ROG Xbox Ally X price revealed as handhelds go up for pre-order

Everything's an Xbox

ROG Xbox Ally X
(Image credit: Asus)

The ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X gaming handhelds are finally up for pre-order, starting at £499.99.

Microsoft throws around the term Xbox like that meme of Oprah giving everyone in sight a car. But this latest incarnation of what an Xbox is has a bit more weight to it.

The ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X are handhelds made by Asus in partnership with the Xbox team. You’ll pay £499.99 for the standard edition, £799.99 for the more powerful ROG Xbox Ally X.

You can pre-order now, ahead of their October 16th release date.

Wondering which to buy? While they look like twins there are major upgrades in the ROG Xbox Ally X.

It has a much more powerful AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor and Impulse Triggers, to deliver the same kind of haptic experience offered by the Xbox Series pad. The more expensive model also gets 24GB RAM and double the storage — 1TB instead of 512GB.

There may be a £300 disparity between the two, but the difference is far greater than that of the cheapest Steam Deck and the most expensive one.

What this dynamic duo has over the competition is an interface designed to give you something closer to the Xbox console experience. Make no mistake, these are full-on handheld PCs. But they also boot into a full-screen Xbox interface.

Could it be the future of Xbox? That’s one hope. But one important part to note is the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds won’t simply play absolutely everything in your Xbox library, because these things play PC games, not Xbox ones. It’s just a handy fact there’s a whole heap of overlap between the two libraries these days.

Asus has already made a couple of pretty similar-looking handhelds, just without the Xbox extras, the Asus ROG Ally and Ally X. However, Asus claims the ROG Xbox Ally X delivers “up to 30%” better performance in games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle compared to the non-Xbox version.

It makes sense, given the ROG Xbox Ally X has a newer processor.

Andrew Williams
Contributor

Andrew Williams has written about all sorts of stuff for more than a decade — from tech and fitness to entertainment and fashion. He has written for a stack of magazines and websites including Wired, TrustedReviews, TechRadar and Stuff, enjoys going to gigs and painting in his spare time. He's also suspiciously good at poker.

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