks on a device like this is a tad challenging.

More on that issue below, but I wish I had so I’d have more to say about comparative performance.

Still, at its core this is a gaming PC, so let’s take the recently reviewed Asus TUF A14 as a comparative example. That’s a more expensive unit, but how do the two compare using standard benchmarks?

The ROG Ally X isn’t an absolute gaming powerhouse, but then if Asus were knocking out gaming powerhouse systems at $1,499, it would collapse the rest of its gaming business and quickly go broke, so that’s not a huge surprise to speak of.

Also, honestly, I kind of ran PCMark 10 more because it was there than anything else; I suspect few will use it as a serious work machine, though you could use its USB-C output ports to connect up to an external monitor if you were crazy enough to try.

The real strength of the Asus ROG Ally X is that it’s a full Windows 11 Home PC, which means it’s got access to a games library beyond compare. Seriously, nothing in the portable space can come close to the many decades of games that you could in theory play.

However, the worst thing about the ROG Ally X is… that it’s a full Windows 11 Home PC as well.

This is evident in two aspects, both of which are mostly beyond Asus’ control. Firstly, Windows just isn’t built to work on screens of this size all that well. You can use touch gestures, but when you’re talking tiny tap zones that absolutely expect mouse and keyboard inputs, it rarely works all that well.

Asus answer to gaming problems like this is its Armoury Crate software. Armoury Crate is Asus’ catch-all term for gaming optimisation software, whether you’re talking an Android ROG phone or a ROG laptop. I seriously expect that if Asus ever got into the business of making underwear, it would work out a way to get Armoury Crate running on a pair of Y-Fronts... but I digress.

Here we’re strictly talking Armoury Crate SE, a ROG Ally/ROG Ally X specific version that incorporates its own custom game launcher and control overlay scheme. It’s pretty good at detecting installed games from the major PC games stores – your Steams, Epic Games and so on – and you can add any other Windows title as a tile here too. I do mean any other executable, if you’re still super keen on that whole spreadsheets-on-the-ROG-Ally-X idea then you could do so. Also, seek help.

I did hit one initial issue with Armoury Crate on the ROG Ally X when first setting it up, because for whatever reason it didn't install properly at all, and the links that the dedicated Armoury Crate face buttons point you to don't actually point to the proper version of Armoury Crate to install. That led to some annoying back-and-forth installing and uninstalling until it finally worked properly, more of a headache than I would have liked. Maybe that's just me, though.

Once installed, Armoury Crate is easy enough to understand and get to using, but you can’t escape the fact that Windows almost inevitably will intrude on your gaming experience in some way or another.

Sometimes it’s pop-ups in the middle of a game, sometimes it’s maddening game crashes that require obtuse solutions, tinkering with specific files in a folder.

I love that the PC gaming community comes together for these kinds of solves, but trying to manage them on this screen with simulated mouse controls or touch is astonishingly frustrating.

Asus has switched from having a custom eGPU port on the original model to dual USB-C ports on the ROG Ally X, which does make it easier to add peripherals such as an actual keyboard and mouse. That works – I managed it with an external USB hub – but it totally kills the “portability” aspect of the ROG Ally X when you’re doing so, with a tangle of cables that rather resembles a deeply confused octopus.

Then there’s the question of game compatibility. I can’t test every game released and compatible with Windows 11 during my review period – or even my lifetime – but newer games are likely to give you less stress than older ones. With my retro gaming hat on, I found more than a few games where getting input controls mapped was either frustrating or impossible, and naturally any game that thinks in terms of mouse inputs is going to be less than stellar.

All of which might sound like a total bummer, not worth bothering with… except that it absolutely is possible to have quite a lot of fun with the ROG Ally X. It has undeniably impacted my productivity while I’ve had it in for review, because the temptation to have “just one game” when it’s this easy to do is quite high. That’s not great for my work ethic, but it does point to just how engaging the ROG Ally X can be.

Asus ROG Ally X

Battery

One of the biggest issues that I had with the original ROG Ally was its battery life.

Battery life for gaming laptops is legendarily awful, and the ROG Ally really did leave me wanting a lot of the time. For the ROG Ally X, Asus has taken a somewhat brute force approach, cramming in literally double the battery capacity of the original model, with an 80Whr battery hiding behind the screen.

As I’ve noted in so many smartphone reviews, having a bigger battery is rarely a bad idea, but the numbers alone aren’t enough to ensure battery life; this needs testing.

To assess that, I ran the ROG Ally X through my standard laptop battery tests, with a “soft” local video playback test and then a “hard” gaming test, in this case PC Mark 10’s gaming battery test. Here’s how the ROG Ally X compared against its predecessor, and just for the sake of it, the TUF A14 as well:

Those numbers are great, hands down.

I doubt too many buyers are going to use it for video watching a lot of the time, but the gaming time score there is the key winner, falling just short of three hours of tested time.

It’s one of the very best scores I’ve seen in that test across any gaming laptop, period, though clearly only having to run a 7 inch FHD display helps a little there.

This isn’t just a theoretical benchmark measure either; in my non-productive-but-hey-I’m-working-on-the-ROG-Ally-X gaming during my review period, two hours and more has been entirely achievable.

Asus supplies a compact USB-C charger in the box, and I’ve had no issues during my review period with suitable USB-C PD chargers giving it power either.

Asus ROG Ally X: Alex’s Verdict

Is the Asus ROG Ally X a clear improvement on the original ROG Ally?

Yes, absolutely.

The key improvement here is battery life, which is critical to a portable games machine like this. It’s still an awful lot of fun to play, too, with a games library that is without a question second to none.

However, it is an expensive proposition not only within its particular portable PC gaming space – even moreso than the original ROG Ally was – but especially against other portable gaming options like a Nintendo Switch. The inclusion of Windows gives it a huge library, but also means it’s just plain less stable and more annoying in places than a dedicated games machine would be.

Asus ROG Ally X: Pricing and availability

The ASUS ROG Ally X retails in Australia for $1,599.

	Buy The Asus ROG Ally X!	Buy On Amazon

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