ASUS ranges up handheld with higher battery, RAM, and extra

Among the many plethora of rivals Valve’s Steam Deck has spawned, the ASUS ROG Ally is arguably its greatest rival. ASUS’s handheld gaming PC is stable {hardware}, nevertheless it’s not with out its faults (e.g. battery life, RAM, and so forth). Whereas we anticipate a sequel to the system, ASUS has launched a mid-gen refresh — the ROG Ally X — that brings a number of vital enhancements.

You gained’t see any drastic modifications right here, however there are noticeable variations with the hand-held. The obvious distinction is the colour, because the ROG Ally X has a black exterior as a substitute of a white one.

One other change ASUS made to the chassis is the handles. The corporate has barely redesigned the handles so they’re deeper than earlier than and extra rounded. ASUS says this modification was made to make the hand-held extra ergonomic. Talking of ergonomics, the triggers and buttons have been additionally barely rearranged so they’re at a extra ergonomic angle.

You can too count on some minor modifications to the joysticks, D-Pad, and ports. ASUS has swapped out the previous joysticks with extra sturdy elements which are stated to be rated for a 5 million cycle lifespan. The D-Pad has been improved to supply extra exact 8-direction enter. Lastly, the XG Cell port from the Ally has been changed by two USB-C ports.

The modifications made to this mid-gen refresh go deeper than simply the cosmetics. Whereas the Home windows gadget is essentially an iterative replace, there are a number of vital new options that you’ll want to learn about.

ASUS SVP Shawn Yen stated that the corporate would handle a few of Ally’s greatest points with the Ally X. One among these points was the 40Wh battery, which solely supplied about 2-6.8 hours of playtime. The brand new system has doubled the capability with an 80Wh battery.

One other grievance many customers had is the quantity of RAM. The Ally has 16GB of RAM, whereas the Ally X will increase this rely to 24GB. Storage has additionally elevated as effectively, shifting up from 512GB to 1TB. And the motherboard has be redesigned to characteristic an M.2 2280 type issue slot, permitting customers to extra simply improve their storage to bigger drives.

One of many greatest downsides of the unique gadget is warmth technology. ASUS has improved warmth dissipation by giving the ROG Ally X followers with blades which are 50% thinner to extend airflow. Together with two new tunnels within the fan’s housing, the corporate says this offers 24% extra air quantity than earlier than.

Pricing and availability

Since that is an improve to the Ally, don’t count on the ROG Ally X to be cheaper. The system is priced at $799.99, which is $100 greater than the unique Z1 Excessive mannequin. You may pre-order the ROG Ally X proper now on Greatest Purchase’s web site.