Asus ROG Ally X leak reveals two critical upgrades to the second-gen handheld gaming PC
Asus revealed the new ROG Ally X on a YouTube livestream this week, noting boosted RAM, storage, and battery life, more ports, and some design changes. Following the ROG Ally X unveiling, a tweet from Arsène Lupin (@MysteryLupin) gave us a few clear specs for the handheld.
Based on this leaker's initial tweet, the ROG Ally X will feature a 7-inch display (1080p, 120Hz), 1TB of SSD storage, an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor, and a steep price of $799.
After another X user (@iGenio88) wrote, "We already knew all that from The Verge, we wanna know numbers for battery size, and Ram amount," Lupin came through with more specs. Thanks to a new tweet from Lupin, it seems the ROG Ally X will likely have "24GB of RAM (LPDDR5X)" and "up to 8h of battery life."
These extra specs might be enough to justify the ROG Ally X costing $799, a jump from the $499 and $699 price of its Z1 and Z1 Extreme-powered predecessors, but given how frequently the Ally is on sale, it may still be hard to convince buyers to spend up for the Ally X, but let's take a closer look at the value proposition.
In theory, you're getting a lot more for only $100 extra
Compared to the more expensive ROG Ally handheld with an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme CPU, the upcoming ROG Ally X would offer 1TB over 512GB of SSD storage, 24GB of RAM over 16GB, and greater battery life, though Lupin doesn't specify whether the "8h" of battery life is for video streaming (which seems more likely) or gaming, and in what mode.
Another X user (@William68318296) speculated that they would assume a 65Wh battery, which would be a pretty good jump from the existing ROG Ally's 40Wh battery.
If all of the specs Lupin outlined are true for the ROG Ally X, it would absolutely be worth paying an extra $100 for the X model over its predecessor at full price.
However, if you're comparing the new specs to a high-end ROG Ally that's on sale for only $599 (like it was back in March at Best Buy) or a lower-end ROG Ally that's frequently only $399, it's a little less worth it. When you consider that Asus might drop the price of its original handhelds, that value drops a little more.
We'd love to see the ROG Ally X jump all the way to 32GB of RAM, but at least 24GB of RAM would be a 50 percent improvement over the existing handheld.
If you're trying to decide which handheld to invest in, check out our full comparison of the Asus ROG Ally vs. Asus ROG Ally X.
