Comfort Zone, Episode 84: Where is Everybody?

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts. Well, outside their comfort zone. My name is not Christopher Lawley.

It's Matt Bircheler. Matt, how are you doing today? I'm doing great.

I'm doing swell. It is super, super, super cold outside right now, but I'm healthy, which is unfortunately not something I can say about either of my co-hosts, both who are very much under the weather and we tried to make this work. This is actually the 3rd different day we were going to try to record together.

It just hasn't happened. Neither of them are up for it. I suspect they'll be back in commission next week, but in the meantime, I do hope they get better very quickly.

Chris, Neelyon, I really hope you get better quickly. But today, I have full power of the show. We're going to do a short little episode.

We'll just kind of do one segment. We're not doing challenges or anything. End of show question.

I really, you're just gonna hear me for a little bit. So, I threatened to do an episode entirely on superhuman, expounding the virtues of superhuman, and this seemed to worry them a little bit, but rest assured, that is not what this episode's about. Today, I wanted to talk about a gaming handheld.

So, I wanted to talk about this specifically, uh, that I've been using for a couple weeks, and it is the ROG Xbox Ally X, which is a very long name for a very, it's a product I'm very conflicted on. I really like some of this product and the other part of it, I hate so much. It is, I would say maybe the worst software experience I have ever had on a consumer electronic device.

Like it is, it's crazy. So I wanted to talk about this device because I am a big fan, over the last couple years, I've become a big fan of portable, just handheld gaming. The switch back in 2017 was a revelation.

Like, obviously, that was a huge success in the world and it really resonated with me. A couple years later, the steam deck came out. And while I wasn't able to get one for about a year, I eventually did pull the trigger and I loved it.

I loved playing games on that thing. And then when they released the OLED model a couple years later, I jumped on it right away because the biggest downfall of the original steam deck was the screen, which sucked and the OLED one was not just a good OLED for most people, it was the best OLED they had in their life. Maybe maybe if they had a high-end iPhone or Samsung phone.

It might be a little better, but like, the steam deck OLED. Go look at their tech reviews for it, just an outstanding display. And that was a couple years ago, and, you know, computers get faster, computers get better, and there are some new options on the market, but there's no new steam deck.

And so I was starting to run into some games that I couldn't run on the steam deck or I couldn't run well on the steam deck and I was like, what else is out there? And it turns out there are some options, but a lot of them are just straight up Windows devices. And I, I don't want that.

So I was intrigued when Microsoft partnered with ROG, who's owned by Asis, or Asus, and they released 2 Xbox. I'm putting air quotes around it, Xbox handhelds in 2025. There is the ROG Xbox ally, and then the Xbox ally X.

And so in terms of performance, the regular Xbox ally is a little bit faster, a little bit more performing than the steam deck, but not by much. But the ally X. That one is supposed to be a big jump.

And so I was interested in the performance games. I'm actually really happy with the steam OS experience. I think it's very, very, very constantly.

Like you never jump into the desktop mode. You never have to install updates anywhere else. The onboarding is very much like a console and yeah, it's a console.

It's running Linux. It's a Linux device running Windows games, and yet somehow it's a very smooth experience overall. It's pretty great Um, and I was wondering, because that's how Microsoft was pitching this.

We're in a post-steam deck world where PC gaming handhelds don't have to be just windows. Like there can be custom software on there. And so I was hoping that this would lead to a good experience that Microsoft was delivering through this device.

I put an Xbox name on it, right? It's got to be good. It's got to be console like, if it's got Xbox in the name, surely, if you're just an Xbox gamer, this is going to work for you.

It's going to be the same interface, that sort of thing, play the same games. No. So the 1st thing I just want to make sure is very clear about this.

that this product, while it has Xbox in the name, is not an Xbox, and it does not play Xbox games. I think that's really important to say. Just in case you weren't totally clear on that.

This is a Windows computer that plays Windows games. And that is most games, especially recently the last few years. Every Xbox game has a PC version.

So if you bought it on the Xbox store, odds are, you have a PC license as well that you can install and play here. If you bought it on steam, you can do that as well. But it does not play Xbox games, if you have old Xbox games, it won't play those.

Maybe there's like a streaming option you can do, but it won't just like play your old Xbox games. It'll play PC games. If they happen to have Xbox versions as well.

That's great, but it's a PC gaming device. And that is very clear right from the jump. When you 1st turn this thing on.

It isn't even a bespoke onboarding. It is the Windows 11 onboarding exactly the same as you would get on Adele laptop or an alien wear PC. It is just the Windows setup.

You have to tap it with your finger. They do, the controller does work. So they have made some accommodations to make a controller navigate this whole system for you, but you'll inevitably find yourself just tapping around like a touchscreen.

Another point to touch on desktop OS as being generally fine. But, um, yeah, on an I didn't screen, it is a little tight. I'll give you that.

And yeah, it is the window setup, and it is exactly Windows. When I installed mine, I basically signed into my Microsoft account, did all the like basic settings, and then once I got to the end, there was a Windows update, and it installed the Windows update, again, with all the Windows update screens you're used to seeing. So, full on Windows experience, I saw no custom experience for like 30 minutes when doing this.

But once you get through the initial round of updates, the initial setup process, it does automatically boot into this kind of, uh, Xbox mode or Xbox Games mode. So it basically is a full screen experience, similar to what you would get on a steam deck, and Windows is in the background. It's still running, like it's there so that you can play the games, but you're not in the full desktop environment, and it's even supposedly using a trimmed down version of Windows, so that it's not using as much RAM, not using as much CPU, fewer, like, background processes going so that all the power can be focused on the game.

And so that's good, right? But, um, it didn't take long for that facade to come down. So I, uh, there's, there's some nice stuff there.

One of the nice things I really like about the Xbox software that they have here is that when you just open it up and you're in the Xbox experience, there's a way there's a place you can go to see other stores. So you can see steam, you can see GOG, you can see Epic. There's a couple more.

I'm not thinking of off the top of my head, but the big PC gaming stores are here, and what's extra cool is that it's not just like you can go download them from like the browser and desktop mode. You can install them fully from the Xbox app, which is really cool. So basically, I was like, I know I want steam.

Most of my games are on steam. Let me just go do that. I tapped on steam and it just installed steam and booted into the full screen experience for steam, which was really nice.

And so that worked great. I was installing my steam games. Everything's good to go.

And I eventually was like, let's start playing a game, right? It's a gaming console. lets play a game.

And for whatever reason. And maybe this isn't happening to everybody. I'm sure it's not happening to everybody.

This would be crazy if it was, but I tried to launch a game and it said, hey, direct X isn't installed. You can play this game. And I was like, oh, that's weird.

Okay, this was a steam game. Let me just go to the Xbox app and like play one of the games I have directly from Xbox and see if that works. And it gave me the same air, which was very strange.

So this was when I 1st had to go into, uh, Windows desktop mode. I had to open edge, find the direct X download page, get the EXC, run it. There's no custom installer here.

It's a Windows installer. Fine whatever. It's installed, and now I'm into the game.

Very good. So a bit of a disjointed experience to start it off, but, you know, it, I'm in, right? I overcame the little hump.

It wasn't that big a deal. At every point I could figure out what to do, but it wasn't super smooth. It wasn't console like, I'll say that.

But that's all out of the way. What's the rest of the experience like? So, I would say, let's start with the good.

Let's talk with the main reason this device was on my radar, which was the power, the performance of this thing is crazy. It is awesome. It is, I'm really, really, really impressed with how powerful it is.

I'm pulling up my benchmarks right now to kind of share those in a sec, but yeah, my goal was to hopefully have something that was notably better than the steam deck in performance. And I'm happy to say that's exactly what I got. So, let's talk about it in general.

Uh, let me just do the benchmarks first. The benchmarks will give you an idea. So I booted up Doom, the Dark Ages, which is a great game from last year, really fun game.

That game is steam deck verified, which means it is verified to run on the steam deck and have decent settings and decent performance. And in my experience, that is true, but only if you want to play at 30 FPS. And I'll be honest, 30 FPS, doom experience is not great.

That's not exactly what the dream is, but you can do it. I was curious, what would that be on this new device? How would they perform the exact same game, exact same settings, how would it perform?

And thankfully, Doom, the Dark Ages has a benchmark mode, where you can run the exact same benchmark across devices several times, and see how they do. And so I have some numbers to point to this. Basically, what I saw was in exact like for like tests.

So 720 P resolution, output, native rendering, so no upscaling, no frame generation. I was able to get about 80 to 85% more performance from the Xbox LIX, then the Steam Deck OLED. So I was getting around 33 frames per 2nd during the 720 P native rendering test, and I got about 62 frames per 2nd on the Xbox ally.

So much better. So 720 p native rendering. I'm able to get a 60 frames per second experience, which is very, very good.

Now, I happen to be someone who likes upscaling technologies and I'll be honest, I even like frame generation stuff. So don't don't tell anybody, but I do actually think these are pretty good and they're getting even better so that they look the same as native rendering. In some cases, DLSS even looks even better, but anyway, I will turn them on, especially on a smaller screen.

Like you want to, like, I feel like those are fine. When you enable FSR. So they don't have DLSS.

It's an AMD setup, so you have FSR, on the steam deck, on the same test, 720 P, handheld settings, the same benchmark, that 30 to 33 FPS goes up to 41 FPS. So 40, you know, a little better, and you can lock the steam deck to 40 FPS for that game, so you can get a pretty smooth experience there. But you're still, it's still not 60.

With FSR, I went from about 61 FPS to about 72 frames per 2nd on the Xbox LIX. And if I enabled frame generation, which is not available on the steam deck at all, I was actually around 105 frames per 2nd in the benchmark. Over a 100 frames per 2nd in Doom, the Dark Ages, a game that has ray tracing, to be clear, like all the lighting in this game is ray traced.

I'm pushing over 100 FPS with frame gen on, which again, not all are real frames, but what is a real frame? Everything is fake. All of this is fake.

So that's pretty cool. But in addition to this, you can also run the game at a higher resolution. So in addition to the performance improvement in like for like tests, the screen on the Xbox ally X has a high resolution.

So on the steam deck, it's 800 P on the on this device, it's 1080 P. And so I can actually boost it up to 10 AVP and gets even more resolution and pretty good performance. So, when I do native rendering, 1080P, same settings as before, on this device, I get around 48 frames per second, with FSR, I get around 60, and with FSR plus frame generation, we're looking at almost 90 FPS at 1080P with handheld settings.

So pretty darn good, especially, um, yeah, compared to what I was used to. The bottom line here is, I would say, this game takes games that were either impossible to play on the steam deck or were technically playable, but weren't good experiences. I would put doom the Dark Ages in that category.

I would put Claire Obscure Expedition 33 in that category. They technically ran. I think both those games are steam deck verified.

But they weren't good experiences. They weren't good enough for me to play them on the go. And with the power boost that I get here, they actually are, and I'm able to enjoy Clare Obscure, and it looks very nice, like, it's not running the Mac settings or anything, like it would be on a desktop PC, but it's running at good enough settings where it doesn't look like trash, which I think it does on the steam deck, and it runs at a smooth enough frame rate that I'm able to play it totally smoothly.

So I'm really happy with this. There's more to say here. I'll have a written review linked in the description where you can kind of see all these charts in different ways.

There are different power modes you can go into here. So the Steam Deck Max is out at 15 watts of power delivery to the system on a chip. The LIX can do 17, 25 or 35 watts.

There's not an enormous difference in all those tests above, we're at 25 watts, which is kind of the performance mode. This gets us into the other part of the hardware that I like, which is the fan system. So the fans on this thing are very quiet.

I would say they are similar probably to the Switch 2 in terms of volume. I don't know if that's exactly true in every single case. I haven't measured this scientifically, but it is noticeably quieter than my steam deck, OLED, which was already quieter than the original steam deck.

It is super quiet, especially at the 17 watt mode, which I would recommend you play most of your games at, unless you really need a little bit extra power. It is basically silent. It is completely silent.

And even when you crank it up to the 25 or 35 watt modes, you hear it, but like, it's not crazy. It is definitely quieter than I typically got with my steam deck, running at, again, 15 watts. So pretty, pretty cool there.

Now, That's about where the, oh, just I, okay, let me say a few more good things. The controllers, the sides are very much like an Xbox controller, they feel very much like an Xbox on the sides. I think they're very comfortable.

Those are very good. The joysticks, very satisfying, feel very good. Um, the D-Pad.

It's okay. And then the triggers, feel nice, are a nice material. There's 2 USB ports on the top, so you can charge and have an accessory plugged in at the same time.

Um, you can plug in a headphone jack and a micro SD card. And all that is good. And there's 2 back paddles on the back further right and left.

So there's some good stuff here. The speakers are also quite loud and sound good enough. But there are some problems.

And I don't even know where to start. So let's start with an annoying thing that I know will get both Chris and Neelion riled up, which is RGB. So there, it's not on right now, but around the joysticks, our RGB lights that will, by default, like animate around and do slow, like, circles.

You can have them do different animations, they can be, they can be breathing, they can be solid, they can be whatever you want. I want them to be nothing. I hate, hate, hate, RGB on basically everything, and I wanted to turn it off.

You are able to turn off the lighting, which is good. However, there is one situation where as far as I can tell, there's no way to turn off the lighting, and that is when the device is charging. So right along the top of the device, there are 2 lights.

There's one light that says it's on or in standby mode, and a 2nd light that says it is charging. And that one light on the top, that little like orange light that turns white, I think, when it's done. That's not sufficient apparently.

What's sufficient is turning on when you're charging and the device, the screen is off. You not even using it. When it's charging, the joysticks will light up with RGB, and as far as I can tell, there's no way to stop this.

It is crazy to me. It makes me insane. I really, really, really wish this was no longer the case.

Maybe this is a me thing as well, but it's absurd. It makes it look so stupid. So I, I, I find that crazy.

And I complain about this because I am not a 12-year-old boy. I don't know who else is into this. Are other adults into these RGB things that are just like lighting up all the time?

Like, I don't know. It doesn't do it for me. If it does for other people, that's great, but I hate this.

As far as I can tell, the only way to truly stop this is either to install a completely different operating system on the device, such as Bazite to run Linux on it, or to open it up and unplug the like power to those lights so that they just literally cannot light up. I am on the brink of doing the ladder. I'm really on the brink of just opening this thing up and trying to find those cables so I can just take them out.

So these stupid things never light up. Drves me crazy. Um, The other thing, before we get onto the real mess of the show, is the display.

So I talked about the display earlier. The display is a classic case of good news, bad news. And I'll remind you, I haven't said this yet.

This is a $1000 device. There's a one ter one terabyte of storage in here. That's great.

That's more than a PS5, embarrassingly, and it is a $1000 device. It is an objectively premium device. This is exceptionally premium.

The screen has great qualities. It has a terrible quality. On the good side.

We'll start with the good. 1080 P, really sharp at this resolution. So, 800 P on the steam deck is totally fine, totally gets the job done, but 1080 P does look better.

We saw that with the Switch 2 when it came out last year and we saw, and I see it with this one, like 10 ADP looks good. It feels like you're going up a class in retina. Like, it's great.

So that's good. Also, it is a higher refresh rate variable rate display. So the steam deck is 90 hertz, but you can set it to other refresh rates, but it is a fixed refresh rate.

By contrast, this is a 120 hertz monitor, so it can or display, so it can go higher in terms of refresh rates, and it's also variable rate. So it will match the content. If it doesn't hit an exact frame rate, it will be able to match it and kind of adjust as it goes, which is really nice, especially if you have games at like 50 frames per second, which you often do.

Clare obscure is a good example of that. That runs 50 to 60 FPS. When I'm playing it, and it feels much smoother because the display is able to match the actual rendering rate, which is nice.

Apple calls this promotion, and it's here too, and it's very nice. Um, That's where the good ends, because the steam deck OLED, as you might expect, has an OLED. It looks great.

The ROG Xbox LAX has an LCD display that looks like trash. Like, I'll, it, you can, let me, let me just be clear. You can see what's going on.

It's technically bright enough, but barely. . .

But it is a horrible display. If you are used to high quality displays in your devices, This is going to be a shock. This is like traveling 15 years back in time, it feels like.

This screen has horrible viewing angles. If you're not looking at a dead on. It is very hard to see.

It does not get bright. The auto brightness makes it dimmer than I've ever find comfortable. I'm constantly having to raise up the brightness to the max.

It's not a good looking display. It's a bad looking LCD, in my opinion, if I had to compare it to the switch too. I'd say the Switch 2 is better.

The Switch 2 doesn't have a great display either, but this is way worse than that. It's not great. But yeah, so good news, bad news on the display.

And then the last thing I'll mention is the software. And buddy, this is horrible. Not even the Windows part.

The fact that it's like a mix of windows and this kind of full screen game meaning experience. That's not even the problem. I can live with that.

That's fine. It's the stability of it. It's, does it do the things it says it's going to do.

So as a simple example, sleep, with these devices, you want to be able to hit the power button at any point, have it just stop whatever you're doing, freeze it in place, and then go to sleep. And then hours later, days later, you can pick up the device, hit the power button again, and you pick up exactly where you were. Super smooth.

And that sometimes works on this. It always works on the steam deck. It always works on the switch.

It always works on your other consoles. It sometimes works on this. I would say two-thirds of the time it works, but a 3rd of the time it straight up does not, which is just unacceptable.

And a big reason for this is that it is literally Windows. It sleeps like a Windows computer, which is to say, when it wants to. I don't know if you've had this experience, but I've had this experience within those computers.

My wife has had an experience like this with Windows computers. They just don't sleep reliably. I routinely will have situations where on both this device and other Windows computers where I say go to sleep.

And then it turns off the display, but the fans keep going and it seems like it's just still on and it never turns off. I've had that happen with this device. I've had situations where it is sleeping, and then suddenly out of nowhere, I just look over across the room, and then suddenly it's on again or it's still the screen off, but the fans are going, and it seems like it's doing something intense.

This happens all the time. Even worse, it, and that kills the battery, by the way. So, like, if you don't even notice it's happening, you know, it's not plugged in because you don't want those stupid, uh, RGB used to be going, it will kill the battery and it just dies.

Very annoying. And additionally, sometimes it doesn't even come out of sleep. So even though it's been charging, it's total, the battery's totally fine.

It's been sleeping. 30 minutes. doesn't even matter.

Like it doesn't have to be like long sleep sessions. It's just, has it, is it asleep? Will it wake up?

Sometimes most of the time it will, but enough of the time it doesn't that I do not rely on it. I do not put this device to sleep without saving my game immediately before that, just in case. It constantly happens where I come back to the device, I hit the power button to wake it up, and nothing happens.

I hit it again, nothing happens, and I have to hold it down to do a force reset, which is just crazy. I've had it happen more in a couple weeks than I have in my entire life, an entire, what are we at? 9 years of the switch.

I've never, I've had it happen more in the last 2 weeks of this device than 9 years of the Switch and Steam Deck and Steam Deck or NSG Switch 2. crazy. So it doesn't do that.

And then the final cherry on top, which happened to me just yesterday. is I couldn't get the start up. Um, yeah, it just didn't start up.

I would hold the power button. It would show like the uh, the Xbox logo, which would show the ROG logo, and it would say repairing system. And I was like, oh, what's that?

I didn't, nothing had happened, nothing that I'd noticed happened. Tried to repair the system, and then it just immediately like, did that like click that you get when a fan just like stops immediately. and just turned itself off.

I turned it back on. It did the same thing and this I was stuck in a loop. And so long story short, I had to boot into the boot loader, which is fun.

You hold down the power button and the volume down for what it's worth. And then I'm in the bootloader. And I'm going through this very, uh, annoying system where I have to do a remote download of a new, um, recovery file or whatever from the web.

I have to like key in this long key from Microsoft to like authenticate that I am who I am. I had to do this twice by the way. I went through a full like reinstall of something.

It didn't work the 1st time. I tried it again. It worked the 2nd time.

This device is crazy for software. And I don't mean this in a good way. It is horrible.

It is unbelievably bad. And I honestly don't understand how it's this bad. I cannot believe they're selling this as a console.

So I've talked for quite a while now. Would I recommend the Rog Xbox ally X? I mean, in general, no.

I don't think it is a good console experience. I don't think it's a good software experience, but it does deliver quite a bit of power, and if that's the most important thing for you, and you're willing to deal with some pretty real headaches. Maybe it's worth it.

For me, it's worth it, but it's marginal. I am on the verge of downloading Bazite and trying that on here. I think I can it has an M2 drive in there, so I think I can just swap it out and try it without wiping my windows installed, but it's a bit of a mess, if I'm being honest.

So I would not recommend it to most people. And I think the screen is really frustrating as well. I think the display is not what should be an $1000 device.

Like, I appreciate that things are more expensive now, but when you're spending this much money to get a screen that feels like it's from an iPad from a decade ago. It's pretty rough. So, yeah, it's a tough one.

I'll put a link in the description, so you can see the product page for it. If my blog post is out where I review it and have all the charts. Actually, I will have it out because I said it would be there.

So, I'll have that in the description for you as well. But yeah, that'll be it for me today. I look forward to next week's episode where we look at our Minecraft houses.

I did make my Minecraft house. It's pretty cool. So I can't wait to see that with Neil Leon and Chris.

And yeah, we'll see how they're doing, how they entertain themselves while they were just sick in bed. So, yeah, that's it for me today. Thank you so much for listening.

Just as a reminder, we are Max Story's podcast. So thank you to Mac stories for working with us on this show, and we'll see you here next time. Bye bye.