The unit on my desk is the European RC73XA-NH011W box, 24GB and 1TB, and it has spent nine months quietly becoming the machine ASUS and Microsoft promised in October. What changed is mostly software, and what didn’t change still matters.
Overview
Every ROG Xbox Ally X in the world has the same silicon inside: a Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme, 24GB of LPDDR5X-8000, a 1TB PCIe 4.0 drive, an 80Wh battery. The only thing that varies between SKUs is the box. Mine is the international retail version, model RC73XA-NH011W, part number 90NV00H2-M003N0, with the CE mark and the EU country grid printed down the side and 36 months of warranty on the label. Battery pack C41N2406. If you have been trying to work out whether one listing differs from another, it doesn’t, beyond regional pricing and paperwork.
That matters because the interesting variable here was never the hardware bin. It was the software, and the software has moved a very long way since 16 October 2025. The handheld I reviewed at launch and the handheld I have been using this month behave differently enough that a fresh verdict is warranted.
Technical specifications
| ROG Xbox Ally X (RC73XA) | |
|---|---|
| APU | AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme, 8 cores / 16 threads (3x Zen 5 + 5x Zen 5c), up to 5.0GHz, 24MB cache |
| Graphics | AMD Radeon 890M, RDNA 3.5, 16 compute units |
| NPU | AMD XDNA 2, up to 50 TOPS |
| Memory | 24GB LPDDR5X-8000, soldered, default 16GB CPU / 8GB GPU split |
| Storage | 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 2280 SSD, user replaceable |
| Display | 7in IPS, 1920×1080, 16:9, 120Hz, FreeSync Premium VRR, 500 nits, 100% sRGB, Gorilla Glass Victus, 10-point touch |
| Power modes | 13W Silent, 17W Performance, 25W Turbo unplugged, 35W Turbo plugged in |
| Battery | 80Wh, 4-cell Li-ion (C41N2406), 65W USB-C charger |
| Ports | 1x USB4 Type-C (Thunderbolt 4 compliant, DP 1.4), 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C (DP Alt Mode, PD), microSD UHS-II, 3.5mm combo jack |
| Wireless | Wi-Fi 6E 2×2, Bluetooth 5.4 with LE Audio |
| Security | Microsoft Pluton, fingerprint reader in power button |
| OS | Windows 11 Home |
| Size and weight | 290 x 121 x 27.5 to 50.9mm, 715g |
Design and build quality
This is the heaviest handheld ASUS has built, at 715g, and it is also the most comfortable. The Xbox controller grips are not a styling exercise. Holding it feels like holding a stretched Wireless Controller, with the weight sitting in your palms rather than hanging off your thumbs, and I can play for two hours without the wrist ache that a Steam Deck OLED gives me after ninety minutes. It is thicker than a Legion Go 2 at its deepest point yet feels considerably less unwieldy, because the mass is distributed instead of concentrated in a slab.
The triggers are Hall effect, taller and wider than the old Ally X units, with a smooth analogue pull that makes a real difference in Forza Horizon 5. The thumbsticks are not Hall effect, which is the single worst hardware decision on this device. Modular they may be, and they have held up on my unit, but potentiometer sticks on a €899 machine in 2026 will eventually drift, and everyone buying one should know that going in.
ASUS also moved View and Menu below the Command Center and Library buttons, which fights years of muscle memory. Nine months in, I still occasionally open Armoury Crate when I meant to bring up a map. The face buttons are pleasingly clicky and slightly too loud for playing in bed next to someone.
Serviceability is better than expected. Eight Phillips screws (five on the back, three on the bottom, the top middle one captive) get you to a standard M.2 2280 slot sitting right in the middle. The battery cable runs across it, so you will want to disconnect that first. Anyone who has built a PC will manage this in fifteen minutes. Everyone else should buy a fast UHS-II microSD card and forget the panel exists.
Setup and the first hour
Out of the box the machine boots into an Xbox-branded setup flow, and by the time you reach the library it has already pulled Armoury Crate SE, controller firmware and Windows updates. On my unit that first-run sequence took about 40 minutes including reboots, most of it unattended. The fingerprint reader in the power button gets enrolled during setup and is the best quality-of-life feature on the device, because it means you unlock by pressing the button you were pressing anyway, without smearing the display.
The thing worth knowing is that first-run is where the Ally X still leaks Windows. The Windows sign-in, the Microsoft account requirement, a lock screen on the way in: it is all still there, and it is the part of the experience that feels least like the console the branding promises. Once you are past it, you rarely see the desktop again.
The software, nine months on
At launch, the Xbox Full Screen Experience was the most interesting and most frustrating thing about this handheld. It looked like a console shell and behaved like a Windows app, sluggish in places and buggy in others. That criticism has largely stopped applying.
The single biggest change is that the shell now boots lean and stays lean. In Xbox mode my unit sits at roughly 85 background processes and about 5GB of memory in use before a game launches, and switching to the Windows desktop adds another ten processes and around a gigabyte. That headroom is why 24GB of LPDDR5X stops looking like overkill. With 8GB carved off for the GPU by default, the shell’s footprint would hurt on a 16GB machine, which tells you a lot about the cheaper Ally.
The library finally does what it should. Since the April update you can add, remove, edit and launch any installed game or app from the Xbox library, including titles from Epic, Battle.net and EA, with a plus button for anything the scanner misses and editable launch targets and command-line arguments. Gamepad Cursor handles the launchers and web apps that were never designed for a controller. Default Game Profiles, which arrived in November, set sensible settings and power targets per title on battery, and Advanced Shader Delivery downloads precompiled shaders so supported games launch quickly and stop stuttering through their first hour. More than 1,000 titles now carry a Handheld Compatible marking, which is the least glamorous and most useful thing Microsoft has shipped for this platform.
Armoury Crate SE deserves separate credit. The Command Center overlay is fast, it never gets in the way, and it exposes real controls: per-game TDP, SPL, SPPT and FPPT sliders, custom fan curves, GPU memory allocation. It is the best first-party handheld utility any manufacturer currently ships, and it makes the Legion Space equivalent look unfinished.
There is a sting in the tail. Xbox mode stopped being an Ally exclusive on 30 April 2026, when Microsoft began rolling it out to Windows 11 PCs generally. The best reason to buy this specific handheld at launch is now a feature you can get on a cheaper one.
Performance
The Z2 Extreme’s story is efficiency rather than raw uplift, and the power ladder is where the whole review lives. Silent runs at 13W, Performance at 17W, Turbo at 25W unplugged and 35W with the 65W charger attached. AMD’s own default for this chip is 28W, so ASUS ships it deliberately conservative.
At 17W the picture is underwhelming. In Cyberpunk 2077 on the Steam Deck preset without upscaling, my unit lands within a couple of frames of the two-year-old Ally X, and in Forza Horizon 5 it is repeatably slower, with lower GPU clocks and higher CPU utilisation at the same wattage. If you buy this expecting a generational leap in the default profile, you will not find one.
Push to 25W and the chip wakes up. Cyberpunk holds a 61fps average at 720p, roughly double what a Steam Deck OLED manages, and 40fps at native 1080p. Shadow of the Tomb Raider on medium runs 64fps at 720p and 45fps at 1080p. Forza Horizon 5 on Low sits around 105fps at 720p and clears 117fps at 35W, which is the first time I have seen a handheld make real use of a 120Hz panel in a driving game. Doom: The Dark Ages is the honest stress case: with ray tracing at the lowest preset it clears 30fps at 720p from 25W upwards, falls a few frames short of 30 at native 1080p, and with XeSS on Quality at 25W settles into a playable 30 to 38fps.
Sustained behaviour is excellent. Looping the Metro Exodus benchmark fifteen times at 720p medium held a 63fps average with no meaningful decay across half an hour, with the three Zen 5 cores averaging 3.24GHz and the Zen 5c cores 2.15GHz. The cooler is sized correctly for the chip, which is not something you could say about every handheld in 2025.
The upscaling situation is the frustrating part. RDNA 3.5 is still not on AMD’s official FSR 4.1 support list, even after the INT8 build shipped for RDNA 3 desktop cards in Adrenalin 26.6.2 in June. The version works on this hardware, as anyone who has forced it through OptiScaler will tell you, and it delivers the image quality and the uplift you would expect. AMD leaving handheld owners to mod in the single feature that would most benefit them is an odd choice, and it costs the Ally X something in this review.
Thermals, noise and the screen
Under the Metro loop the grips stay between 29 and 32°C where your hands actually are, the exhaust vent along the top reaches about 45°C, and internally the CPU package settles around 75°C with the GPU near 71°C. Nothing gets uncomfortable. The fans are audible in Turbo, a broad whoosh rather than a whine, and the custom fan curve is there if you would rather trade a few degrees for quiet.
The panel is the same 7in 1080p 120Hz IPS unit ASUS has used for three generations, and its age shows in exactly one way: no HDR, and blacks that go grey the moment you play anything set at night. Measured brightness on my unit comes in a shade above the rated 500 nits, which is more than an OLED handheld will give you outdoors and the reason I would not simply call this a downgrade. Colour coverage is full sRGB and accurate enough that I stopped thinking about it. The complaint I would put to ASUS is the aspect ratio: 16:9 on a 7in panel means thick top and bottom bezels and less usable height than the 16:10 competition, and a 16:10 successor would improve this device more than an OLED swap.
Connectivity and docked play
Both USB-C ports sit on the top edge, one USB4 at 40Gb/s with Thunderbolt 4 compliance and DisplayPort 1.4, the other USB 3.2 Gen 2 at 20Gb/s, both capable of display output and power delivery. Two ports on top is the right decision, because it means charging while docked without a cable hanging off the bottom. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4 round it out, and Wi-Fi 7 by its absence.
Docked play was rough at launch and is now the most improved part of the machine. Dock it and gameplay moves to the TV while the handheld panel switches off, with resolution, refresh rate and HDR negotiated automatically; recent Samsung, LG and Vizio sets flip into their low-latency game modes on their own. Pair an Xbox controller and the built-in controls disable themselves, which is what finally made titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 work properly in docked mode. A new Game Bar display widget lets you change resolution and refresh rate with a controller instead of walking into Windows Settings, and it only offers the modes your TV actually supports.
Auto Super Resolution is live in preview for Insiders on the Ally X, docked only, using the NPU to deliver something close to 1440p detail from a lower render target. On Forza Horizon 5 it is convincing. Calling it finished would be generous, and this is the feature that has taken longest to arrive of everything promised in August 2025.
Battery life
Eighty watt-hours sounds enormous and buys you less than you would hope, because efficiency gains at a given wattage are modest. In Performance mode at 17W with the panel capped at 60Hz and brightness at 50%, Marvel’s Midnight Suns took an hour and 32 minutes to drain half the battery, and Alan Wake 2 with FSR2 on a performance render target took an hour and 35 minutes. Extrapolate and you are looking at roughly three hours with the screen deliberately held back. Turbo at 25W cuts that closer to two. Drop to 10 to 13W for indies and Balatro-adjacent things and four hours plus is realistic.
Measured against its own predecessor the Z2 Extreme is about 17% better on performance per watt, since it matches a Z1 Extreme at 30W while drawing 25W. ASUS quoted “up to 2x” battery life relative to the ROG Ally X, and I have not seen anything close to that in normal use.
Price and value
At launch, €899 in Portugal and $999.99 in the US was the loudest objection anyone had to this handheld, mine included. That argument has been overtaken by events. The global DRAM and NAND squeeze pushed the Ally X up by roughly €200 equivalent in Japan and Australia during the first half of 2026, and in May Valve raised the Steam Deck OLED from $549 to $789 for 512GB and from $649 to $949 for 1TB. A Legion Go 2 asks $1,349.99. The Ally X held its US price, and a machine that looked overpriced in October is now among the more sensible things you can buy in this category, which says more about the memory market than about ASUS.
What still stings is what is missing from the box. There is a 65W charger and a cardboard stand. The official case costs extra, on a €899 device that is designed to leave the house.
Verdict
The ROG Xbox Ally X is the best Windows handheld you can buy, and it took nine months of patches to earn that. The hardware was always good, with class-leading ergonomics, a cooler that holds its numbers under sustained load, and a chip that rewards anyone willing to move the TDP slider off its conservative default. What arrived late is the software discipline: a shell that boots lean, a library that finally accepts every storefront, docked play that behaves like a console, and per-game profiles that mean you stop fiddling and start playing.
It is held back by decisions ASUS could have made differently and by one AMD still can. Potentiometer thumbsticks on a flagship handheld are indefensible. The 16:9 IPS panel is a generation past its moment. FSR 4.1 works on this silicon and remains officially unsupported, which is AMD leaving performance on the table for the exact users who need it most. And Xbox mode arriving on every Windows 11 PC in April removed the clearest reason to pay ASUS’s premium.
Buy it if you want one machine that plays anything from any storefront, on a screen or on a TV, and you would rather spend your evenings gaming than tuning. Skip it if you already own an Ally X with a Z1 Extreme, because you are paying a lot for roughly one power step and a better shell you will eventually get anyway.
