It took them long enough, but Microsoft has finally confirmed the pricing for the ROG Xbox Ally X and ROG Xbox Ally, just a few weeks ahead of the handheld’s launch on 16th October.
The two models are priced as follows:
- ROG Xbox Ally X: Available for $999.99, €899.99, and £799.99
- ROG Xbox Ally: Available for $599.99, €599.99 and £499.99
That’s some slightly muddled pricing, no doubt thanks to the very muddled situation with imports and tariffs in the US right now. What’s quite baffling is that while the base model equates $1 to €1, the higher-powered Ally X makes $1 equal to €0.90. Pricing hardware between regions is difficult at the best of times, but this definitely makes the base Ally a bit less appealing in Europe.
The ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X have been developed in partnership between Xbox and Asus, a successor to Asus’ first effort, the 2023 ROG Ally, but with a newer chipset, Xbox branding, and with Microsoft building bespoke gaming features into Windows 11 for this and other PC gaming handhelds.
Sharing the same form factor with proper handgrips and a 7″ 1080p screen, there’s internal difference, but they’ve got some pretty impressive specs under the hood. Both have AMD processors, with the Xbox Ally toting an AMD Ryzen Z2 A Processor, which combines Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2 GPU architecture with 16GB of RAM and a 512GD SSD. The Xbox Ally X meanwhile has a Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor which leaps ahead to newer architectures with three Zen 5 cores and five more lower-powered Zen 5c cores, paired with RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture, a massive 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
The ROG Xbox Ally has architectural basis similar to the Xbox Series X|S consoles, but with different CPU and GPU core counts roughly half of what is found in the Series S. The Ryzen Z2 A is actually using older architecture than the outgoing Ryzen Z1 (which was used in the original ROG Ally), though with a different balance in core counts such that the GPU should be better. The Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme of the ROG Xbox Ally X is also rebalanced in core configuration versus the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, but crucially has both a neural engine that could be used for FSR upscaling, and more GPU compute units for improved baseline graphics performance.
All of which is to say, we eagerly await benchmarks and comparisons to see how these two consoles compare, both to each other, to other handhelds, and to Series S.
Source: Xbox
