Usually, when I talk about gaming on the go, I’m talking about a gaming laptop. While they’re certainly more portable than a dedicated desktop PC, they’re still not the easiest thing to take out and play, particularly in cramped areas, like on a plane. While not a particularly long flight, I recently spent a few hours on a plane travelling from Brisbane to Adelaide, and there was no way the tray table for my seat was going to hold my laptop. Luckily, ASUS ROG had sent us an ROG Ally Gaming Handheld, and it was the perfect way to keep myself occupied.

Weighing in at 608g, I was incredibly surprised at how light it was, particularly with how powerful the system looked to be on paper. It features an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme Processor, with 8-core, 16-threads, and up to 5.10GHZ boost, as well as an AMD Radeon Graphics processor that uses AMD RDNA 3, with 12 CUs and up to 2.7GHz performance. They’ve also crammed 16GB of 6400MT/s Dual Channel LPDDR5 RAM and a 512GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD behind the 7” FHD 120Hz touch screen. Somehow, this all fits into a system that is about the same size as the Nintendo Switch Lite, except I can play my PC games on it, and I’ve been playing quite a bit of Starfield.

Time Spy Results – 3dmark

The aforementioned screen is incredible, with the glossy display offering crystal clear colours and smooth motions, and its 10-point multi-touch panel makes navigating Windows 11 Home amazingly simple. There is a trade-off though. While it’s great at displaying vibrant colours, it’s also really good at reflecting light, so I’m glad I was able to close the window on both flights. The speakers on the ASUS ROG Ally Gaming Handheld are truly impressive.

Featuring a 2-speaker system with Smart Amplifier technology, they sound incredible and pump out some amazing sound quality while still being nice and loud, complete with Hi-Res Certification and Dolby Atmos. Of course, I couldn’t really do this on my flight, so I made use of the Bluetooth 5.2 connection and kept the noise all to myself. I could have made use of the 3.5mm combination audio jack, but who wants to get tangled up in cables on a flight?

Holding the device felt very much like I was holding a wide Xbox controller. For this reason, it felt a little awkward at first, as my muscle memory wanted my hands to be closer together, but it wasn’t long before I was comfortably jumping around and slapping the Crimson Fleet. The buttons are full-sized, featuring the same layout as an Xbox controller with a couple of additional buttons located in the bottom that you can easily feel with the tips of your fingers during an intense gaming session, and being a PC, you can remap any of these to do whatever it is you want.

The smooth-motion thumb sticks are circled by AURA SYNC RGB rings that can be controlled through the proprietary ROG Armoury Crate SE software, already installed on the console. This will also give you a single place to launch your games from, as well as adjust the system settings on the fly, as well as easily monitor things such as performance and the device’s temperature. I was a little surprised at how cool the system stayed because I wasn’t able to hear a fan running at all – at least, not until I had to reset it to send it back. This is thanks to ROG’s new Zero Gravity thermal system and dual fan design, which worked a treat.

Solar Bay Unlimited Results – 3dmark

Before I was able to play Starfield, I did encounter some things that left me scratching my head. Being a Windows-based system, I had somewhat expected to update graphics drivers in the same way I do on my PC, but this is not the case. Instead, these are done through the preinstalled MyASUS app, your one-stop shop for updates, though I was surprised that the drivers I needed to play Starfield were considered optional, and while these updates were specifically for Starfield, there have been reports of people experiencing better performance in other games, such as Forza.
Playing Starfield was a dream.

The 7” display lends itself well to the supposed low-quality graphics, leaving characters and environments still looking amazingly detailed. It also ran butter-smooth, even during spaceflight surrounded by the UC Navy, asteroids, and the scrap remaining after an intense space battle. Even while running around on planets, surrounded by civilians, buildings, and plant life, it maintained its crystal-clear performance, and the motion kept up perfectly with my control inputs.

The downside to this amazing performance is the battery life, although it’s certainly not bad. Depending on the performance settings you use, you can expect up to three hours from the 40WHrs 4S1P 4-cell Li-ion battery. I got about two hours of continuous gameplay, though the performance was set to the highest possible option while on battery, and I probably could have turned off the RGB rings I mentioned earlier. It was still more than enough power for my flight.

DiabloIV Gameplay – Recorded On Device With Simple Screen Recorder

As it’s a handheld device, complete with built-in controllers and a touch screen, you don’t need much in the way of peripherals to play a game or browse the internet. I’ve already mentioned the 3.5mm audio jack, but it also has a USB Type-C combo port that supports USB 3.2 Gen2 and DisplayPort 1.4, which is also used to charge it, a UHS-II microSD card reader with support for SD, SDXC, and SDHX, and an ROG XG Mobile interface, an external GPU that will bump up your performance even more.

The ASUS ROG Ally Gaming Handheld is compact, lightweight, and amazingly powerful, and having the opportunity to play my favourite PC games on a system that fits into my pocket was an experience that I won’t forget anytime soon. It still amazes me that I was able to play a newly released PC title on a handheld device, and even more so that it was playing just as smoothly as my desktop, albeit with lower graphics presets. With options to play games from Steam, Game Pass, Epic, and GOG, you can #playALLYourgames wherever you go.

Written by: Mathew Lindner