Two handheld consoles are about to arrive for the festive season... Xbox-branded consoles.
Two years after the release of ASUS's first ROG Ally portable console, and one year after its renewal, the Taiwanese firm has found a strong ally to help it make its mark in the highly competitive field of these small hybrid PC and game console machines. Microsoft has joined forces with ASUS to produce two new machines, the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X, the release of which was recently confirmed: one of the two will be available on October 16, with the end-of-year festive season in particular in the sights of the two partners.
The ROG Xbox Ally is the more "modest" of the two, with its AMD Ryzen Z2 A processor equipped with 4 CPU cores in Zen 2 technology capable of a frequency of 3.8 GHz, 16 GB of LPDDR5X RAM, 512 GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD and 60 Wh battery. It should nevertheless be a nice little machine dedicated to video games, thanks to its graphics solution based on 8 RDNA 2 computing units. The "big sister" - the ROG Xbox Ally X - features a much more powerful chip: a Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme with 8 CPU cores clocked at a maximum of 5 GHz, and a different kind of graphics solution: 16 RDNA 3.5 processing units. Suffice to say, games will run much more smoothly on this machine, which also benefits from 24 GB of LPDDR5X RAM, a 1 TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD and an 80 Wh battery.
Apart from these few "details", the two machines feature an identical 29 x 12.1 x 5 centimetre chassis, a 7-inch diagonal IPS screen for 1080p at 120 Hz and a three-month subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. That said, as you might expect, the price won't be the same at all. The information was recently confirmed by ASUS and Microsoft: the ROG Xbox Ally will cost 599 euros and the ROG Xbox Ally X 899 euros.
