I recently acquired a second-hand ROG Xbox Ally. This handheld is perfect for travelling on public transport with my PTSD. Plus, thanks to the RAM and storage shortages, it’s currently the cheapest handheld available.
First Impressions
I used the Xbox Ally for a month running Windows 11. Getting into Windows took about two hours due to all the updates it needed. The Xbox Ally runs a special version of Windows 11 called Xbox Mode which reduces some background tasks. This improved performance but made the handheld feel clunky to use.
The Xbox app isn’t designed for handhelds; it’s meant for keyboards and mice. You also need to keep four things updated: Windows itself, the Xbox app via the Windows Store, MyAsus and Armoury Crate. These are the tools for customising the ROG Xbox Ally and setting power profiles. Finally, you need to keep game launchers and games up to date. It’s not a console-like experience.
Specs of the ROG Xbox Ally
The specs of the ROG Xbox Ally APU, the brain of the handheld, are very similar to those of the Steam Deck which sparked the modern gaming handheld revolution. The main difference is the slightly higher clock speed on the ROG Xbox Ally.
- AMD Ryzen Z2A APU (Zen 2 – 4 Core 8 Thread)
- AMD Radeon RDNA 2 8 Core GPU
- 7” IPS 1080p 120Mhz Touchscreen Display
- 16Gb LPDDR5 at 6400Mhz
- 512Gb NVMe SSD
- Wifi 6/Bluetooth 5
- MicroSD Card slot
- Fingerprint Reader
- Windows 11 Home (Xbox Mode)
In my opinion, the ROG Xbox Handheld feels much better than the Steam Deck. A friend also described it as an enlarged Xbox One X/S Controller which I highly appreciate as I believe they’re the best controllers on the market.
For gaming at full power, the battery life is just under two hours while light gaming can extend it to up to four and a half hours.
Upgradeability
Although upgrades are limited, being a handheld device you can at least upgrade the storage. The system uses a standard 2280 NVMe SSD which is easily accessible.
You can expand storage further using a Micro SD card, though this is limited to the U1 and U2 standards rather than the U3 standard used by the Nintendo Switch 2. However, this is still fast enough for older games and simple titles like Vampire Survivor. This leaves room on the SSD for more advanced games.
The battery is also user-replaceable.
Out-Of-The-Box Experience
The out-of-the-box experience is terrible. It took over four hours from factory restoration to downloading my first game. Initially, you navigate through Windows setup, answering numerous questions. Even after installing the recovery image via Asus’s Cloud Recovery option in the BIOS, the system had a lot of updates to install, which it did automatically.
Once in Windows, you must update Armoury Crate and the My ASUS app to ensure all drivers and software optimisations are current. You’ll also encounter a lot of unwanted software pre-installed. Who needs Microsoft Office 365 on a gaming handheld? The only positive is the absence of a third-party antivirus. Next, you install game launchers like Steam, UPlay, EA App and GOG.
After cleaning up, installing and updating everything, I checked the SSD space. It was around 100 GB used space before I’d even installed a single game.
Performance
Performance under Windows was a pleasant surprise. It handled all the games I wanted to play including both Horizon Games, Control, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and my latest title Starfield.
While they all ran at least 1080p low settings at 30fps, I prefer 720p 60fps due to the screen size. For simpler games like Stardew Valley, Vampire Survivor and the Ori games, they run perfectly fine on the ROG Xbox Ally at max settings.
The Armoury Crate software included with the ROG Xbox Ally is decent. It performs essential functions like setting the APU power profile, enabling a default FPS device-wide setting, customising the device’s RGB lighting and disabling the built-in controller when docked.
Problems with Windows
I encountered a few issues with Windows on the ROG Xbox Ally. Not all game launchers work with a controller so you can either use the touchscreen or connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, as I did. Another problem I had was that the system automatically rebooted itself during game play to install a Windows Update. This wasn’t a great console experience.
While the Xbox App itself is terrible on a handheld, the icons are very small for example, if you have Xbox Game Pass for PC then this app is your only option for using it. The interface is also full of adverts. However, one positive is that it allows you to launch any game installed on the system regardless of the store you downloaded it from. The only way to turn off the handheld is via Armour Crate, which you do get a dedicated key for on the device. Why isn’t there a power option in the Xbox App?
The battery life is decent for gaming, comparable to the Steam Deck. However, it dramatically drops when in standby mode. Over an hour doing nothing, it lost 8% of battery. Additionally, the device occasionally wakes itself to check for updates while in standby.
Alternatives to Windows
After the first month, I switched from Windows to SteamOS on my device. Valve, the creators of SteamOS and the Steam Deck, have a vested interest in making SteamOS the best gaming operating system because it’s built around the Steam Store, which Valve runs. The Steam store is the most popular way to buy games on PC by a long way.
Since SteamOS v3.8, SteamOS is available in Beta on the ROG Xbox Ally. Most things work out of the box, but there are three issues that haven’t been resolved as of this blog post. Firstly, there’s no native support for controlling the RGB lighting. Secondly, the built-in controller can’t be disabled when docked. Third, and there is nothing you can do about this, the fingerprint reader doesn’t work under Linux.
To fix these issues, you can install a program called Decky on SteamOS. This will allow you to install a plugin for SteamOS called HueSync, which will fix the RGB issue. You have to install decky through the Desktop mode of SteamOS, though you can change options through the default gaming mode of SteamOS.
As of V3.8.14, the controller issue remains unresolved. This is significant because some games become confused when the ROG Xbox Ally is docked and an external controller is attached. However, the latest SteamOS beta version (V3.8.25) allows you to re-order controllers, enabling your external controller to function normally.
Since SteamOS is Linux-based, it doesn’t support games currently unsupported on that OS, particularly those using kernel-level anti-cheat. For compatibility checks, visit ProtonDB. Additionally, Xbox Game Pass won’t work on SteamOS.
Performance on SteamOS is slightly improved over Windows, but battery life is significantly better. For example, playing Starfield on it extended my game time by half an hour. Furthermore, standby mode reduced battery loss from 8% to 1% per hour compared to Windows.
Navigating the interface is also vastly improved compared to Windows, thanks to SteamOS’s design for controller-only navigation. System updates are also simplified, as there’s a single location to update the entire OS, including drivers. Those accustomed to Steam Big Picture mode on Windows will find the SteamOS interface familiar.
Conclusion
The ROG Xbox Ally is a very good handheld. While I am not a fan of Windows on it, as you can probably tell, it is the only way to get Xbox Game Pass on a handheld. If Microsoft put the Xbox OS on this handheld, it would have been a LOT better, as they marketed ROG Xbox Ally and its bigger brother, the ROG Xbox Ally X, as an Xbox, which it is not.
After I put SteamOS on it, the handheld was like a new computer. Everything was smooth, no crashes or random reboots, and it worked very fast. While yes, there are a few hoops to get things to work, mainly the RGB, I am sure Valve will soon sort this out, like they are doing with the controller when docked issue I mentioned above.
Thanks to the recent price hike of the Steam Deck, the ROG Xbox Ally is the best handheld on the market for budget gamers, which is surprising since it is a ROG handheld
Leave a Reply