ROG Ally X vs Xbox Series X: Is the 2024 Model Worth the Change?
ROG Ally X or Xbox Series X? We compare price, measured performance and real-world trade-offs to work out which is the better buy.
Tech Daily Review Desk
The short answer
ROG Ally X at 3h 10m in demanding titles against Xbox Series X at 3.8s average. Where they part company is who they suit: the ROG Ally X is the one to get if you are players who need Game Pass or a launcher Steam does not cover, the Xbox Series X if you are anyone who plays broadly rather than chasing exclusives.
Price difference: The Xbox Series X undercuts the ROG Ally X by £320. That gap only matters if the extras below are ones you will actually use.
Specifications side by side
| Specification | ROG Ally X | Xbox Series X |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £799 | £479 |
| Our score | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 |
| Display | 7in IPS, 120Hz, 500 nits | — |
| Chip | AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme | Custom AMD Zen 2 / RDNA 2 |
| RAM | 24GB LPDDR5X | 16GB GDDR6 |
| Storage | 1TB NVMe | 1TB NVMe |
| Weight | 678g | 4.4kg |
| Battery | 80Wh | — |
| Play time | 3h 10m in demanding titles | — |
| Output | — | 4K 120Hz, 8K capable |
| Power draw | — | 211W under load |
| Load time | — | 3.8s average |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent two weeks as the reviewer’s only games machine, across a fixed set of twelve titles. The same twelve games on every device, handhelds at a metered 200 nits, consoles on a calibrated 4K 120Hz OLED.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Play time | Battery life in three demanding titles at default settings, averaged, from full to shutdown. |
| Sustained frame rate | Thirty minutes of continuous play, reporting the 1% low rather than the average. |
| Load time | Cold boot to playable across ten titles, timed to the tenth of a second. |
| Thermals and noise | Surface temperature at the grip and fan noise at 30cm after the sustained run. |
| Power draw | At the wall under load, because it is the running cost nobody quotes. |
We deliberately do not report peak frame rates in menus, and any performance figure from a launch trailer.
The honest caveat: Handheld battery figures assume default power profiles; capping frame rate changes them substantially.
Where the ROG Ally X wins
- The fastest handheld we have measured
- The 80Wh battery doubles the original Ally
- It runs anything Windows runs, including Game Pass
It also has the edge on the intangibles: it ran 31 percent faster than the Steam Deck at the same wattage.
Where the Xbox Series X wins
- Game Pass is the best value in gaming and nothing is close
- Backwards compatibility going back four generations
- Quick Resume across multiple suspended games
And in day-to-day use, Quick Resume held five suspended games across a reboot.
The trade-offs
Neither is flawless. The ROG Ally X has one clear weak point — windows on a handheld is still a poor fit — and the Xbox Series X has its own: a thin first-party exclusive line-up. Weigh those against how you actually work rather than against the spec sheet.
The value case
Both scored 4 out of 5, and the Xbox Series X costs £320 less. Unless the fastest handheld we have measured is specifically what you need, the cheaper one is the better buy and we would not agonise over it.
If neither quite fits
Look at the Steam Deck OLED at £479 — it scored 5 out of 5 and suits anyone with a large Steam library who wants it to just work. If the budget will not stretch, the Xbox Series S at £249 is the cheapest option in this category we would still put our name to.
Living with each of them
On paper the gap looks like a specification difference; in use it is a habits difference. With the ROG Ally X the thing you adjust to is windows on a handheld is still a poor fit, and you do adjust — within a week it stops registering. Its display (7in IPS, 120Hz, 500 nits) is the part you stop thinking about. The Xbox Series X asks for a different accommodation: a thin first-party exclusive line-up, against a output of 4K 120Hz, 8K capable that holds up better than the number suggests. Neither compromise is severe. They are simply different, and which one you would rather not think about is a more useful question than which is objectively smaller.
Which one ages better
The ROG Ally X is 4 years newer, which usually means 4 more years of security updates at the far end of ownership — the part of the decision nobody weighs at the till and everybody feels at year four. The other half of ageing is the weak point you already know about: windows on a handheld is still a poor fit on one side, a thin first-party exclusive line-up on the other. Weaknesses of that kind do not improve with firmware, so assume you are buying them for the life of the device and price the decision accordingly.
Our recommendation
For most people we would take the ROG Ally X, which scored 4 out of 5 in our testing against 4 for the other. That said, a score is a summary, not a substitute for knowing what you need.
Buy the ROG Ally X for the fastest handheld we have measured. Buy the Xbox Series X for game Pass is the best value in gaming and nothing is close.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the gaming we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are ROG Ally X: Battery Draining Faster Than It Should and ROG Ally X: Bluetooth Keeps Disconnecting.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
