Valve's Steam Deck OLED is still a beloved handheld, but can the Asus ROG Ally X shift the narrative?
This story is part of our coverage of Computex, the world's biggest computing conference. It’s not much of an overstatement to say that when Valve released the original Steam Deck, it started a real handheld PC revolution. Launching the Steam Deck OLED only emphasized that while there may be other, more powerful consoles on the market now, Valve’s offering still stands strong against the competition.
The new ROG Ally X received a RAM upgrade compared to its predecessor, putting it further ahead of the Steam Deck OLED. Not only does it have 8GB more memory, but the RAM is also faster, and as this is on-board memory, it can be split between the system and the GPU as needed. Moreover, Asus gave the ROG Ally X a more upgradeable M.2 2280 NVMe SSD.
Design and battery The two handhelds vary greatly in terms of design. We won’t go over the basic differences between a Steam Deck and an Asus ROG Ally — you can read about those in our comparison of those models. Instead, we’ll discuss the changes that apply only to these newer, updated versions. The biggest upgrade for the ROG Ally X stems from the fact that Asus doubled the battery capacity, going up from 40Wh to 80Wh. This should have a massive impact on the battery life. While Valve’s battery upgrade is not as significant, the APU was made to be more efficient, which results in a tangible difference in battery life. In our tests, the OLED model consumed about 5% of the battery during a 30-minute gameplay session of Dead Cells.
When we tested the ROG Ally Z1 Extreme against the base version of the Steam Deck, we weren’t surprised to find the Asus handheld in the lead by a significant margin across every possible title. Some of the gains were smaller, such as 31 frames per second for the ROG Ally versus 24 fps for the Steam Deck in Returnal, while some were much more impressive, like 91 fps vs 79 fps in Strange Brigade.
Asus ROG Ally X Computex 2024 Gaming Handheld Portable PC Steam Deck OLED
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