Due to the ongoing RAM crisis, handheld gaming PCs have long parted ways with affordability. But that hasn’t stopped vendors like Asus from putting out revisions to their existing lineups. The latest is the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 ($1,299), a swanky gold-and-black repackaging of last year’s Editors’ Choice-award-winning Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. Now it has a translucent chassis, custom gold RGB lighting, and an illuminated Xbox button, all in celebration of the Asus ROG brand’s 20th anniversary.
In terms of specs, the Xbox Ally X20 is identical to the older model: It offers the same impressive AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor, ergonomics, and dimensions. If you bought the Xbox Ally X last year, then there’s no real reason to upgrade, unless you’re intrigued by the new OLED panel. However, given the price, it’s hard to fully recommend this handheld unless you’ve got cash to burn. In terms of pure power, the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is a better choice, though it’s evenmoreexpensive. Yes, the Xbox Ally X20’s pricing leaves it caught between a rock and a hard place, but it’s still a very capable handheld gaming PC and a fun collector’s item if you’re willing to splurge.
Now, I don’t mean to sound too glum while talking about the Xbox Ally X20; I really liked the previous version, the Xbox Ally X, when I reviewed it last year. The Xbox Ally X has the best ergonomics of the many handheld gaming PCs I’ve reviewed (it even tops the Nintendo Switch 2 in that regard), thanks to the contoured grips that frame the system. That’s true of the Xbox X20, too, as it shares the same design principles. They distribute weight evenly and have a slight texture that not only feels good but also adds extra grip.
The machine’s measurements are exactly the same, as well. The Xbox Ally X20 measures at 1.9 by 11.8 by 4.7 inches (HWD), just slightly wider than the Steam Deck OLED (1.9 by 11.7 by 4.6 inches HWD). Regarding weight, the Xbox Ally X20 weighs in at 1.6 pounds, slightly heavier than the Xbox Ally X but far lighter than the Lenovo Legion Go 2 and the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+. That’s not quite as light as the Steam Deck OLED’s 1.4 pounds or the Switch 2’s 1.18 pounds.
Curious about the Xbox Ally X20 newer aspects? Let’s start with the translucent chassis. It’s a callback to the “xtreme” see-through electronics of the late 1990s and early 2000s, a gaming trend that I welcome. From the front, you can admire some of the machine’sinnards; from the back, you can appreciate the motherboard and fans peeking through the machine’s vents.
Two gold buttons flank the Xbox Ally X20’s mighty 7.4-inch screen, while the Xbox button, nestled between the left control stick and the Command Center and View buttons, now glows Xbox green. It’s not as bright as the RGB rings that wrap around both control sticks, but it certainly pops against the system’s black color. And if you look closely, you can still see the “Xbox ROG” lettering trickling down the handheld. At the system level, the celebration continues with a custom 20th-anniversary startup logo, wallpaper, and screensaver.
Turn it around, and you’ll spot the 20th anniversary gold badge among Asus ROG’s typical design language. Two macro buttons sit just in reach of your middle and index fingers, and the slightly textured shoulder buttons are pleasant to the touch. They feel good to press, too, thanks to the Hall-effect analog triggers. Aesthetically, the Xbox Ally X20 is far more visually pleasing than the plain black original, and the handheld comes with a simple cardboard stand for showcasing it on your desk or for monitor use. (It lacks a kickstand.)
Undeniably, the biggest change between the two Xbox-branded systems is the display. The first change is one you might not notice at first glance. The Xbox Ally X20’s screen is 0.4 inch bigger than the Xbox Ally X’s 7-inch screen. The second, and most obvious, is that the Xbox Ally X20 upgrades to an OLED screen. Both systems still offer a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel resolution with a 16:9 aspect ratio and a 120Hz refresh rate. But the OLED has improved brightness (600 nits, versus the Ally X’s 500 nits).
The Xbox Ally X20 also offers HDR support, which wasn’t in the original model. With HDR on, Asus says that the system can reach a max brightness of 1,400 nits. It’s also officially Pantone Validated, a certification program that ensures the machine can faithfully reproduce colors from the Pantone Matching System (PMS). And finally, the screen supports AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, an update over the Xbox Ally X’s AMD FreeSync Premium.In addition to suppressing screen tearing, the Pro upgrade adds color and luminance certification as well as HDR compatibility.
Rounding out the system’s specs, you’ll find the Xbox Ally X20 comes equipped with 24GB of DDR5 memory and a 1TB M.2 solid-state drive. Two USB-C ports are on the top of the handheld (one USB-C 3.2 and one USB4), both supporting Power Delivery 3.0 and DisplayPort 2.1 output. The USB4 port is also Thunderbolt-compatible. A 3.5mm headphone jack is there for audio. It’s all virtually the same as on the Xbox Ally X, except for the microSD card reader. It’s now a microSD Express card slot, an improvement from the Ally’s UHS-II microSD card reader, which means that you can expect faster read and write speeds with the Xbox Ally X20.
One of the things that made the original Xbox Ally X such a big deal at launch was the introduction of the Xbox Full Screen Experience (now simply called Xbox Mode). It’s Microsoft’s attempt to bring the Xbox console experience to handhelds and make the Windows handheld experience comparable to Valve’s excellent SteamOS.
Xbox Mode returns with the Xbox Ally X20, and using it has perks. It makes navigation easier and aggregates your game library, including titles downloaded from stores other than Microsoft’s. Even better, Xbox Mode uses less RAM. That’s because it pushes Windows 11 into the background, cutting all Windows processes to only the most essential for maximum game performance.
Xbox Mode is still the best way to play your games on a Windows handheld, and while things have gotten easier, there are still many quirks and glitches that sometimes don’t resolve themselves without a full reset. For example, sometimes I’ll turn on the Xbox Ally X20 and get ready to enter my four-digit password. However, the system won’t detect my button presses or screen taps. A reset sets things right, but that this issue still remains a year later is annoying, even if it’s minor.
SteamOS also tucks away its desktop in the back end. As many people, including myself, have discovered, Windows 11 is quite a heavy processing load on handheld gaming PCs. While testing the SteamOS version of the Lenovo Legion Go S (running the Z2 Go chip), I discovered that ditching Windows 11 significantly improves game performance. In fact, testing Cyberpunk 2077 on both the Windows 11 and SteamOS variants of the Legion Go S, the SteamOS version delivered a 69% performance boost over the Windows 11 version. Although Asus retained Windows 11 here, Xbox Mode is a way for Microsoft to at least try to reckon with that reality.
Upon Xbox Mode’s debut, Microsoft promised features that were not quite ready at launch. The most significant was Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR), a system-level feature that uses the Ryzen NPU’s power to upscale games running at lower resolutions, much like AMD’s FSR, thereby freeing re launched a few months ago, so I tested it to see how it uses the Ryzen NPU
To activate it, you first must be an Xbox Insider member. If you’re enrolled, you can turn on Auto SR in two ways. You can either enable it in Windows Settings (System > Display > Graphics) and turn on Auto SR for all compatible games, or activate it by starting a compatible game, opening the Xbox Game Bar, navigating to the Display section, and enabling Auto SR. Currently, Auto SR is only available when the Xbox Ally X20 is docked.
On the Ally X20, Auto SR upscales from an internal resolution of 1,280 by 720. What I liked most is that you can enable an Auto SR status indicator that’ll flash on screen to let you know when Auto SR is engaged.
In action, Auto SR is as good as any other upscaling option. To see if there was a significant boost in performance, I set my monitor’s resolution to 1080p and ran Cyberpunk 2077’s benchmark with Steam Deck presets enabled, turning off only the upscaling options so that I could run the game at a native resolution of 1920 by 1080. I also kept the performance mode at 35 watts. Then, I ran it again, this time with Auto SR upscaling 720p to 1080p. The difference was less than 10 frames: 55fps at 1080p native vs. 63fps AutoSR-upscaled.
In-game, Auto SR seems to do a better job of cleaning up smaller details on items in the foreground and background. Text on neon signs, the stitching on a paper lantern, and a chain-link fence all appeared clearer with Auto SR than with FSR. It also didn’t look too bad when I bumped the monitor’s resolution up to 4K. Obviously, the graphics aren’t comparable to native 4K images, but it’s not a bad way to play, especially if you’re determined to use your Xbox Ally X20 in docked mode. While this is by no means a full analysis of Auto SR, it’s worth experimenting with on a game-by-game basis.
As with previous Windows handheld reviews, I’ve split our performance testing into two parts. The productivity/content creation/synthetic graphics tests come first, and we compare the results with comparable laptops and recent Windows handhelds like the Lenovo Legion Go 2, the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, and last year’s Xbox Ally X.
Then, our gaming benchmarks follow, charted against a host of exclusively PC gaming handhelds, including the Steam Deck OLED. I’ve also outlined some additional anecdotal game testing I did outside of our formal tests to give you an idea of real-world gameplay across various game genres.
Our primary overall benchmark, UL’s PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Three more tests we rely on are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the HandBrake 1.8 video transcoder to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Now, the Xbox Ally X20 is not going to be anyone’s first choice for content creation, but it still holds its own pretty well against full-blown gaming laptops, as well as the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip, which is Intel’s answer to the Ryzen Z2 AI Extreme.Interestingly, despite sharing essentially the same hardware as the Xbox Ally X, the Xbox Ally X20 performed a bit better on the PCMark 10 benchmark but worse on the Cinebench test.
Although it wouldn’t be my first choice for a productivity driver, with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard attached, you can use the Ally X20 as a machine that handles both work and play.
Ordinarily, we challenge each reviewed system’s graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The second pair, Steel Nomad’s regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance. Since not all the contenders here could run all five of these tests, we boiled down our pool to Wild Life, Steel Nomad Light, and Solar Bay.
These tests prove that while the handheld performance is very impressive, it still doesn’t compare to the raw power of straight-up gaming laptops like the Lenovo Legion Pro 5 and MSI Katana. Also, we can see the Intel-based MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ racing ahead of the Ryzen AI Z2 in both the Wild Life and Solar Bay tests.
Moving on to our real-world gaming benchmarks, the Xbox Ally X20 takes on members of the Legion Go family, including the Legion Go 2, the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, the Xbox Ally X, and the Steam Deck OLED. For our formal benchmarking, we replaced our usual Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and F1 2024 benchmarks with performance tools from Cyberpunk 2077, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider to evaluate gaming muscle across all current Legion Go handhelds and Valve’s Steam Deck.
Each console was tested in the device’s performance mode while plugged directly into power, with the only difference being the resolution. (The Steam Deck screen is 800p, the Legion Go S models, Legion Go 2, and MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ are 1200p, and the Xbox Ally X and X20 are 1080p.) Finally, we take a look at popular titles for some anecdotal testing. All results are measured in fps. (Every game tested on the Xbox Ally X, X20, and MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ launched
For our first test, we fired up Cyberpunk 2077. Using the Steam Deck graphics preset, as shown in the chart, the Xbox Ally X20 performed similarly to the Xbox Ally X and Legion Go 2. It easily trumped the Z2 Go models with or without Windows and comfortably cruised past the Steam Deck. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, however, showed the strength of its new processor, with a 33% performance increase.
Moving on to the Ultra and Ray-Tracing benchmarks, results start to level out across the board. Even the Claw, which is by far the most powerful handheld in the group, flounders at higher settings.These handhelds are impressive, but without any sort of upscaling, they crumble under the weight of Cyberpunk 2077’s CPU- and GPU-intensive world.
With formal benchmarking out of the way, I decided to try some informal trials and played a few newer games on the system. Pragmata is one of my favorite games of the year, and trying it out on the Xbox Ally X20 was a delight. However, it’s a very demanding shooter, so I rarely hit 60fps for long stretches. Still, VRR handled the stutters, and it was a great way to play the game. I also took a look at Dragon’s Dogma 2 to compare it to the Switch 2 version. In short, Dragon Dogma 2 performed similarly to Pragmata, coming in at around 40fps at full 1080p, so I could squeeze out a few more frames by dropping the resolution to 720p.
Minecraft Dungeons 2 ran exceptionally well right out of the gate, holding 60fps at full resolution without much issue. I had previously tested Baldur’s Gate III, Coral Island, Hades II, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Forza Horizon 5, Gears of War: Reloaded, and Resident Evil 4 (2023) for my review of the original Xbox Ally X, and, no surprise, they all performed well on the Xbox Ally X20, too.
The Xbox Ally X20’s strong performance wasn’t too surprising, as it shares much of the same DNA as the Xbox Ally X. However, its OLED panel really helped these games pop. Bright titles like Hollow Knight benefited from the brighter whites and expanded color contrast, while dark games like Resident Evil 4 benefited from the OLED’s true blacks. As I’ve said in my monitor reviews, I haven’t met an OLED I didn’t like, and that’s still true here.
The Xbox Ally X20 has an 80-watt-hour battery, the same as the Xbox Ally X and MSI Claw 8 EX AI+. Asus doesn’t list an estimated battery endurance per charge, but we’ve seen devices like these typically last about 3 to 12 hours, depending on the use case. The Xbox Ally X20 has four power profiles. Two of the profiles (Performance and Windows) draw 17 watts of power, while Silent mode draws only 13 watts. Turbo mode goes all out, at 35 watts.
Our first battery test measures each system’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open- with the display brightness at 50% and the audio volume at 100%. We ensure the battery is fully charged and that Wi-Fi and additional RGB backlighting are turned off before the test. I chose the silent operating mode (13W) for my testing. Under these settings, the Xbox Ally X20 lasted 17 hours and 17 minutes
For all-out play, battery life depends on the game you’re playing. A graphically intensive title will likely draw more power than something simple. We set the system to 50% brightness and 100% volume, deactivated all the Dim Display and Sleep options, and turned the device on Airplane mode, this time setting the system’s power profile to Performance. Using Cyberpunk 2077’s Steam Deck preset, I set a timer, left the game idle, and found it lasted 3 hours and 8 minutes.
In the year since I reviewed the original Xbox Ally X, Asus released many updates and optimizations, which may explain why, despite housing the same-size battery, the Xbox Ally X20 lasted a bit longer in our tests. It has a different screen, too, with different traits. At any rate, battery life remained comparable where it counts—in actual gameplay.
Final Thoughts
Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20
3.5
Good
What Our Ratings Mean
- 5.0 – Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 – Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 – Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 – Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 – Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 – Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 – Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 – Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 – Dismal: Don’t even think about buying this product
Read Our
Editorial Mission Statement
and
Testing Methodologies.
While the upgrades offered are minor at best, there’s no doubt that the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 is an impressive handheld. It looks great, it feels comfortable to grip for extended periods, and it plays many games well, including new releases.
It doesn’t change how I feel about Windows-based gaming handhelds: The Windows partition is still a pain to use, and there are annoying glitches and bugs. If the Ally X20 were more affordable, it would probably earn a full-throated recommendation, but because it occupies this space between the more powerful MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ and the cheaper Xbox Ally X, it’s only for people with deep pockets, collectors, and folks who are truly about that OLED life.
SHOULD I UPGRADE?
It’s difficult to recommend upgrading from an Asus ROG Xbox Ally X to the X20. The new system is expensive, and aside from the OLED screen (which is lovely), there’s no significant difference in performance or user experience.
About Our Expert
Zackery Cuevas
Writer, Hardware
Experience
I’m a PCMag reviewer and ISF-certified TV calibrator focused on computer accessories, laptops, gaming monitors, and video games. I’ve been writing, playing, and complaining about games for as long as I remember, but it wasn’t until recently that I’ve been able to shout my opinions directly at a larger audience. My work has appeared on iMore, Windows Central, Android Central, and TWICE, and I have a diverse portfolio of editing work under my belt from my time spent at Scholastic and Oxford University Press. I also have a few book-author credits under my belt—I’ve contributed to the sci-fi anthology Under New Suns, and I’ve even written a Peppa Pig book.
Areas of Expertise
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