I just had time to play with the ROG Ally X at Asus HQ in Taiwan - just a moment before the handheld could be pre-ordered with the pre799.

The new handheld gaming PC, which is more of a mid—generation upgrade than something new overall, contains a number of significant improvements, including RAM, back

The biggest and best upgrade of the lot is the improved battery size:ROG Ally X has an 80wh battery. - It is 40wh times that of ROG Ally.

"What's crazy is that we did it without significantly increasing the weight or thickness of the device," said Whitson Gordon, senior Manager of product marketing at Asus HQ

The new ROG Ally X weighs between 678 grams and 70 grams more than the original Ally. But it is not a noticeably heavier device. While fiddling with the camera's settings, I easily shifted the device from one hand to another, but how it feels to play the game in the long run is something I think Tess

"We were able to offset that number of interesting things and left the weight distribution really centered," Gordon says.

The chassis is a bit thicker for a larger battery, but I did not notice a lot of changes without the original allies in hand for comparison. It's hardly hefty. Some of the changes made to the device's shape were to improve its general comfort and feel, such as tilting the button or thumb in a more natural way.

I didn't get the chance to test the battery at the event — I don't think Asus or my fellow event go-ute were looking too kindly. For reference, ROG Ally's original test allowed PCMark's gaming benchmark to run for about 57 minutes before giving up.

The chips inside Ally X will remain the AMD Z1Extreme that was shipped with the original ROG Ally's top model, so the performance could remain pretty much the same. On the plus side, this means that the extra capacity will go towards longer battery life.

Ally X can now accommodate up to 2280 form factor SSDs — the same as you would expect to find in most desktop gaming PCs. This makes it easy to switch if you are trying to upgrade your storage.  However, if the handheld PC comes standard with 1TB2280SSD, there is almost no problem. The Ally X comes with 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM, which currently runs at 7500MT/s. That means there's more memory that can be split between CPU and GPU components than the 16GB original Ally, and it's faster to boot. It can be seen that some games and applications run a little better or at least don't run into many problems.

"16 [gigabytes] for systems and 8 [gigabytes] for VRAM, this is actually the most common configuration you'll see throughout the PC gaming space. And for a 1080p device it's going to be really nice.

Some other notable upgrades include a new, more efficient fan, a more durable thumbstick module, a new d-pad, two Type-C USB ports — one USB4 compatibility and the other USB3.2Gen2. The SD slot also moved, but I certainly didn't know where it moved. It's probably not because of ROG Ally's SD card slot problem, but it should be a handy excuse for Asus to fix things.

The entire lot costsド799. You can pre-order it now, but Ally X will start shipping towards the end of the 7th month. That's aboutル1 more than ROG Ally's original Zextreme edition, which costs aboutル100. 

There will also be a new official hard case and a universal charger, which will be sold separately to the device itself.

It's hard to say if I'm worth the extra dosh right now because I couldn't really test that significant improvement for longevity. The lack of a new processor is not, but at least, if it really goes very far beyond the original model, the battery life will be convincing.