ASUS ROG Ally X review: the best Windows handheld, at a price India has to swallow

The hardware is a spec sheet that finally makes sense

Inside is AMD's Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme — eight Zen cores, 16 threads, up to 5.0GHz, with an XDNA NPU rated at 50 TOPS. It drives a 7-inch, 1920x1080 120Hz touchscreen behind Gorilla Glass Victus, rated at 500 nits with FreeSync Premium. That is the same panel philosophy as before: an LCD, not OLED, and reviewers have not let ASUS forget it. Feed the chip 24GB of LPDDR5X at 8000MT/s and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD and you have a machine that stops making you choose between a Windows page file and your game library. The original Ally shipped 16GB and 512GB; this doubling is the single most consequential change here, and it is why every long-term reviewer we read — from IGN to PCMag — treats memory and storage, not raw GPU power, as the story.

The APU is not a generational leap in frames. It is the same class of integrated Radeon graphics you already understand, tuned. What changed is everything around it: a redesigned chassis, full-size Hall-effect analog triggers, two assignable grip buttons, HD haptics, and a USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 port sitting next to a second USB-C. That second port matters more than it sounds — you can charge and run an external display or dock without a single dongle argument.

Battery is where the X earns its letter

The Ally X was a vast improvement, not only offering longer playtime, but better-looking rounds too.

That line, from Stevivor's review, is the whole pitch. ASUS roughly doubled the cell to 80Wh, and the practical effect is the difference between a handheld you plan your evening around and one you just pick up. PCMag, which handed the platform an Editors' Choice, singled out "superior battery life" as the reason to prefer it over the MSI Claw and Lenovo Legion Go. It does not turn physics off — run a demanding AAA title at full tilt and you are still watching the percentage drain — but the floor is dramatically higher than the original, and idle-to-light play now stretches across a commute instead of dying halfway through it.

Windows is still the tax you pay

Here is the honest part. Buy this and you are buying a tiny Windows 11 PC that happens to have thumbsticks, and Windows on a 7-inch screen is exactly as fiddly as that sounds. Armoury Crate has improved and the front-end is more console-like than it was, but you will still meet a desktop, a login prompt, and the occasional update that arrives at the worst moment. The Steam Deck's SteamOS remains the smoother living-room experience; the Ally X's answer is that it runs everything — Game Pass, the Epic and EA launchers, emulators, your existing Steam library — with no walled garden. The 2025 unit leans into that with an Xbox-flavoured full-screen mode and three months of Game Pass Ultimate in the box. Whether that flexibility is worth the friction is the real buying decision, not the frame counter.

The India math is the hard conversation

At ₹1,37,990, the ROG Xbox Ally X costs more than a capable gaming laptop — and PCMag says so plainly, noting you can get more raw power from a sub-four-figure-dollar laptop. What you cannot get from a laptop is this: a 715g slab you actually carry, that turns a delayed flight or a power cut into game time. That is the entire value proposition, and in Indian conditions it holds up in specific ways. The 80Wh cell is genuine insurance against unreliable charging windows. The build tolerates being a daily-carry device. ASUS lists a 1-year onsite warranty with an India importer of record, which — for a niche imported category where grey-market units are common — is not nothing. For a sense of what gaming-laptop money actually buys in India right now, our gaming laptops under ₹60,000 guide is the honest version of that comparison.

What we cannot verify at street level yet is thermals in a 34°C living room versus an air-conditioned lab, and how the LCD's 500-nit ceiling holds up against Indian afternoon glare on that glossy panel. Those are the two things we would stress-test on a review unit, and they are exactly where a glossy 500-nit LCD tends to struggle. Treat the score below as provisional on price, not performance.

Who should actually buy it

If you own the original ROG Ally and it still holds a charge, sit this generation out — the internals are a refinement, not a revolution, and PCMag agrees it is "not a must-buy" for existing owners. If you are coming from nothing, want your whole PC library in your hands, and have made peace with paying a premium for the best-executed version of this idea, the Ally X is the one to get. It beats the Claw and the Legion Go on execution, and it out-runs the Steam Deck on raw capability while conceding the software polish. At this price it is not a casual purchase. It is a deliberate one — and if you make it deliberately, you will not be disappointed by the hardware. You will just have to make peace with the invoice. If handheld money is fantasy money this year, our best gaming phones under ₹30,000 guide covers gaming on the device you already carry. And whichever PC you pair it with deserves better than a ₹300 mouse — our ₹1,000 gaming mouse picks are the cheapest real upgrade.