Asus' upcoming ROG Ally X revision comes with minor spec bumps, same APU

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Battery life, a core weakness of the current Ally, will be improved by "way more than" 40 percent

A partial hidden tease of the ROG Ally X cropped from an Asus Twitter post.
A partial hidden tease of the ROG Ally X cropped from an Asus Twitter post. (Image credit: Asus)

The Asus ROG Ally Z1 Extreme is now seeing a successor, but not the ROG Ally 2 just yet— per an unveiling to The Verge ahead of an upcoming official June 2 announcement, the Asus ROG Ally X has been revealed. The device has been confirmed to have mostly the same specifications as the original Asus ROG Ally Z1 Extreme, particularly the 7-inch, 120 Hz VRR IPS display and AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU, which is broadly equivalent to the Ryzen 7 7840U used in other handhelds and some gaming laptops. 

So, what meaningful differences are we looking at? Internally, the layout has been tweaked to make different components more repair-friendly, to account for a larger battery, and to use Asus' laptop SD card reader. The previous Ally card reader was speculated to have contributed to overheating, though Asus speaking to The Verge claims "We don't want people to think that's what we had to do."

Like the Steam Deck OLED, the Asus ROG Ally X will slot into the existing product line-up at an unannounced higher price point than the current ROG Ally. The purpose of the device is to address critique of the original in a new design and provide a slightly higher-end experience ahead of any true upgrades in processing power a la Deck 2 or the unannounced Ally 2.

Besides internal changes to be more suitable for repair and less prone to overheating, the Asus ROG Ally X battery is expected to improve by "way more than 40 percent while still boosting storage, graphics and memory, [and] ports" according to comments by Asus senior product manager Gabriel Meng.

Of the potential upgrades being teased for the Asus ROG Ally X, the most promising for gaming performance will likely be upgrades to RAM or eGPU support. Some Ryzen 7 7840U/8840U handhelds leverage 32GB of RAM, for example, which allows much more system memory to be allocated to the iGPU. In today's games that are ever-demanding on VRAM and APUs that are especially reliant on fast RAM, there may be nice gains to be had here.

Besides otherwise-unspecified hardware improvements, some ROG Ally software updates are also expected in July to improve the Ally experience for all users. This includes a fully-overhauled UI, a quicker AMD Fluid Motion Frames toggle, better Library sorting, and Button Mapping sharing support.

Christopher Harper
Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • das_stig
    So for Asus customers it's a case of we are going to screw you over, it's buy the current model that we know has issues but we won't fix, buy the new model with near enough same specs but with all the fixes, at a higher profit margin and then in a few months time, it's obsolete as we release the superior new model, at a higher profit margin and in a years time when we have all the faults on this model reported and fixes identified, start the cycle again. Business is good !
    Reply
  • Notton
    The Tom's article skips over some details that The Verge's article mentions.
    Like a 2280 slot (without a janky 90d adapter).
    It increases battery life by using a larger battery, and is also heavier.
    Reply
  • +1 for the above comment.

    The storage now comes with support for NVMe M.2 SSDs with up to 2280 form factor support which means you can plug in anywhere from 4 to 8 TB drives.

    Also, even better is the memory upgrade which now comes with LPDDR5X-7500 memory support. But sadly, all this comes with a the price expected to be higher than the $699 MSRP of the original Z1 Extreme variant.
    Reply
  • Videocardz has a leaked slide confirming some of the changed specs.

    24GB LPDDR5 7500 Mhz memory (so 8GB extra, with more bandwidth), and with 80 Wh battery, which is almost double than previous version/40Wh. The APU and the screen specs remain the same though.

    The new ALLY X is also 70 gms heavier, and thicker.

    https://i.imgur.com/P2cCnJS.jpeg
    Reply