The Asus ROG Ally X is the best a Windows gaming handheld has ever been. It’s got the most comfortable grip, the smoothest gameplay, and the longest-lasting battery — three of the elements that make a PC gaming experience truly portable for me.
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Asus ROG Ally X review: the best Windows gaming handheld by a mile
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Most of this is no surprise: It’s smooth because Asus makes the only handheld that pairs AMD’s powerful Ryzen chips with a variable refresh rate screen, which better syncs up with your game. It’s got longer battery life because Asus now stuffs an 80-watt-hour pack in there, the biggest we’ve seen in a handheld to date. The battery’s so big, you can keep that AMD chip humming at higher power levels for higher framerates.
But what might surprise you is this: the Ally X is the first handheld I can recommend alongside my gold standard for handhelds: the Steam Deck OLED. That is, if you’ve got a few extra bills burning a hole in your pocket, don’t mind wrestling with Windows, and trust that Asus has actually learned its customer support lesson.
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My ROG Ally X review unit arrived just before I went on vacation — the perfect opportunity to test its massive 80Wh battery. As of today, I’ve spent more than 24 hours playing actual games on the Ally X.
At first, the battery life didn’t seem like anything special. When I navigated the Japanese high school demon drama of Persona 3 Reload at maximum brightness in the car and on the beach, I got 2.5 hours per charge. That’s not enough to last the drive from Northern California to Southern California, at least not without an external battery. I did get an entire additional hour in Dave the Diver compared to the Lenovo Legion Go, but my total runtime of 3 hours, 19 minutes still paled in comparison to the Steam Deck OLED’s total of 4 hours, 42 minutes.
But when I fired up more demanding games, the Ally X pulled far ahead. I got nearly an entire extra hour of Armored Core 6 (2h59m) and an extra half-hour of Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2h41m) at 720p and medium spec, using the Ally X’s default power mode. That’s the best I’ve seen handheld for games that intensive!
1/25
Then, I played two full hours of one of the most demanding PC games currently in existence: Alan Wake II.
Technically, the ROG Ally X is the first handheld that even begins to meet Alan Wake II’s system requirements. It wants 16GB of system memory and 6GB of VRAM, and it’ll throw errors at launch if you’re short; on the original ROG Ally and Steam Deck OLED, which have to share 16GB between system memory and GPU, the game is a choppy mess.
But the ROG Ally X has a full 24GB of shared memory, and it shows! At a 540p render resolution, upscaled to 1080p with AMD’s FSR 2.1 tech, I could actually delve through the game’s lush, eerie forest without wanting to throw my handheld against the wall. The game did dip as low as 29fps in combat, but I saw a smooth 35–45fps just running around.
It felt playable enough that I finally sat down and beat the game on Ally X — and I had enough battery to do so for two full hours using the Ally X’s 25W “Turbo” mode.
As you can see in my comparison screenshots, the game’s only running 5fps faster on the Ally X when Saga’s standing still over this corpse. But when we’re playing a game that would dip below a smooth 30fps if not for that boost — on a handheld with VRR and Low Framerate Compensation that works right down to 30fps — it makes all the difference in the world.
In game after game, benchmark after benchmark, the Ally X produces the smoothest gameplay I’ve seen from any handheld, even in the valleys and caves of Shadow of the Tomb Raider where the Legion Go technically produces more frames per second. That’s because Asus’ screen is dynamically working to smooth things out. (Even the Steam Deck OLED’s brighter, more colorful, and faster-responding OLED panel can’t match it there.)
Speaking of benchmarks, Alan Wake II isn’t the only game where the Ally X pulls ahead. Despite having the same AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip as the original ROG Ally, the faster memory, more efficient cooling, and power tweaks make their mark.
Tested at 720p low, save Dirt Rally at 720p ultra. Ally X tested with 15W custom TDP, 17W “Performance”, 25W “Turbo”, and 30W “Turbo” AC modes.
While you should note that the Ally X now defaults to a new 17W “Performance” mode rather than 15W, I’m getting better numbers in almost every game with the newer handheld, regardless of wattage.
See how Returnal is now hitting 38fps in my 720p benchmark in the 25W “Turbo” mode, up from 33 with the original Ally? Like Alan Wake II, I bet that means it’s finally enjoyable on a handheld.
But again, power is only half the performance story. A year ago, the original ROG Ally drained its 40-watt-hour battery pack at 40–50 watts in Turbo mode, meaning you’d get less than an hour of gameplay if you ran the Ally that fast away from a charger. With the Ally X, I’m draining an 80-watt-hour battery pack at 33–40 watts in Turbo mode, generally giving me two full hours in a worst-case scenario.
I’m not even seeing any slowdown as the battery reaches empty — it’s good all the way down to the 3 percent mark, when it puts itself in hibernation, and I can begin playing again at full speed almost as soon as I plug into the wall.
Even configured to its lowest wattage of 7W TDP, the Ally X isn’t as power-hungry as the original. Balatro gave me over eight hours of magic roguelike poker at 50 percent brightness, by draining under 10 watts the whole time. So far, my best result was total battery drain of 7 watts in Slay the Spire, down from 9 watts with the OG Ally. At that rate, the Ally X should be able to play for 10 entire hours before shutting down.
I’m not going to rehash everything I already told you about the ROG Ally X in my early hands-on — there are so many substantive little changes they deserve their own story, and I’ve already written that one. But I suspect you may have three distinct questions that deserve answers here:
- How are the revised ergonomics and other physical changes?
- Can Windows really be so bad that you’d choose a Steam Deck with worse performance?
- Why trust Asus when it dodged our SD card reader defect questions and its customer support reputation is in the toilet?
I find the ROG Ally X so much more comfortable to hold than the original, despite its additional weight. The meatier grips, triggers, and pebble-shaped omnidirectional back buttons no longer have any protrusions to get in the way. The joysticks and bumpers feel tighter and more premium, the face buttons have a deeper (though noisier) throw, and the D-pad has gone from meh to quite decent — though I am already getting an annoying squeaky sound when I press the down arrow. The fan is also genuinely quiet, not that it was an issue with the original.
It’s also nice to have twin USB-C ports for charging and peripherals, even if I haven’t yet been able to hook up a Thunderbolt eGPU (Asus tells me there’s a driver issue with AMD eGPUs at the moment).
But I vastly prefer the Steam Deck’s symmetrical analog sticks, which always lie right under where my thumb naturally lands, instead of the Ally’s offset right analog stick that makes me uncomfortably shift my grip. I miss the larger screen I get on other handhelds and their less cramped 16:10 aspect ratio.
And I cannot stand that Windows still cannot reliably make a gaming handheld Go the Fuck to Sleep and reliably wake up again. The Nintendo Switch does it perfectly, and the Steam Deck does it nearly perfectly, but I couldn’t keep track of the number of times Windows decided it could no longer recognize my fingerprint on the sensor or black-screened my game, or the Ally X simply woke up again the moment I set it down, or Asus’ Armoury Crate settings app simply forgot my choices (like whether to turn on my joysticks’ RGB lights) on wake.
I’m happy to say that Armoury Crate has actually improved tremendously over the past year — the game launcher now intelligently sorts my games, lets me easily map buttons and gyro controls for fine aiming, and seamlessly downloads updates (including BIOS updates) without navigating to a website or separate app.
But it’s nothing compared to the ease of use of SteamOS and its compatibility with generations of older PC games thanks to community support — and Windows itself is more of a pig than ever. I spent nearly 45 minutes waiting for mandatory updates and clicking through unwanted offers for various Microsoft products before I could use the Ally X for the first time.
Did I get a joystick-navigable virtual keyboard or PIN screen or a pre-mapped Alt-Enter shortcut for my trouble? Nope — instead, Asus added a Copilot shortcut, there’s a copy of Outlook sitting on my taskbar, and OneDrive is on by default. The only mercy is that Microsoft Teams doesn’t launch on startup this time.
As far as the whole SD card situation, Asus has only told me that it’s not the same reader as the old one that it won’t admit has an issue — it’s the one it uses on laptops. That’s somewhat reassuring, I guess. I haven’t yet had issues playing games from SD after a week of play, in case you’re wondering.
The ROG Ally X doesn’t check all the boxes I personally need in a handheld. The one-two punch of performance and battery life is tempting, but not tempting enough to steer me away from a $549 or $649 Steam Deck OLED that will play my legacy library of Steam games more easily, then reliably go to sleep when I want to put it away. The customer support controversy is just one more reason to hesitate.
But if you must have Windows or play the latest games on the go, the Ally X is the best Windows handheld yet. I hope it normalizes bigger batteries and VRR screens, and I hope Asus will seriously consider a SteamOS version, too. I hope to test it with Bazzite, an unofficial SteamOS clone, later this year.
Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge
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Billy Woods has one of the highest batting averages in the game. Between his solo records like Hiding Places and Maps, and his collaborative albums with Elucid as Armand Hammer, the man has multiple stone-cold classics under his belt. And, while no one would ever claim that Woods’ albums were light-hearted fare (these are not party records), Golliwog represents his darkest to date.
This is not your typical horrorcore record. Others, like Geto Boys, Gravediggaz, and Insane Clown Posse, reach for slasher aesthetics and shock tactics. But what Billy Woods has crafted is more A24 than Blumhouse.
Sure, the first track is called “Jumpscare,” and it opens with the sound of a film reel spinning up, followed by a creepy music box and the line: “Ragdoll playing dead. Rabid dog in the yard, car won’t start, it’s bees in your head.” It’s setting you up for the typical horror flick gimmickry. But by the end, it’s psychological torture. A cacophony of voices forms a bed for unidentifiable screeching noises, and Woods drops what feels like a mission statement:
“The English language is violence, I hotwired it. I got a hold of the master’s tools and got dialed in.”
Throughout the record, Woods turns to his producers to craft not cheap scares, but tension, to make the listener feel uneasy. “Waterproof Mascara” turns a woman’s sobs into a rhythmic motif. On “Pitchforks & Halos” Kenny Segal conjures the aural equivalent of a POV shot of a serial killer. And “All These Worlds are Yours” produced by DJ Haram has more in common with the early industrial of Throbbing Gristle than it does even some of the other tracks on the record, like “Golgotha” which pairs boombap drums with New Orleans funeral horns.
That dense, at times scattered production is paired with lines that juxtapose the real-world horrors of oppression and colonialism, with scenes that feel taken straight from Bring Her Back: “Trapped a housefly in an upside-down pint glass and waited for it to die.” And later, Woods seamlessly transitions from boasting to warning people about turning their backs on the genocide in Gaza on “Corinthians”:
If you never came back from the dead you can’t tell me shit
Twelve billion USD hovering over the Gaza Strip
You don’t wanna know what it cost to live
What it cost to hide behind eyelids
When your back turnt, secret cannibals lick they lips
The record features some of Woods’ deftest lyricism, balancing confrontation with philosophy, horror with emotion. Billy Woods’ Golliwog is available on Bandcamp and on most major streaming services, including Apple Music, Qobuz, Deezer, YouTube Music, and Spotify.
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Grok, the built-in chatbot on X, is facing intense scrutiny after acknowledging it generated and shared an AI image depicting two young girls in sexualized attire.
In a public post on X, Grok admitted the content “violated ethical standards” and “potentially U.S. laws on child sexual abuse material (CSAM).” The chatbot added, “It was a failure in safeguards, and I’m sorry for any harm caused. xAI is reviewing to prevent future issues.”
That admission alone is alarming. What followed revealed a far broader pattern.
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OPENAI TIGHTENS AI RULES FOR TEENS BUT CONCERNS REMAIN
The fallout from this incident has triggered global scrutiny, with governments and safety groups questioning whether AI platforms are doing enough to protect children. (Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Grok quietly restricts image tools to paying users after backlash
As criticism mounted, Grok confirmed it has begun limiting image generation and editing features to paying subscribers only. In a late-night reply on X, the chatbot stated that image tools are now locked behind a premium subscription, directing users to sign up to regain access.
The apology that raised more questions
Grok’s apology appeared only after a user prompted the chatbot to write a heartfelt explanation for people lacking context. In other words, the system did not proactively address the issue. It responded because someone asked it to.
Around the same time, researchers and journalists uncovered widespread misuse of Grok’s image tools. According to monitoring firm Copyleaks, users were generating nonconsensual, sexually manipulated images of real women, including minors and well-known figures.
After reviewing Grok’s publicly accessible photo feed, Copyleaks identified a conservative rate of roughly one nonconsensual sexualized image per minute, based on images involving real people with no clear indication of consent. The firm says the misuse escalated quickly, shifting from consensual self-promotion to large-scale harassment enabled by AI.
Copyleaks CEO and co-founder Alon Yamin said, “When AI systems allow the manipulation of real people’s images without clear consent, the impact can be immediate and deeply personal.”
PROTECTING KIDS FROM AI CHATBOTS: WHAT THE GUARD ACT MEANS
Grok admitted it generated and shared an AI image that violated ethical standards and may have broken U.S. child protection laws. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
Sexualized images of minors are illegal
This is not a gray area. Generating or distributing sexualized images of minors is a serious criminal offense in the United States and many other countries. Under U.S. federal law, such content is classified as child sexual abuse material. Penalties can include five to 20 years in prison, fines up to $250,000 and mandatory sex offender registration. Similar laws apply in the U.K. and France.
In 2024, a Pennsylvania man received nearly eight years in prison for creating and possessing deepfake CSAM involving child celebrities. That case set a clear precedent. Grok itself acknowledged this legal reality in its post, stating that AI images depicting minors in sexualized contexts are illegal.
The scale of the problem is growing fast
A July report from the Internet Watch Foundation, a nonprofit that tracks and removes child sexual abuse material online, shows how quickly this threat is accelerating. Reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery jumped by 400% in the first half of 2025 alone. Experts warn that AI tools lower the barrier to potential abuse. What once required technical skill or access to hidden forums can now happen through a simple prompt on a mainstream platform.
Real people are being targeted
The harm is not abstract. Reuters documented cases where users asked Grok to digitally undress real women whose photos were posted on X. In multiple documented cases, Grok fully complied. Even more disturbing, users targeted images of a 14-year-old actress Nell Fisher from the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” Grok later admitted there were isolated cases in which users received images depicting minors in minimal clothing. In another Reuters investigation, a Brazilian musician described watching AI-generated bikini images of herself spread across X after users prompted Grok to alter a harmless photo. Her experience mirrors what many women and girls are now facing.
Governments respond worldwide
The backlash has gone global. In France, multiple ministers referred X to an investigative agency over possible violations of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires platforms to prevent and mitigate the spread of illegal content. Violations can trigger heavy fines. In India, the country’s IT ministry gave xAI 72 hours to submit a report detailing how it plans to stop the spread of obscene and sexually explicit material generated by Grok. Grok has also warned publicly that xAI could face potential probes from the Department of Justice or lawsuits tied to these failures.
LEAKED META DOCUMENTS SHOW HOW AI CHATBOTS HANDLE CHILD EXPLOITATION
Researchers later found Grok was widely used to create nonconsensual, sexually altered images of real women, including minors. (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Concerns grow over Grok’s safety and government use
The incident raises serious concerns about online privacy, platform security and the safeguards designed to protect minors.
Elon Musk, the owner of X and founder of xAI, had not offered a public response at the time of publication. That silence comes at a sensitive time. Grok has been authorized for official government use under an 18-month federal contract. This approval was granted despite objections from more than 30 consumer advocacy groups that warned the system lacked proper safety testing.
Over the past year, Grok has been accused by critics of spreading misinformation about major news events, promoting antisemitic rhetoric and sharing misleading health information. It also competed directly with tools like ChatGPT and Gemini while operating with fewer visible safety restrictions. Each controversy raises the same question. Can a powerful AI tool be deployed responsibly without strong oversight and enforcement?
What parents and users should know
If you encounter sexualized images of minors or other abusive material online, report it immediately. In the United States, you can contact the FBI tip line or seek help from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Do not download, share, screenshot or interact with the content in any way. Even viewing or forwarding illegal material can expose you to serious legal risk.
Parents should also talk with children and teens about AI image tools and social media prompts. Many of these images are created through casual requests that do not feel dangerous at first. Teaching kids to report content, close the app and tell a trusted adult can stop harm from spreading further.
Platforms may fail. Safeguards may lag. But early reporting and clear conversations at home remain one of the most effective ways to protect children online.
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Kurt’s key takeaways
The Grok scandal highlights a dangerous reality. As AI spreads faster, these systems amplify harm at an unprecedented scale. When safeguards fail, real people suffer, and children face serious risk. At the same time, trust cannot depend on apologies issued after harm occurs. Instead, companies must earn trust through strong safety design, constant monitoring and real accountability when problems emerge.
Should any AI system be approved for government or mass public use before it proves it can reliably protect children and prevent abuse? Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.
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