Recently, we had a chance to play around with the Asus ROG Ally, which is one of the best handheld gaming PCs at the moment. The device is part of Asus’ Republic of Gamers line of products. Since it has Windows 11 — unlike the Linux-based SteamOS on Steam Deck — there is a wide range of possibilities, playing games from Steam to the Epic Game Store to Xbox Game Pass.
With the review unit, Asus had sent ROG XG Mobile external GPU, which deserves a closer look. You can pair it with Asus devices that come with the XG Mobile port, like on Asus ROG Flow Z13 laptop or ROG Ally.
The Ally runs full HD at 120Hz and a closer look at its specs reveals quite a power monster. You get the machine with the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme with 512 gigabytes of PCIe Gen 4 SSD storage. So that’s eight cores and 16 threads. Making things even better is the 16 gigabytes of 6,400 megahertz, LPDDR5 RAM, and you can also expand the storage via the micro SD card slot on the top.
There are plenty of ports on the ROG XG Mobile dock The Telegraph
The brain of the ROG Ally is powerful. In the Cinebench R23 test, at 30W mode the ROG Ally scores around 1,800 points in single-core and around 15,000 in multi-core. This places the portable processor in the same performance category as the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. But here we’re talking about 30W consumption, compared to the 100-plus on the desktop processor. The processor in the ROG Ally has just about everything it needs to handle gaming.
The only major hurdle in the way of high frames per second is the graphics card. The solution integrated into this chip is the Radeon 780M. Just imagine how this configuration can perform with something like an RTX 3080 instead of the integrated Radeon or even better, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.
At the top of the Ally, next to the USB port, there's another connector. That's the interface for the ROG XG Mobile. Through it, you can connect an external graphics card. It's not the first time we've seen something like this but Asus is giving the device a push among gamers.
The 2023 version of ROG XG Mobile comes with a single graphics solution — NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. If you want a powerful graphics card for your portable console, the ROG XG Mobile is an option to consider. It’s a small package weighing only 1.3 kg and doubles as a dock for the ROG Ally.
Through the proprietary connection, a box like this not only attaches a video card to the console or laptop, but it also considerably increases its connectivity. The XG Mobile module adds HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4, a 2.5G Ethernet port for high-speed wired connection, four USB 3.2 Gen2 ports, one of which is Type-C, and an SD card reader. Once you've connected an ROG XG Mobile module to a console like this, you've turned it into a full-fledged PC.
Now take a 4K resolution, 120Hz refresh rate gaming OLED monitor. Connect it to the ROG XG Mobile. Connect the console to the module, add a mouse and keyboard. You don't need to worry about battery because the XG Mobile also serves as a charger for the Ally.
There is a special connector that comes with the ROG XG Mobile The Telegraph
The connection is simple: plug the brick with the video card into the socket, connect it to the XG Mobile interface on the ROG Ally, pull the button down to lock the cable in place and that's it. A few taps in Armoury Crate are required to get things going.
It’s expensive. But it remains an interesting option if you want to create an ecosystem with a ROG Flow laptop, a console like Ally, and a video card dock that you can connect to both devices. Playing Forza Horizon 5 on the Ally you may get around 57 frames per second but on adding the ROG XG Mobile accessory, the frame rate can go up to 122, which is a big jump.
With such a setup, you can easily connect to a TV, link a wireless controller and you can even get a 4K gaming console. The manufacturer probably saw an opportunity to develop an external video card module like ROG XG Mobile external GPU (RTX 4090-16GB is priced at Rs 201,990) a long time ago, and now it's reaping the rewards.
