Revamping the AMD Ryzen 5000 Series: The Allyn X Review & Future Desires

Key Takeaways

• The ASUS ROG Ally X upgrades are set to include a larger battery, more RAM, and an improved SD card slot.
• The move to an 80Wh battery and 24GB of RAM shows ASUS taking necessary steps to improve the Ally experience for users.
• ASUS should consider adding a trackpad, OLED screen, and more back buttons in the ROG Ally 2 to solidify its position in the gaming handheld market.

The specs of the upcoming ASUS ROG Ally X, a refresh of the ASUS ROG Ally, are all but fully leaked, and I’m pretty satisfied with what I’m seeing. Here’s what I think about the ROG Ally X and what I want to see in the ROG Ally 2.

The ROG Ally X Packs Some Cool Upgrades

It looks like ASUS tweaked or upgraded everything the community complained about with the original ROG Ally . We’re expecting a much bigger battery, an SD card slot that actually works, more storage, more RAM , and several other smaller upgrades.

The most important change here is the new SD card reader, apparently the same one ASUS uses on its laptops, which has been moved away from the air vents where the card reader on the original Ally is located. This is a step in the right direction, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

ASUS

The next big improvement is a larger battery. According to Videocardz , which apparently acquired a document listing the official specs of the ROG Ally X, the new revision features an 80Wh cell, doubling the capacity of the original ROG Ally’s battery. This should hopefully allow the ROG Ally X to last two hours at its max TDP, considering I get about an hour when gaming at 25W.

Next up is 24GB of LPDDR5X-7500 memory, which is 8GB more than on the original model. I’ve been saying that the ROG Ally should’ve launched with 24GB of RAM from the get-go, so this is yet another right move by ASUS, allowing future ROG Ally X owners to reserve 8GB of RAM for the GPU and still have 16GB of memory for games and the OS.

Performance improvements due to faster memory should be minimal (the ROG Ally packs 16GB of LPDDR5 -6400 RAM); I don’t expect more than 10% difference between the two machines.

We should also get support for regular-sized 2280 NVMe SSDs instead of being limited to compact 2230 SSDs on the OG Ally. This should allow for more affordable storage upgrades, but considering that the ROG Ally X features 1TB of storage and a working SD card reader, I doubt many owners will opt to upgrade the SSD.

Other ROG Ally X upgrades include improved grips for better ergonomics, new thumbsticks that are easier to repair and replace, a new color—the ROG Ally X will be available in black—and increased weight due to the larger battery. The X should weigh 678 grams, which is 70 grams more than the OG Ally.

Considering that I get wrist pain when gaming on my LCD Steam Deck for longer than half an hour and that the LCD Deck weighs 669 grams, I don’t think the ROG Ally X is for me. I think I’ll wait for the ROG Ally 2 which will, hopefully, be a bit slimmer. That said, the improved grips and the fact that the Ally has a different weight distribution compared to the Deck might mean that I can enjoy the Ally X without wrist pain after all.

While this is already a pretty strong collection of improvements, I’d like to see a couple more upgrades on the ROG Ally X.

Extra Improvements I’d Love to See in the ROG Ally X

The most important change I’d like to see is ASUS removing the proprietary XG Mobile port and replacing it with a USB 4 or an Oculink port. Both can be used with any external GPU enclosure and the new wave of eGPUs that’s coming from Chinese brands such as GPD and AYANEO.

According to Videocardz and their sources, this ought to be the case. The ROG Ally X will reportedly ditch the XG Mobile port and replace it with a USB 4 Type-C port. Better yet, the USB 4 port is accompanied by the second USB-C 3.2 10Gbps port.

I hope one of them is placed at the top with the other located at the bottom, allowing the owners to charge their Ally X while gaming without worrying about the charging cable bending and the charging port getting damaged due to having to use the topside USB-C port. That rubber clamp on the charging cable does help, but a second port at the bottom is a vastly better solution.

Goran Damnjanovic / How-To Geek

The linked report also mentions a new “Precision D-Pad” and I’m all for it. The D-Pad on the Ally isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either. Any improvement is welcome since it will most likely find its way to the ROG Ally 2.

I’d also like to see tighter thumbsticks. The ones of the OG Ally are a bit loose and a pair of tighter thumbsticks would be a nice improvement. According to The Verge’s Sean Hollister , this is the case, which is welcome news. The face buttons on the Ally X are also (reportedly) less prone to rattling, which is another pet peeve I have with my Ally that’s now fixed on the X.

The Verge also mentioned that ASUS redesigned the back buttons, which are helpful but feel cheap and are hard to hold on the original Ally. Considering how much I like using back buttons when playing games, the redesigned back buttons on the ROG All X are an exciting development.

Things I Want to See on the Rog Ally 2

If the ROG Ally 2 keeps the upgrades mentioned above, sheds some weight, and comes with a more powerful APU, I’ll be happy. But I’ll be even happier if it packs some of the following upgrades.

A Trackpad

I understand why the Ally X doesn’t feature a trackpad. To fit one, ASUS would have to completely redesign the chassis and rearrange the internal components. But the ROG Ally 2 should really come with one because having one makes navigating around Desktop Mode on my Steam Deck so much more enjoyable. I’m positive a trackpad would make navigating around Windows almost pain-free , too, which is anything but on the ROG Ally.

A Slightly Larger, OLED Screen

ASUS copying Valve and equipping the ROG Ally X with an OLED panel didn’t happen, but if they could pack one inside the ROG Ally 2, I wouldn’t mind. Especially if we get a slightly larger screen in the same body, only with thinner bezels, like on the Steam Deck OLED .

That said, if I had to choose between an OLED screen without variable refresh rate (VRR) and an LCD screen with VRR, I’d pick the latter any day of the week. OLED screens are fantastic, but after experiencing VRR on my ROG Ally, I realized that VRR on gaming handhelds is essential.

Taller Triggers

The triggers on the Ally are pretty good. They have just the right resistance and pretty generous travel, but they’re just a tad too short for my taste. Triggers being even a half centimeter (a fifth of an inch) taller on the next ROG Ally would be great.

A Physical Button for Switching Between Desktop and Controller Modes

GPD

Virtually all handheld gaming PCs from GPD come with a physical switch for swapping between desktop and controller modes, and having one on the ROG Ally 2 would be awesome. That way, switching between modes would take just one step instead of four—opening the Command Center, going to the Control Mode toggle, toggling it, and then closing the Command Center.

Four Back Buttons Instead of Two

While the ROG Ally X packs redesigned back buttons, it still only has two of them. This isn’t ideal because keeping one as a modifier button allows you to practically double the number of buttons on your Ally by assigning a secondary function to every button.

This means that I can only use one back button in most games. But if the ROG Ally 2 copies the Steam Deck and packs four buttons, I’ll be able to use three of those as regular back buttons, which would be yet another small yet super handy upgrade.

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Hall Effect Thumbsticks

ASUS stated they couldn’t fit Hall effect thumbsticks on the ROG Ally because the Hall effect triggers present on the Ally would interfere with the thumbstick sensors and vice versa if both were Hall effect-based.

But if they could somehow pack Hall effect thumbsticks and make them work with Hall effect triggers on the ROG Ally 2, we wouldn’t have to worry about the joystick drift. If nothing else, analog sticks that are legitimately easier to replace or upgrade on the ROG Ally X (as ASUS claims) are a nice consolation prize.

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A Proper Budget Version

The ROG Ally with the AMD Z1 APU isn’t a proper budget version of the ROG Ally. The price difference isn’t there, and the 1080p screen on the Z1 model is overkill for the level of gaming performance the Z1 offers.

I’d like the ROG Ally 2 lineup to include a proper budget model—at least 30% more affordable than the high-end model, featuring a 900p screen instead of a 1080p panel.

An APU That’s Designed for a Gaming Handheld

The AMD Z1 Extreme is a solid APU, but it’s clear it wasn’t designed for a handheld. It’s basically a Ryzen 7 7840U with its AI cores disabled. Now that gaming handhelds have become somewhat popular, I’d like AMD to create a proper APU for gaming-focused portable devices.

One that will make the iGPU the main part of the equation and that won’t pack an ultra-overkill 8-core CPU. A 6-core CPU should be more than enough, as should a wider memory bus that would help the GPU spread its wings, something we might see in the next generation of AMD APUs.

And hey, I wouldn’t mind if Intel or NVIDIA came up with such an APU instead of AMD. Intel has something interesting cooking with its Lunar Lake mobile chips. These chips will have on-package RAM, allowing for massive improvements to memory bandwidth, which is just what gaming handhelds need.

Intel

There are also rumors that NVIDIA is preparing an ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) with MediaTek that will have a beastly iGPU , so I can’t wait to see what’s in store in the next 12-24 months and which of the future APUs will power the ASUS ROG Ally 2.

32GB of Memory

24GB of memory on the ROG Ally X is great, but considering just how memory-hungry modern AAA games are and how 8GB of video memory isn’t enough to play certain games with max textures, even at 1080p, I’d like for the ROG Ally 2 to pack 32GB of RAM. Increasing texture detail is one of the most visible yet least demanding ways to improve visuals in modern games, and more memory is necessary to make it happen.

That way, we could reserve 10GB of memory for the iGPU and leave Windows and games with 22GB of RAM, which should be enough even for the most demanding games still set to arrive in this console generation.

Multiple Color Options

This is a first-world problem, but I’d like to see the ROG Ally 2 arrive in multiple flavors.

A Plastic Cover on the Back to Allow for Easy SSD Replacement

You can find this feature on some early GPD handheld PCs and some Microsoft Surface devices also come with an SSD cover. I don’t understand how this hasn’t become a regular thing in handheld gaming PCs.

Microsoft

An SSD cover would mean we wouldn’t have to remove the entire back cover of our handhelds and instead just unscrew the SSD cover, replace the storage drive, screw the cover back, and continue with our day. This is yet another minor tweak that would make the lives of the ROG Ally 2 owners much easier.

If the ROG Ally 2 ends up having most of the upgrades listed above, it will be a beast of a gaming handheld. If Microsoft also improves Windows on handhelds in time for the ROG Ally 2’s launch, we could see the ROG Ally 2 seriously threaten the Steam Deck 2 in terms of sales and popularity.

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