We've had some good times together, me and my Steam Deck. While the battery life isn't brilliant, and some games prove simply too much for the hardware inside, it's been mostly a smooth ride. But now the so-new-you-can-smell-the-paint Asus ROG Ally X has received a Black Friday discount, I can feel our time together coming to an end.
It's not your fault, dear Deck. You've been a product of your time, and to be honest, you're still a fantastic gaming handheld in 2024, and likely long after that. But now I've spotted the ROG Ally X for $700 at Best Buy, I can feel the times a'changing.
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The new generation of handheld gaming PCs is here, and this particular model is leading the charge.
It was our Nick who got the chance to review this particular model, and he's a tough audience. So when he gave it 91%, you can best believe that it was tested inside and out with every tool in his arsenal.
It uses the same AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU as the previous ROG Ally, which is absolutely no slouch. However, this time around it gets 24 GB of RAM, meaning it's much more inclined to use a whole 8 GB of it (or more) for VRAM purposes—and that means smoother performance in demanding games.
How smooth, I hear you ask? How about a 75 fps average result in Horizon Zero Dawn with FSR set to Balanced (click the arrow on the graph below to see the upscaled results). Sure, it's at medium quality settings, and sure, upscaling is kinda magic, but that's a properly great result for any handheld.
A lot of this performance is down to the cooling system, which keeps that APU chilled without sounding like a hairdryer. Nick found that the Ally X was around six to 10% faster than the original Ally with FSR engaged, and the OG wasn't exactly slow.
It's also got a whole 1 TB of storage, meaning that there's actually room to fit a number of SSD-swallowing games onboard at once. The chassis has experienced what I believe the kids are calling a "glow up", with a sensible grey/black finish and higher-quality plastics lending the whole machine a high-end feel.
And for $700, you'd probably argue that it should feel expensive. After all, you can pick up budget gaming laptops for similar money. But what the Ally X represents is the evolution of gaming handhelds, a refinement of the form that allows them to be proper, fully-fledged PC gaming machines, and not something that you'd likely only consider using to play undemanding games.
It's the sort of machine that should make the Steam Deck nervous, and that's why it sits as our recommendation for the best handheld gaming PC right now. While it's still a lot more expensive than even the Steam Deck OLED, it's got much more firepower, and an IPS screen that, while not quite OLED levels of lovely, still shines bright and true.
I'm not knocking the Steam Deck in the slightest. Like I say, I love mine, and it's still going to be a great choice for a while yet. But with higher-level competition starting to drop in price, the market is really heating up—and if I was going to buy any handheld right now, I'd try and find the cash for this one instead.
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