The 4 Best Handheld Gaming Consoles of 2025
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The ROG Ally X performs better in games than any other handheld we’ve tested, the battery life is great, and it works with Xbox Game Pass and every other PC gaming service—but it’s expensive.
The Asus ROG Ally X is the best Windows-based gaming handheld you can buy right now. It delivers the best, most consistent frame rates in current video game releases of any gaming handheld we tested, and it has the best battery life, squeaking past the Steam Deck OLED in that regard. It also works with every gaming storefront on Windows, including Steam and the Epic Game Store (the home of Fortnite). In addition, it supports Xbox Game Pass and comes with a three-month subscription to the service. However, the display’s image quality isn’t as good as that of the Steam Deck OLED, the handheld is expensive, and the Armoury Crate software still has some kinks, though it has improved dramatically in the past year.
It plays games better than the competition. Asus’s ROG Ally X is the most technically capable handheld gaming console available from any major manufacturer. Although this model has the same AMD Ryzen Z1 processor as Asus’s older ROG Ally Extreme and Lenovo’s Legion Go, Asus has paired it with much more and faster RAM, in addition to redesigned cooling technology that allows the Ally X to run faster without overheating.
The result is a system that can hit slightly higher peak frame rates. But more importantly, the Ally X can maintain performance in demanding games such as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora; it was the only handheld we tested that was capable of running that game at playable frame rates. The Ally X also ran Starfield better than any handheld we tested, often hitting and staying at 60 frames per second—and even when it couldn’t manage more than 40 fps, its variable-refresh-rate screen ensured that gameplay remained smooth. Asus’s ROG Ally handhelds are the only models in our test group that support VRR, and we really wish more companies would adopt the feature.
The software is as close as Windows has come to a console-style interface. The Armoury Crate software on the Ally X has seen numerous minor updates and a couple of major revisions, and as of fall 2024 it remains well ahead of the Windows-based handheld competition in ease of use, performance, and useful features. You can activate the Armoury Crate software via two different buttons, each of which brings up a different overlay. A dedicated button on the right side summons the full Armoury UI, which presents you with a library of installed games as well as a secondary tab for different gaming storefronts. You’ll also find pages of settings to tweak to your preference, and a reasonably intuitive update page. It’s absolutely critical to the user experience on a handheld gaming console for the UI to provide a snappy response, and Armoury Crate handily beats similar offerings from MSI and Lenovo in this regard.
The ROG Ally X also provides an overlaid UI that allows you to change multiple settings on the fly, which is especially useful. Its primary use is to change the active power profile of the Ally X, which lets you throttle down the system for less demanding games in order to extend the battery life, but the panel offers plenty of other tools as well. You can force the analog sticks to work as a de facto mouse (which is more helpful than you might think), change the resolution of the screen, limit the refresh rate, force-close a window, trigger airplane mode, reduce brightness, or access numerous other helpful functions.
It has the best battery life of any handheld console we tested. The Ally X has an enormous 80-watt-hour battery, and although Windows simply isn’t quite as battery-efficient as SteamOS seems to be, the Ally X has slightly better battery life than even the impressive Steam Deck OLED. Playing Starfield in Turbo mode (the highest performance option) on an hour-long subway commute, I stepped off the train with approximately 70% battery remaining, and 40 minutes of Dragon Age: The Veilguard left my battery at just under 70%. It helps that Asus’s Armoury Crate overlay provides power-management options, including Silent, Performance, and the aforementioned Turbo, which help to throttle the Ally X’s processor and provide longer battery life for less demanding titles. The Ally X lasts four or five hours when playing smaller and less graphically intense games but only two or so hours when playing bigger releases.
It can sit in a bag for weeks without losing its charge. The software of the Ally X includes a hibernation mode to preserve its battery life that goes above and beyond what I’ve seen on almost every other device I’ve used in the past 10 years. I put the Ally X in my messenger bag, forgot about it for more than two weeks, turned it on, and found the battery at 94%. Although you aren’t likely to forget about the Ally X as long as I did, if you do, it will be waiting for you, still ready to play.
It works seamlessly with Game Pass. Xbox’s Game Pass subscription service is one of the best deals in gaming, and that’s especially true of PC Game Pass. Since the Ally X runs Windows 11, Game Pass just works, which is almost worth the price of admission alone. The Ally X is a fantastic Game Pass machine, and the service integrates fairly well with the Armoury Crate software. Asus also includes a three-month Game Pass subscription with the Ally X.
It’s quiet. The Ally X is the quietest gaming handheld we’ve tested. Although we don’t have an anechoic chamber to fully benchmark the Ally X’s acoustic profile, we have found that it’s noticeably quieter than rival handhelds such as the Lenovo Legion Go or even the Steam Deck OLED. Even under full load, it’s quiet enough that it shouldn’t bother someone sitting next to you on the couch.
It’s full of useful features that make for a better experience. The Ally X has a variety of seemingly minor features that add up to a generally better user experience in comparison with other Windows-based gaming handhelds. It has two USB-C ports, so it can charge and connect to two USB-C devices such as another controller or a monitor at the same time (and in a pinch, the Ally X becomes a fully capable mini-PC when you connect a display, mouse, and keyboard). Its power button includes a Windows Hello–compliant fingerprint reader, which has proven invaluable for secure log-ins and passkey support for websites and Chrome’s password manager. The audio quality is even pretty good.
It has an SD card slot for storage expansion, but notably it also includes a full-size, 2280 M.2 slot for its NVMe storage. If you want to upgrade its storage, its support for full-size desktop-style NVMe drives will allow you to more easily find cheaper, large-capacity options, in contrast to the smaller, 2230-size drives that other handhelds require.
The Ally X also includes a UEFI-based (think BIOS screen) network-recovery tool, which allows you to perform a hardware reset or even install a factory-standard OS on a newly installed NVMe drive without going through the trouble of downloading and installing Asus-approved software to a separate USB key.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
It’s expensive. The Asus ROG Ally X is currently the most expensive gaming handheld from a mainstream manufacturer that you can buy. Although you get what you pay for, including 1 TB of storage, you still pay significantly more for this model than you would for even the Steam Deck OLED. The Ally X has already seen some sales and discounts, but they rarely last for long.
It has an LCD screen rather than an OLED display. The Ally X’s variable-refresh-rate support is excellent, and the screen is bright with pretty good color levels, but I would have liked to see an OLED display with HDR support at this price.
Armoury Crate still isn’t as good as SteamOS. Asus has released a slew of impressive improvements to Armoury Crate over the course of the past year and a half, but the software is still subject to some occasional bugs and hiccups. When a gaming device is as expensive as the Ally X is, these moments stick out a little more than they otherwise might.
