I came into the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X with a chip on my shoulder. Xbox is having a weird year-Game Pass price hikes, whiplash-inducing messaging-and now there’s a handheld PC with an Xbox button daring me to treat Windows 11 like a living room console. For two weeks, I treated it the way I use my Steam Deck OLED: on the couch, on a flight, at a coffee shop, and plugged into my desk monitor. It’s impressive, no doubt. It’s also undeniably a Windows PC first, a handheld second, and a would-be console somewhere in between.
My verdict up front: the ROG Xbox Ally X is a powerful, comfortable handheld that really does make Xbox Play Anywhere feel real-when the fan isn’t howling and Windows isn’t being, well, Windows. If that trade-off sounds familiar and acceptable, you’ll have a blast. If you want Nintendo-like simplicity, you’ll bounce off the rough edges fast.
The box is clean and sparse. Maybe a little too sparse. You get the handheld, paperwork, and that’s it—no charger, not even a USB-C cable. I get the sustainability angle, but starting a premium handheld journey by digging through drawers for a 65W USB-C PD brick sets the tone. I used my 65W GaN charger and a spare cable; both ports on the unit will fast-charge it, which is convenient. First boot took a while—like setting up any brand-new Windows machine—so plan for that.
At 715 g, it’s noticeably heavier than a Switch and slightly heavier than a Steam Deck OLED, but the weight distribution is great. The new, detached grip design genuinely helps. After a two-hour Hades II session lying on a couch, my wrists felt fine. That surprised me; I expected the extra grams to sting. The grips have a textured “ROG” and “ROG XBOX” pattern that sounds gamer-y but feels practical. No sweaty slip, no awkward pinky balancing act.
The layout hits a nice “Xbox-adjacent” sweet spot: asymmetrical sticks, familiar triggers, and a dedicated Xbox button to bring up the Xbox layer over Asus’s own software. ABXY are now black/gray instead of color-coded. I miss the colors more than I expected; they matter when you glance down mid-fight. The face buttons have a clicky, audible snap—fine with headphones, a touch loud in a quiet room.
Two rear paddles are well-placed and saved my bacon in Halo Infinite; I mapped one to melee and the other to jump, and it just felt right. The sticks are smooth and accurate, but they aren’t Hall effect. That’s a head-scratcher in 2025. The triggers, though, do use Hall sensors and feel excellent—linear, stable, no gritty travel. Rumble is basic, not the nuanced haptics you get on DualSense. If you crave granular vibration, this won’t scratch that itch.
The fingerprint reader baked into the power button is a low-key hero. On a device that constantly deals with Windows logins, that one-touch unlock removed just enough friction to keep me from grumbling. Small win, big quality-of-life impact.
On top you’ve got dual vents, the volume rocker, power/fingerprint, and the ports: one USB4 Type-C (Thunderbolt 4 compatible) and one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C—both support 65W charging—plus a microSD slot and a 3.5 mm jack. The microSD slot recognized my 512 GB card instantly and performance felt consistent; I installed smaller indies there without drama. I ran a USB-C hub off the Thunderbolt port to plug in a keyboard and external SSD, then threw Forza Horizon 5 onto the SSD just to see. No bottlenecks I could feel.
Docking to a monitor through USB-C was painless, and while the screen itself doesn’t do Dolby Vision or HDR, you can pass Dolby Vision to a compatible external display. It’s a niche perk, but watching a few Dolby Vision movies during a hotel stay made the Ally X double as a handy media box.
The 7-inch IPS panel looks crisp at 1080p and 120 Hz. I’m an OLED snob, and I still didn’t hate being here. Blacks aren’t OLED-deep and the contrast isn’t magical, but the 500-nit brightness and VRR (FreeSync Premium) keep motion clean. In Hi-Fi Rush, the 120 Hz refresh felt butter-smooth in a way the Deck’s 800p/90 Hz can’t match. Outdoors, I could still see the screen in direct sun at max brightness—reflections weren’t brutal thanks to Gorilla Glass—but fingerprints collect fast. I kept a microfiber cloth in the case for a reason.
Fans aside (we’ll get there), the speakers shocked me. Front-facing Smart Amp drivers with Dolby Atmos support fill a small room without rattling. There’s a tiny boxed-in timbre, but at mid-to-high volume, music and voice come through clean. Hades II’s soundtrack had punch; Baldur’s Gate 3’s voiceover never got swallowed by fan noise unless I was in Turbo mode. The onboard mic with AI noise suppression did a decent job on a quick Sea of Thieves session—teammates didn’t complain once.
Here’s the crossroads: this machine runs Windows 11. That’s both the selling point and the headache. The Xbox layer and apps make a real effort to corral the experience into “pick up and play,” and the dedicated Xbox button helps. I bounced between the Xbox app (including Game Pass), Steam, and the Epic Games Store without any juggling of launchers beyond the usual logins. The Xbox app’s new library view makes it feel closer to a console shelf, and I appreciated that it aggregates purchases across stores, at least visually.
But Windows is Windows. The onscreen keyboard pops up when it shouldn’t, and sometimes refuses to when it should. Text scaling occasionally breaks on odd desktop dialogs, especially in app installers. A stray Windows update restarted me right as I was about to drop a boss in Dead Cells. After 10 hours, I had my rhythm: set the device to “controller mode” for games, “desktop mode” when fiddling with settings or launching something cranky, and use the right stick as a mouse when needed. There’s an auto mode that guesses based on the active app, which worked most of the time, but not always.
I mapped the rear paddles to handy shortcuts: one for Windows Game Bar capture and one to bring up the control center. Speaking of, the control center is actually great—quick toggles for performance profile, refresh rate, and screen brightness live there, and I used them constantly. Flip to 60 Hz for battery sipping on Slay the Spire; swagger back to 120 Hz for shooters. It’s nice muscle memory once it clicks.
Let’s talk about the thing you came here for: how it plays and how it sounds doing it. Across two weeks, I rotated through Halo Infinite, Forza Horizon 5, Hi-Fi Rush, Hades II, Baldur’s Gate 3, Sea of Stars, and a smattering of indies. I didn’t chase benchmark charts—I played the way I normally would on a handheld: some medium settings, some frame caps, quick tweaks for comfort.
In Performance mode, Halo Infinite felt comfortably responsive with medium-ish settings and a 60 fps target—it dipped during big firefights, but VRR masked the stutter well. Forza Horizon 5 is the showpiece: frame pacing felt tight, and at 60 fps with a few settings nudged down, it was a pocket console bliss moment. Hi-Fi Rush at 120 Hz? A vibe. The minute I docked the Ally X and went Turbo, frames stabilized further—but so did the fan noise, at a level that made me reach for headphones.
Indies and lighter fare absolutely sing here. Sea of Stars at 120 Hz makes the world feel liquid; Celeste’s precision is enhanced by the panel’s clarity. Baldur’s Gate 3 required the most fiddling—texture settings, FSR tweaks, and a 40-60 fps window depending on the area—but that’s par for the course on any handheld PC right now. I didn’t encounter thermal throttling that killed a session, but I did feel the heat right above the grips after a 90-minute Turbo-mode push. The dual “Zero Gravity” fans do their job even if you’re gaming upside down in bed (don’t judge), but in Turbo they’re not shy. You’ll hear them. People around you will hear them.
If silence matters, Performance mode is the sweet spot. Silent mode exists, and it’s fine for visual novels or 2D indies, but anything 3D will chug. I ended up using Performance mode 70% of the time, Turbo when docked with headphones, Silent for midnight visual novel binges. This balance made the device feel versatile, if not truly console-simple.
Battery life is going to depend wildly on what you play and which mode you pick. I won’t pretend it’s a miracle worker. In my testing window: Hades II in Performance mode with the screen at 60 Hz gave me a little over three hours. Halo Infinite at 60 Hz landed closer to two hours. Turbo mode with Forza docked was basically “stay plugged in” territory. Slay the Spire and Vampire Survivors stretched well past four hours with brightness down.
Heat is mostly concentrated at the top near the vents; the grips stay reasonably comfortable. The screen itself warms up after prolonged Turbo play, and I noticed more finger smudging when the glass was warm—little things you won’t see on spec sheets. If you’re sensitive to fan pitch, you’ll learn exactly when to cap frames, drop to 60 Hz, or flip to Performance. It becomes second nature after a few sessions.
This hardware is a flex, but the pitch is philosophical: your Xbox catalog, your PC catalog, on one handheld, with an Xbox-flavored interface guiding you. And to a surprising extent, it lands. I booted, hit the Xbox button, scrolled my library in a way that felt familiar, and jumped into Game Pass games like it was second nature. Then I tapped open Steam for my purchases there. I didn’t have to think about cross-saves because so many of these games just handle it now. That’s the Xbox Play Anywhere dream actually working.
Where it falls short is the glue. A true console smooths edge cases you never see. Windows doesn’t. I had a couple of games that launched behind other windows, or lost focus when I plugged in a USB keyboard. More than once, a first-time launch wanted desktop-level permissions and dropped me into clicky dialog boxes that don’t scale well on a 7-inch screen. If you’ve lived with a handheld PC before, you’ll shrug. If you haven’t, it might feel like homework.
Three things bugged me over time. First, the sticks not being Hall effect in 2025 feels like a miss, especially at this price. I didn’t experience drift, but I’ve been around enough handhelds to want prevention by design. Second, the fan’s tone in Turbo is just high enough to cut through living room noise. I could ignore it with the volume at 30% and above, but in quiet games I constantly reached for headphones. Third, smudges. The glass is sturdy and resists glare decently, but it is a fingerprint magnet. Not a deal-breaker, just a constant wipe.
I kept bouncing between this and my Steam Deck OLED. The Deck is slower, but its OS is cohesive and quiet. The Ally X is faster and sharper, with a glorious 120 Hz panel and better speakers, but louder and more fiddly. If I’m traveling and want sheer convenience, I still grab the Deck. If I want to play my PC/Xbox library at higher fidelity and don’t mind babysitting settings, the Ally X earns its spot.
Versus a Switch? Different universe. The Switch remains king of pick-up-and-play. The Ally X is the power user’s handheld, pulling double duty as a mini PC that just happens to game extremely well. Against Lenovo’s Legion Go, the Ally X feels more balanced in the hands and simpler in software—even if both are ultimately Windows contraptions with their own brand of chaos.
With the ROG Xbox Ally and the beefier ROG Xbox Ally X landing between €599.99 and €899.99, you’re paying premium handheld-PC money. The performance, screen, and feel justify it if you’ll actually use the power and the Xbox/PC overlap. But remember: you’ll likely need to buy a 65W charger if you don’t already own one, and you might want a microSD card out of the gate. Hidden cost creep is real here.
By day four, I stopped thinking about the form factor and just treated it like my “Xbox-to-go.” By day seven, I had muscle memory for the control center and refresh-rate toggles. By day ten, the fan’s voice had set up shop in my brain and I defaulted to headphones after sunset. By the end, I trusted it. I trusted that I could take a save from my Series X, continue on the couch, dock it at my desk for Turbo-mode clarity, and go right back to handheld mode without a fuss. That trust is hard to earn, and the Ally X earned it—scuffs and all.
If you’re the kind of player who doesn’t mind a little tinkering in exchange for a lot of capability, the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X is a blast. If you want silence and simplicity, you’ll be happier elsewhere. It’s the best argument yet for Xbox Play Anywhere as a lifestyle, not just a slogan—delivered through a handheld that sometimes screams while it succeeds.
Powerful, comfortable, and often delightful—just bring your own charger and your favorite headphones.
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