The world of PC-powered gaming handhelds can be tricky to navigate. Check out our guide for some tips on choosing the right device for you.
If you’ve been conisdering the purchase of a PC gaming handheld, but are not sure which one is the right machine for you, we totally understand. There are a whole bunch of PC-based handheld gaming systems out there right now, and if you don’t stay abreast of this stuff, it can be hard to keep up.
If you look at the wider market, there really are piles and piles of these things. Companies like AyaNeo, GamePad Digital (GPD), and One-Netbook were making these devices before anyone else, but being smaller vendors, their products can run toward the more expensive side as they offer high-end specifications and unique features. For the scope of this post, we’re limiting ourselves to just four affordable device families: the Steam Deck, the ASUS ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go, and the MSI Claw.
The chart above summarizes the most important specifications of each system. Fundamentally, we’re looking at four machines, but each one has at least one variant model with slightly different specifications—although how different they are depends quite a bit on what we’re talking about. We’ll go over each one in detail here, starting with the ASUS ROG Ally X.ASUS’ ROG Ally X: No Compromises Handheld PC Gaming
We liked the original ROG Ally quite a bit, despite a few teething issues. When the Ally X came along and promised to resolve every complaint we had with the original recipe, we immediately fell in love. ASUS’ ROG Ally X refines the original system, dropping the proprietary ROG XG Mobile connector in favor of a second USB Type-C port, and then drops in another 8GB of RAM while applying a bump to the memory clock.
Aside from that, ASUS doubled the battery capacity from 40 Watt-hours to a full eighty. This is the biggest battery in any gaming handheld, and it lets you run the machine full-tilt in “Turbo” mode for as long as three hours. Not that you need to use “Turbo” mode for most games, as optimizations made to the software and firmware of the ROG Ally mean that it can handle most games in the lower-power modes.
Compared to the other systems, the Ally X has a lot of advantages: more memory than all but the priciest configurations of the MSI Claw, the biggest battery, and a variable-refresh-rate (VRR) display that makes gaming in the 40-to-50 FPS range much more pleasant than on the other systems. That particular benefit applies to the original Ally as well, which shares the same SoC and software but only has 16GB of RAM.ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD: $549.99 at Best BuyASUS ROG Ally Ryzen Z1, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD: $499.99 at Best Buy
The singular major downside of the ROG Ally X is the price. We like the machine a lot, but there’s no getting around it: it’s $800, making it the most expensive system in this roundup. As we said, it’s a no-compromise gaming experience, so you get what you pay for. However, the original Ryzen Z1 Extreme Ally is $250 cheaper at $549, and it gives essentially the same performance in games that are OK with the 16GB RAM configuration.
There’s also the regular Ally with the non-‘Extreme’ Ryzen Z1 processor.
