If you're looking at picking up one of the new ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X machines — and we wouldn't blame you, because they do look pretty sweet — we have some advice: namely, don't buy one off eBay. Yes, scalpers are already trying to move pre-orders for the system, and they're pushing them for as much as 2.5 times the manufacturer's suggested retail price of $999 USD. No, we're not kidding; see for yourself.
Seriously, don't buy this. If you really want a ROG Xbox Ally X, head right on over to Best Buy, where you can still pre-order the thing ahead of its October 16 release date for the standard price of $999—a price that's already a little contentious given that performance is likely to be only slightly ahead of the extant $899 ROG Ally X despite that machine being based on the previous-generation Z1 Extreme processor.
We haven't tested the Ryzen Z2 Extreme ourselves yet, but benchmarks out of China for MSI's Claw A8 with the chip put it slightly ahead of Intel's Core Ultra 7 258V in the MSI Claw 8 AI+, although the gap was vanishingly small. Considering that Lunar Lake is often not far ahead of the original Ryzen Z1 Extreme, this mirrors what we've seen in laptops, where the Ryzen AI 300 series' integrated GPU rarely puts much space between itself and the Ryzen AI 200 series, formerly known as the Ryzen 8040 series, codenamed Hawk Point. The Ryzen Z1 Extreme is also Hawk Point.
If you're really keen for a significant uplift in handheld performance versus the wave of Hawk Point-based machines, like the original ASUS ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go, the Ayaneo Kun, the GPD Win 4, and many others, then what you're going to be looking for is a system based on the AMD Ryzen AI Max 300 family. These chips are fundamentally much larger, featuring desktop-class CPU cores, significantly wider GPUs, and a double-wide memory bus to prevent bandwidth bottlenecks.
Ryzen AI Max processors are not cheap, and as it happens, many of the systems sporting these SoCs seem to be coming in right around the prices asked by the ROG Xbox Ally X scalpers. If you've got $2,500 to drop on a handheld, maybe check out the GPD Win 5, Ayaneo's Next 2, and the just-announced OneXFly Apex, all of which are based on this chip, codenamed Strix Halo. They're going to offer you real premium features that you won't find on the ROG Xbox Ally X, including OLED screens, detachable batteries, and legitimate console-like performance. Of course, there's the question of whether you should spend $2500 on a machine with console-like performance, but that's your judgment call to make, not ours.
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