As an ROG Ally Z1 Extreme owner, I skipped the X.
It wasn't much of an upgrade, but now that Xbox and ASUS have teamed up
to give us the ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X,
I might be due for an upgrade. Let's look at the box here.
We've got ROG Xbox Ally. This is the white one is the Ally,
which is the weaker one. It's got a Z2A processor instead of the new Z2 Extreme,
but we'll get more into that later. Their code name is RC73YA.
I'm actually writing the review for these units now, and that's why my unit is actually already opened.
The main difference between a fully new experience
and what I've got here is there's normally some plastic that kind of covers the device.
You just peel that off, and there's some plastic around the box. That's it.
For this SC, we're doing a more of just, you know,
open the thing, check it out, take a look, and see if it actually feels or plays any good.
If you want the more full review, check it out on LTT. We've also got, similar to the ROG Ally and Ally X,
it does come with a little stand from ASUS.
Otherwise, that's it in here, but past the handheld itself, we get our charger.
Yep, 65 watt right there. My only complaint here is that the prongs aren't retractable.
Let's see how long this cable is. Probably about six feet. Definitely long enough for you to plug this into an outlet
and then stay tethered to the wall. And what's in this other box?
I actually never even looked through these when I opened it. I had all the cables I needed, so I just kind of like took the handheld out
and started using it. A little gaming handheld guide.
That's basically it. That's what you get in the box. And honestly, the big stand out for me is the kickstand.
It's got a little soft piece of like felt or something
on the frontier or foam, so that you're, even though your screen is sliding into it,
you're not gonna damage it. And while it is covering part of the screen,
that's actually really just the bezel and the ROG logo. So you're not even losing any screen real estate
when you pop it in here. So overall, really nice inclusion.
You don't need it, but hey, I'd rather they include it and not need it than need it and not have it.
But there isn't just the Ally. There's also the Ally X for a significantly higher price
that we'll touch on later. And unlike the white one, this one's black.
Also the unboxing experience is basically the same. You've got your card here.
The whole device is wrapped in some plastic.
Also includes a 65 watt charger. And I believe the kickstand as well.
And otherwise, yeah, it's the same. You just pull the device out and there you go. Well, look at these little guys.
Aren't they cute together? They're almost the exact same
aside from the black and white color schemes. We'll start with the regular Ally.
Non-X, 672 grams, okay, very good.
And then our X-Backs, 720 grams.
So yeah, there's a not insignificant difference in weight.
And that's probably because of the 80 watt hour battery
that's in here, which is gonna be a little larger than the 60 watt hour battery in this guy.
But what it costs you in weight, it makes up for in performance, but we'll get to that later.
Because first I wanna tell you guys about the rest of the construction and everything.
I actually had a really cool meeting with ASUS where they showed us all the different
like prototypes they've built and the internals of this thing.
So I've seen it torn down. It is pretty repairable with just a few screws.
I think one of them's captive. The only thing that you might have to worry about
if you're gonna open these things and change out the SSD or swap the sticks
or something like that is there's a tiny ribbon cable that you wanna watch out for when you're opening it.
So when you do get the shell separate, don't rip it open.
Just slightly lift it up and then look for the cable, disconnect it and you're good to go from there.
Aside from the obviously different controller grips, which we'll talk about later,
this is very similar to an ROG Ally. So if you've seen one of those,
then you've already kind of seen one of these. The main differences are the face buttons
are nice and big and chunky, like a real controller.
Your preference may vary. I prefer these bigger ones, Linus doesn't like them,
but that's, you know, to each their own. The thumbsticks feel significantly better than the ROG Ally.
They're not nearly as loose and I was playing a lot of skate on these things
and it just, oh my God, it was night and day playing on this versus my Ally.
The screen is the same. It's still a seven inch 1080p, 120 Hertz display IPS.
It's not bad. Obviously it's not an OLED. I know everyone wanted this thing to be OLED
even at the price point, but I promise you, if they made it OLED, it would cost more than it already does.
As for the top IO, we've got our power button and fingerprint sensor,
headphone jack, micro SD card slot on the other side of the device,
like they fixed with the Ally X, volume rocker.
Now we've got our two USB-C ports. The one right here is USB 3.2 Gen 2.
And then this guy with a nice little 40 next to it
is Thunderbolt 4. So you're gonna be able to connect this
to an eGPU, no problem. They've taken away their XG mobile connection
and now we're just using Thunderbolt, which is way more universal and easy to use.
And then on the bottom, there's nothing but screws. I would love having the second USB-C port.
That's actually a huge improvement over my
Ally Z one extreme, because now I can connect both a keyboard and a mouse
if I wanted to. Or you know, you can charge it while you've got a keyboard attached because
mouse, fine. I can deal without having a mouse on these things, but without having a keyboard,
it is really a nightmare to type in like passwords and stuff like that.
As for the rest of the shell and the plastic itself, we've got this little ASUS logo down here.
And then something I'm actually just kind of noticing now on the black one.
Yeah, I never noticed this once on the white one. It's almost impossible to see.
But on the black, it's super obvious. You've got this like Xbox ROG scribed all along.
And I don't know how well the camera will pick it up. That's just kind of a nice little touch.
And then the back is actually textured really nicely. So you feel like you've got a good grip on this thing.
I mean, you're gonna kind of need it because like holding it like this is fine.
But I can tell you there's a scuff on this guy because I was holding it like that.
And it's not thumbstick snagged on my jeans
and it dropped it at the floor. It's okay. Don't worry about it.
And we've got a couple of front speaker grills here. I don't think they did a major update on the speakers,
but they're pretty solid. We'll get to those later. One thing they have seemed to improve is the rumble.
And I don't know if it's just having it in a bigger handle that I feel it more,
but or if they've actually improved the rumble in it, but it's significantly better than the other units.
And then the final kind of touch is just like ROG
on the side here. What's actually really surprising me that I didn't notice while gaming on it.
And it's only once I've started looking at it more closely is how much like ROG and ASUS stuff is on this thing.
Like ROG, ASUS ROG logo.
They've got the ROG logo on the back here.
And then for Xbox or Microsoft for that matter,
you've literally got the Xbox button right there. And then for the non-X, it's almost the same
except these USB-C ports are a little different. Instead, both of them are USB-C 3.2 Gen2.
And the DisplayPort that we get on the DisplayPort one
is only DP 1.4, unlike the 2.1 we're getting on the other guy.
To be clear, these things are, unless you're hooking it up to an eGPU,
I don't think they're gonna need anything bigger than DP 1.4, but it's nice to have it and not need it,
then need it and not have it. All right, enough about design. Let's talk about power.
And unfortunately, there's only a Z2A
in the white non-X ally versus the Z2 Extreme
in the black ally X. And there's a pretty massive performance difference
between the two, both on the CPU side and on the GPU side.
At 599 on the ally non-X, you are essentially getting a beefed up steam deck.
With the Z2A chip, you're getting four cores, eight threads on the CPU.
And then for the GPU part of that APU, it's RDNA 2 and you're only getting eight cores.
And while this has the same 1080p display I mentioned earlier,
this one's only gonna go up to a max of 20 watts
because it just, it can't go higher than that.
That is five watts higher than the steam deck. So I was being very serious when I said
it's a juiced up steam deck. Whereas with the Xbox ally X,
you're getting an eight core 16 thread chip and 16 RDNA 3.5 graphics cores.
This thing is kind of a beast. And yeah, it's $1,000.
But to be clear, if you want something higher end than that, you're almost doubling the price.
As for memory and storage, the white one's got a 512 gig SSD, which is fine.
You're gonna be playing more, you know, AA or indie games on this thing.
And most of those aren't very big anyway, versus the one terabyte that comes with the ally X.
The nice thing about both of these is they've got 2280 millimeter NVMe drives back here.
So if you do want to make an upgrade, it should be relatively easy.
They've got micro SD cards. So buy a one terabyte micro SD card.
If you're really worried about storage, pop it in and never worry about it again.
And then the nice thing about the Xbox is that this thing can juice up to 35 watts.
That's a lot of juice. But enough about the numbers, let's turn these things on.
Now they are basically Windows devices. So that's the thing is to be very clear here,
Xbox is making a lot of mistakes recently. Don't worry about that.
Just look at this as a Windows handheld. And you're totally fine.
You don't need to use any of the Xbox related stuff at all. One major difference, if you do already own an ally
or an ally X, they swapped the buttons for like armory crate and pause and stuff.
Really annoying. It didn't take me super long to get used to it, but I did a lot of like, oh, positive.
Nope, that's not pause at all. Oh, that's not armory crate at all. It's pretty cool.
You can have your device set so that it just launches straight into Xbox mode.
So you never even see a Windows desktop. It's not super seamless.
If you go to launch a game that you own through Steam, for example, it does keep your entire library in one space.
So it's really easy to keep all your games together, even if you have multiple different platforms
that you go to. But if you go to launch a game and you're booting the system up for the first time,
it'll then go to launch Steam. And that's actually like waiting for a little while.
Like it even tells me, Steam, Steam, Steam, Steam. It's not perfect.
If you want a bit of a deeper dive, definitely check out the LTT
because me and Linus both have our own list of complaints. But overall, it's better than I expected it to be.
And if you don't want to use this at all, because you don't have to, you just hold the Xbox button
and then instead of Xbox full screen experience, you hit Windows desktop, continue.
Boom, now Windows handheld, super simple. It doesn't always do a seamless transition,
but Skate was loading. So I expect it to be a little upset with me right now.
You know, FSR quality, everything else is set to low,
30 FPS target frame. Let's, you know, put it to 60. See if it can do it.
I don't think it can. 720p feels a little floaty,
but that's also just kind of Skate. There was a big update, so I wonder if it's changed at all.
But we'll try it on the X afterwards, because yeah, 20 Watts,
I'm getting like 80, 75 FPS, which is totally pretty solid.
Oh yeah, it's already feels better. Oh, and I'm only on 13 Watts. Man, this thing is such a beast.
I gotta blame Linus for this. He didn't update the device properly. So we don't have all of our FPS numbers showing properly,
but like I can tell you right now, all the settings the same.
It's handling so much smoother.
God, everything feels so good. Yeah, I like your beard belt. It still feels a little floaty,
so I'm not sure if I'm just used to playing on PC. This feels great.
If you wanna see actual proper game benchmark results, please check out the LTT that we're also uploading today.
But what I wanna know right now is how good these speakers are. Oh, we'll use Microsoft Edge
because there's no Chrome on this bad boy yet. It should be the same speakers on both devices.
And on top of the vibration feeling pretty solid in the grips, there's also in the AllyX vibration motors
and the triggers as well.
That's pretty solid.
They're pretty good. Now, I'm pretty sure they're the exact same speakers,
but we'll check it out on the non-X as well.
That sounds the same to me. If you're picking which one to buy,
it's kind of a tough call. But the real big improvement is just
the Z2 Extreme versus the Z2 A.
I don't really recommend the non-X.
I think that if you want this level of performance, you're kind of better off just buying a Steam Deck
for like 320 bucks, especially cause, you know, the OLED Steam Deck is like what, $600?
So it's around the same price as this anyway. If you're out there struggling
to make up your mind right now, make sure to check out the LTT for a bit more in-depth benchmarking and information.
And if you want to check out any other handhelds that we've looked at over the past couple of years,
check them out on ShortCircuit. We've unboxed a lot of them.