Asus ROG Xbox Ally X Review

Design

• Meaner, black chassis
• Very comfortable in-hand
• A faster USB-C port is present

There are some differences between this ROG Xbox Ally X and the non-X model – one big one is that this more expensive one only comes in black, against the white of the base model. It provides a meaner look than the standard model. The screen is also tilted away from you, to make the handheld more comfortable to use – this is true of both ROG Xbox Ally models.

The controller-style grips on the underside are retained, making this a very comfortable device in-hand, while the addition of impulse triggers (similar to modern Xbox controllers) and a larger battery push the weight of the X model up to 715g. That’s still some 50g lighter than the Claw A8, which makes a bit of a difference to overall feel in hand.

The control layout is identical to an Xbox controller, with a pair of diagonally opposing thumbsticks on either side of the screen, plus a D-Pad on the left and ABXY buttons on the right. This provides a familiar feel and is a comfortable layout I’m used to.

The ROG Xbox Ally X is kitted out with the same port selection as its cheaper brother, although it comes with one more powerful USB4 Type-C port that’s Thunderbolt 4 compatible, alongside the existing USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port with DisplayPort 2.1 and PD 3.0 capabilities. You also get a slightly better UHS-II microSD card reader and a headphone jack.

Having two on the top side makes it easier than dealing with other handhelds that feature one on the bottom, and it is possible to hook this handheld up to an external display if you want to, while providing power, to use it in the same vein as a more traditional computer.

Controls

• Familiar Xbox controller layout 
• Comfortable triggers and thumbsticks
• Pleasant rumble, especially with impulse triggers

The general feel of the ROG Xbox Ally X’s controls is familiar if you’ve used an Xbox controller for even a femtosecond, as it splits a standard controller in half between the 7-inch screen, providing all the controls you need. ABXY buttons, full-size textured thumbsticks and a D-Pad are all here.

The thumbsticks feel the same as on a standard Xbox Wireless Controller when comparing them, while the main buttons have a snappy feel. On the top side, there are shoulder buttons and Hall-effect triggers with heightened accuracy and durability over standard mechanisms. 

This -X model also benefits from impulse triggers, the same as you’ll find on modern Xbox controllers, for extra haptic feedback and rumble, such as when firing a gun or accelerating in a car. You also get a pair of clicky paddles on the rear side of the chassis.

My general impressions when running through some Hitman World of Assassination over the cloud or with Forza Horizon 5 natively on the unit are positive, and I had no issues with how the controls felt. I also feel obliged to say there is some familiar rumble with the HD haptics and the presence of the impulse triggers, and the speakers are pretty good, too.

With Armoury Crate SE present, you can remap inputs for the two paddle buttons on the rear side, while you’re also able to remap the individual buttons in gamepad and desktop modes separately.

Display

• Unchanged Full HD IPS screen from original Ally and Xbox Ally base model
• Punchy brightness and responsive with 120Hz refresh rate
• Black level and contrast are just okay

Against both the ROG Xbox Ally and even Asus’ older Ally handhelds, the screen of this ROG Xbox Ally X isn’t an upgrade as it sticks with an identical 7-inch Full HD resolution IPS screen, complete with a 120Hz refresh rate for smoother motion and variable refresh rate to prevent screen tearing and juddering.

The lack of an OLED screen is easy to bemoan, especially given the gains in depth and vibrancy that you get over an IPS screen like the one here. For Asus, though, there is a reason that OLED wasn’t chosen; it was a trade-off between OLED and VRR, and variable refresh rate was deemed a non-negotiable feature.

Putting a colorimeter to the panel revealed near-identical results to the ROG Xbox Ally, with a vibrant peak brightness of 427.6 nits, plus reasonable black level and contrast, with 0.35 and 1340:1 results respectively. It’s about what you’d expect from an IPS panel.

The same is also true for the colour accuracy of the panel, with 96% sRGB coverage meaning the mainstream colours you’ll see for gaming loads are rather well represented, although the 73% DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB results are lacking for any more specialist use cases. For the fact that this is a gaming handheld, it’s more than okay.

The 120Hz refresh rate is a bump over the 90Hz you’ll find on the Steam Deck OLED, as is the Full HD resolution, which is a sensible choice given the power level on offer with the Z2 Extreme. I found the panel to offer solid detail and smoother motion in titles that could take advantage of it, although it is nonetheless present for aiding a slicker feel in navigating menus in and out of games.

Performance

• Potent results at full 35W TDP in Turbo mode
• Gaming numbers similar to MSI Claw A8 when at 17W
• Capacious SSD and good RAM headroom

The ROG Xbox Ally X isn’t lacking in grunt against its contemporaries, coming packed with the same Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme chip as the MSI Claw A8, although with an added NPU for AI tasks if you need it. 

Otherwise, the basic formation of the chip is the same –  eight Zen 5 cores and 16 threads, plus a 16-core RDNA 3.5-based GPU that’s the same Radeon 890M integrated graphics found in AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 laptop processor. It is a small, but important, step up from the Ryzen Z1 Extreme found in the Asus ROG Ally X, too.

Alongside this grunt in a processing sense, Asus has opted to go for 24GB of fast LPDDR5X RAM in this handheld, plus a 1TB internal SSD for storage. In theory, this might seem like enough storage, but with a couple of bigger games installed, that’s half your storage gone.

As with MSI’s choice, I ran the ROG Xbox Ally X through our usual suite of computing benchmarks to provide some quantifiable idea of how well this handheld performs in both games and a range of synthetic tests.

In the likes of Geekbench 6, I noted the scores achieved by the Ryzen Z2 Extreme to be quite similar to those on the laptop-class Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, especially when this handheld was allowed to run at its full 35W Turbo mode.

The Radeon 890M integrated graphics posted a reasonable score in 3DMark Time Spy, although the result there and the associated gaming benchmarks go to prove that even this new Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme chip is far behind the newer Strix Halo APUs found in the likes of the Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) that’ll hopefully make their way to these handhelds soon. It’s in some options from the likes of GPD at the moment, although calling it ‘portable’ is a bit of a stretch.

For reference, the Radeon 8050S in the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) has double the compute units and much more bandwidth for a lot of added grunt.

Intriguingly, running the ROG Xbox Ally X in its full 35W Turbo mode pushes it ahead of the MSI Claw A8 in the same test suite of games to varying degrees, given it can harness a little extra power. For instance, at 1080p, we saw 28.93fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at its Ultra preset and 28fps in Returnal at 1080p; the Claw A8 hit 25.20fps and 24fps, respectively.

As with the Claw A8, these aren’t groundbreaking numbers, admittedly, and balancing settings and some upscaling will take numbers higher. Cyberpunk pushed all the way up to 46.38fps with FSR 2.1 in Performance mode at 1080p, while Returnal pushed up to 37fps.

Both handhelds, when unplugged, posted results in the mid-20fps range at top settings in both games that are within the margin of error for each other, given the Z2 Extreme chip was running at 17W for both. Intriguingly, the Claw A8 took a very slight lead, even if it wasn’t utilising the lighter Xbox Full Screen Experience, as the ROG Xbox Ally X was.

For less demanding and more competitive eSports titles such as Rainbow Six Extraction, this hit 66fps without any form of upscaling at the default highest preset with its dynamic resolution and plugged in (it hit 64fps unplugged), so it’ll be possible to get closer to maxing out the 120Hz refresh rate with some lower quality settings.

The same goes for Forza Horizon 5, which arguably benefited most from the slight boost in wattage when the ROG Xbox Ally X was plugged in. At its recommended High preset at 1080p, we hit 72fps, which dropped to 61fps when the device was unplugged. Dropping down to 720p with some small compromises on Medium settings yields in excess of 100fps at 35W, pushing the 120Hz refresh rate of the 7-inch screen.

The 1TB SSD didn’t turn out to be anywhere near as fast on battery power as it did when this Ally Xbox X was plugged in, weirdly. It posted respective reads and writes of 2060.60 MB/s and 3100.24MB/s on battery (slower than the Claw A8), plus 5013.23MB/s reads, and 4164.99MB/s writes, which are okay, if a little confusing.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 3 hours 1 minute in the gaming battery test
• 65W brick puts charge back into it decently fast

The ROG Xbox Ally X, being the flagship model, comes with the larger 80Whr battery that’s the same in capacity as on the competing MSI Claw A8 and the non-Xbox Ally X model that preceded it.

With the brightness dialled back to 150 nits, this handheld lasted for 17 hours 25 minutes in the PCMark 10 Modern Office benchmark, which is a very respectable result, all things considered, and nearly double the non-X model.

Gaming is, of course, a bigger battery drain, and in the PCMark 10 Gaming benchmark, it went down to 3 hours and 1 minute of use before conking out. This feels in line with competing handhelds, and is fifteen minutes longer than the MSI Claw A8 that has the same Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor inside.

The ROG Xbox Ally X comes with a dinky 65W power brick, which was decently brisk at getting the unit charged back up. A charge from zero to 50 percent took 45 minutes, while for a full charge, you’re looking at 90 minutes. Oddly, this is slower to charge than the non -X model.

Games & Software

• Xbox Full Screen Experience is the star of the show
• Slick, console-type UI with Windows 11 underneath
• Some teething problems and finicky elements

The ROG Xbox Ally X is technically the second handheld I’ve used with Microsoft’s new Xbox Full Screen Experience UI that comes over the top of Windows 11. It’s designed to streamline a lot of the key Windows processes that sap power and hinder gaming performance, while presenting things in a more console-type experience that standard Windows 11 has failed to deliver.

If you go into the desktop mode, the processes start, and you will see a dip in performance as resources are taken up in the background. Restarting the ROG Xbox Ally is required to optimise performance if you change from one mode to the other, and there’s a button in the top right corner of the Xbox app to restart into FSE if you’re in desktop mode.

I found the UI to be slick and easy to use, and it is certainly console-like in its implementation, putting your installed games front and centre in a similar vein to the Xbox app baked into Windows. It manages to place them neatly and tidily in one place, regardless of whether they’re installed via the Xbox app itself or through third-party launchers such as Steam and Ubisoft Connect. As much as I had to install these launchers to install the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Rainbow Six Extraction for testing, launching them via the Xbox app is a doozy. It pulls through the relevant processes and boots the game with ease.

Some titles take a little longer to boot, such as Returnal through Steam. This opens Steam and even Epic Games up on first launch to install some dependencies and run an update, and then proceeds to launch the game. It takes some of the slickness away, admittedly, but nonetheless works.

With this in mind, being a Windows 11 handheld means you get access to a vast number of PC games through those launchers, which is a welcome addition. You also have the option of using Xbox Cloud Gaming for playing Xbox console games with a Game Pass subscription, plus the option to remotely stream from your console if you wish. It is a shame you can’t play Xbox games natively, although maybe that’s for a future iteration. Rumours indicate that the next Xbox could be a ‘hybrid’ console to play both PC and Xbox games natively, although these aren’t confirmed, of course.

Microsoft has done as much to preserve the console-type experience with the ROG Xbox Ally X as possible, not least with a range of shortcut buttons around the 7-inch screen. There is a quick access button for Armoury Crate SE, Asus’ software, where you can change settings such as performance modes and screen resolution virtually on the fly. 

The Xbox button brings up a slick Xbox Game Bar where you can quickly jump into games and switch between full-screen apps, such as those games or Discord, while there is a button on the right side of the screen to bring up your library. You can also swipe in a mobile-style manner to close apps down and deal with notifications, plus switch between handheld and desktop mode, as it were.

The aim of all of this is to simplify and streamline the sub-par experience of Windows 11 on a handheld, which can feel clunky at times, given it isn’t a touch-optimised OS. The move to Xbox Full Screen Experience feels like Microsoft has admitted it wholesale.

The addition of the Xbox Full Screen Experience feels like the logical next step forward for these handhelds, and it helps the ROG Xbox Ally X  to feel like the most complete one software-wise yet, especially given my previous misgivings with Windows on these devices. 

It is also worth noting that, as much as this Xbox Full Screen Experience is here at launch for the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, it will be coming to the likes of the Lenovo Legion Go 2 in spring 2026, so the first-party software monopoly isn’t as far-reaching as initially anticipated. Until then, though, this is the best version of Windows 11 fitted to a handheld thus far.

Should you buy it?