The Asus ROG Ally Z1 Extreme is now seeing a successor, but not the ROG Ally 2 just yet— per an unveiling to The Verge ahead of an upcoming official June 2 announcement, the Asus ROG Ally X has been revealed. The device has been confirmed to have mostly the same specifications as the original Asus ROG Ally Z1 Extreme, particularly the 7-inch, 120 Hz VRR IPS display and AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU, which is broadly equivalent to the Ryzen 7 7840U used in other handhelds and some gaming laptops.
So, what meaningful differences are we looking at? Internally, the layout has been tweaked to make different components more repair-friendly, to account for a larger battery, and to use Asus' laptop SD card reader. The previous Ally card reader was speculated to have contributed to overheating, though Asus speaking to The Verge claims "We don't want people to think that's what we had to do."
Like the Steam Deck OLED, the Asus ROG Ally X will slot into the existing product line-up at an unannounced higher price point than the current ROG Ally. The purpose of the device is to address critique of the original in a new design and provide a slightly higher-end experience ahead of any true upgrades in processing power a la Deck 2 or the unannounced Ally 2.
Besides internal changes to be more suitable for repair and less prone to overheating, the Asus ROG Ally X battery is expected to improve by "way more than 40 percent while still boosting storage, graphics and memory, [and] ports" according to comments by Asus senior product manager Gabriel Meng.
Of the potential upgrades being teased for the Asus ROG Ally X, the most promising for gaming performance will likely be upgrades to RAM or eGPU support. Some Ryzen 7 7840U/8840U handhelds leverage 32GB of RAM, for example, which allows much more system memory to be allocated to the iGPU. In today's games that are ever-demanding on VRAM and APUs that are especially reliant on fast RAM, there may be nice gains to be had here.
Besides otherwise-unspecified hardware improvements, some ROG Ally software updates are also expected in July to improve the Ally experience for all users. This includes a fully-overhauled UI, a quicker AMD Fluid Motion Frames toggle, better Library sorting, and Button Mapping sharing support.
