I don’t want to upgrade to the ROG Ally X.

a new product is supposed to be exciting right I get to tell you about all the cool new features like the massively upgraded 80w hour battery the second USBC Port that does 40 GB per second and can even work with Thunderbolt external gpus and of course the minor improvements to everything from buttons to ergonomics to Specs but the Lix is so flipping expensive and comes so closely on the heels of the original Ally that if I'm anything like you and I've got a first generation Ally with which I do I'm looking at this thing going

oh my God you want my money again and for a 10% performance Improvement at 1080p oh the battery life guys that's the standout to us this thing manages 14 hours in our endurance battery life test and 2 hours in our stress test and somehow it manages to do that while only being about 11% heavier in fact when I did my initial impressions of this I had a hard hard time picking out whether I was holding the Ally or the Ally X and a big part of that is that they haven't changed the ergonomics that much

the ABX y buttons sit a little bit more proud to the face the d-pad has been improved with more clear delineation between all eight positions and the joysticks have a little bit more resistance on them although that does come with a benefit they are now rated for 2 and a half times the number of rotations compared to the ones on the original Ally we've got Hallett triggers again click here nicer feeling shoulder buttons and a big Improvement to the back buttons now they can be actuated really however you want you can kind of slide across

them you can push down on them really like this we've got larger air intakes a thicker internal heat pipe and a third exhaust grill that together contributed to both quieter and cooler operation in our testing and up at the top for I/O we've got a fingerprint sensing Windows hello power button a headphone microphone Jack ah yes the micro SD card slot that led to so many challenges with the original Ally although to asus's credit they have finally addressed that with the community volume rocker and of course that second USBC Port that I was really happy

to see and normally it doesn't matter but every once in a while I run into a situation where I'm like I wish the AL had a second USBC Port okay I'm on a plane I got a portable monitor and I realized I forgot to bring a dongle that supports pass through charging so I had no way to charge the Ally and also output to my portable monitor no one seems to feel bad for me okay it's a champagne problem but a problem nonetheless and one that Aus has addressed got a 65 W charger which is

nice to see included at all but doesn't support the maximum charging speed of the Alx which is 100 watts and that you're definitely going to want if you're ever in a hurry when you're charging because an 80w hour battery is flipping big ah yes warranty information form awkward there now I'm done with accessories and I can get back to what matters the Ally oh okay no I'm sorry there is one two more accessories there's no kickstand on the Alx itself but Asus does include little cardboard stands and you get two just in case you lose

one apparently these were included with the original I never noticed maybe because they aren't very good you can't even adjust the angle thanks Asus and thanks our sponsor thanks to charge for sponsoring this video check out their shiek 140 your new on the-go power up buddy for your phone laptop and more it's got a huge 20,000 Milah capacity 140 W dual port or 100 WT single port outputs and it's Compact and Airline safe with a smart display and long lasting Samsung batteries you can keep your devices Juiced up anywhere grab a Shar geek 140 using

the link in the description you know I was expecting the display to be the first thing that stood out to me but as I launch Steam Big Picture it's actually the speakers they've got a much Fuller sound than the original Ally and as one of those monsters who does the vast majority of my handheld gaming with speakers rather than headphones I'm sorry sorry sorry everyone that makes a pretty big difference to me I'm actually going to go crab Rave before I even fire up a game here operating windows on a handheld gaming PC is always

going to be awkward that's something that the steam deck just does so much better than any Windows handheld can do at this time but one of the reasons that I daily drive an ally instead of a steamjack OLED is that game compati ility is damn near perfect and that's only going to get better with the improved Hardware in this new iteration they still don't compare to something like a Macbook but they're definitely better than the old one okay let's uh maybe we'll go Forza you may not proceed without being signed into a profile you may

not proceed without being well what am I allowed to do you may not proceed without there's no option to close the game God modern gaming sucks you may not proceed without being signed into a profile the device is upgraded it's now available with up to a 1 TB SSD out of the box and supports longer 80 mm sticks so that you can put in up to an 8 tbte drive it has 24 gigs of RAM instead of 16 gigs of RAM this time around and it even runs at a higher 7500 megat transfers per second

which when you're using onboard Graphics which uses your system Ram can make a significant difference to system performance in fact at 1080p we saw an approximately 10% uplift in fps in games however on a device like this you often times wouldn't be running at 1080p you'd be running at 720 in order to get the best performance and at 720 we found that we ran into other system bottlenecks before that increased memory clock speed really made a difference so just like the original Ally it clocks down from 30 wats to 25 watts when you're away from

the wall even in its turbo operating mode but to take advantage of the bigger battery in the lower performance modes it goes up to 13 and 17 rather than 10 and 15 which does result in a measurable performance Improvement while still maintaining better battery life than the original Ally there's other quality of life improvements it's easier to access the SSD for upgrades it runs quieter and the display now gets dimmer if you're the kind of person who games in the dark and doesn't want to melt your eyes out of their freaking sockets but none of

those things are big enough to overcome two major obstacles that are facing the Ally x one is that the original Ally offers a lot of the same experience and two it does so at a much lower price the Ally X is coming into a Marketplace that is absolutely flush with competition from the liks of valve Zotac iono uh Lenovo there's so many players in this space now it might still be among if not the best handheld gaming PCs but $800 before I even put a decent sized SSD in it good Lord what's a one tby

steam deck OLED $650 and yeah this has advantages but so does the steam deck OLED I mean that screen so nice and making things even more Awkward we're already starting to see rumors of what the performance of rdna 3.5 mobile Graphics are going to be now the word on the street and I didn't hear this from Asus is that amd's upcoming STX Point processors that feature those Graphics are going to be so expensive that this would have been more like $900 but I've got to wonder guys with how much more performance it would offer would

that be more justifiable as an upgrade as it is now if I'm looking to buy a handheld gaming PC and I have a functionally unlimited budget this is going to be a strong if not the contender but if I'm upgrading from something older I don't know if it has enough on offer I know the battery life damn it the battery life is incredible it's so much better than it should be on paper like it's double the size and yet it manages three times the real world performance that and I have one of the OG allies

that has the dimmer 400 nnit screen as it is now the later model ones seem to use the same 500 plus knit screen I think only you guys can judge is this thing worth the increase I mean yeah sure you get rid of the proprietary XG mobile external GPU connector that cost so much but you add a thunderbolt connector that you're going to need an enclosure for for your GPU that costs so much it's a really complicated story what's not complicated is subscribing to Short Circuit make sure you do it