If you purchased an Asus ROG Xbox Ally X handheld when it launched, I wouldn’t have blamed you. In my own review, I called it “the definitive Windows handheld to buy”, and at the moment, I still stand by that verdict – it remains an excellent choice.
However, Asus has just announced the new ROG Xbox Ally X20 at Computex 2026, and if you’re an Xbox Ally X owner, you might want to look away now.
So what is the ROG Xbox Ally X20, exactly? On paper, it’s a special edition (and presumably limited run) handheld built to celebrate 20 years of Asus’ ROG gaming brand. As part of the celebration, Asus has leaned hard into the anniversary angle.
The translucent black chassis with its gold accents is genuinely striking in person, and I think the renders the brand has provided rarely do it justice. It fits neatly into the aesthetic language Asus is using across its 20th anniversary lineup — the special editions of the Azoth Extreme and Harpe Ace Extreme share the same translucent, gold-accented design language, and as a collector’s piece, it’s one of the more visually arresting handhelds I’ve seen.
If it were just a cosmetic upgrade built to celebrate the 20th anniversary of ROG, I wouldn’t have had an issue, but Asus has made some noteworthy improvements to this new model to take it above the ROG Xbox Ally X, which has barely been out for seven months.
Its headline upgrade is ironically one that Asus had said it didn’t put in the original model, owing to the potential sacrifice of VRR – an OLED screen. It’s a slightly larger 7.4-inch 1080p screen complete with up to 1400 nits of peak brightness in HDR (600 nits in SDR), Dolby Vision HDR, and a 120Hz refresh rate, delivering noticeably richer contrast and colour over the standard LCD, plus being in the same chassis means noticeably smaller bezels and a more modern look overall. With AMD FreeSync Premium Pro support, it retains strong variable refresh rate credentials, too.
In my quick hands-on on the busy show floor, which is never the most controlled environment for display evaluation, I felt it to be noticeably poppier than the LCD panel on the original. That’s not to say the original LCD was a bad panel, because it wasn’t – it had good SDR peak brightness, decent depth and solid colours, but an OLED just takes it to the next level. First impressions are certainly encouraging.
The other headline addition is TMR joystick technology, which Asus claims offers more precision than Hall effect sensors – though that’s difficult to evaluate meaningfully in a busy Computex demo, of course. Nonetheless, we’ve seen TMR-based controllers make their way onto the market in recent times, including Valve’s new Steam Controller, and it’s a noticeable improvement over the original model’s standard analog sticks, bringing more precision and eliminating the horrible issue of stick drift in one fell swoop.
It is technically possible to upgrade an existing ROG Xbox Ally X with Hall effect joysticks from third-party providers, but it’s up to you whether you want to open the device to change them over. Ironically, the sticks Asus has opted for come from GuliKit, one of the third-party firms offering replacement sticks for the original Xbox Ally X, and other gaming handhelds.
There are other, albeit smaller, optimisations, too. Asus has made tweaks to the buttons by making them sit closer to the chassis when you push them down, and optimised the bumper buttons with a longer, but quieter travel. Haptic feedback has been further optimised, alongside redesigned fans that channel more fresh air through the chassis to bring temps down. Asus has also upgraded the D-Pad so that it can be used as both an eight-way and a four-way controllable input by dropping the corners, and has even changed the old MicroSD card slot to a much faster MicroSD Express slot, the same as the Nintendo Switch 2 has. It proves that numerous little changes add up to an awful lot.
The fact is that this is the handheld Asus and Microsoft should have brought to the table in the first place. The lack of an OLED screen was one of my small pain points with the original model, and to see Asus bring it to a special edition alongside TMR joysticks and its numerous other optimisations signals to me that Asus felt it could have done better in the first instance. To me, this is as close to an Asus ROG Xbox Ally X 2 as we’re going to get, especially as the rest of the admittedly powerful internals haven’t changed – the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme SoC, 24GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 1TB SSD and capacious 80Whr battery are all retained.
Of all these changes, the OLED omission is the most maddening to me, especially as at the time of launch, Asus argued that OLED and VRR couldn’t coexist on the ROG Xbox Ally X without compromise. The X20, with its FreeSync Premium Pro-equipped OLED panel, suggests that the argument was either overstated or it has been quietly solved in the seven months since. If it’s been solved in that time, that’s fantastic, but it’s a little bit of a misstep considering the type of device this is likely to be.
With this in mind, it’s more of a slap in the face to both existing owners and those who might have wanted to purchase the X20 that it’s likely a limited edition device, and you’ll only be able to purchase it in a bundle with Asus and XReal’s ROG R1 AR glasses.
Admittedly, the glasses are very cool, using Micro OLED displays to project a potential 171-inch 240Hz screen in front of your eyes, connecting to host devices via a simple USB-C cable and offering even more desktop connectivity with the docking station they come with.
However, the glasses themselves cost £749/$849, meaning they carry a premium price tag on their own. The standard ROG Xbox Ally X is £899.99/$999.99, and there’s likely to be an added premium for this new model, owing to the upgrades, special edition tax, and the ongoing memory crisis that’s pushed the price up of lots of other handhelds as manufacturers attempt to deal with horribly rising costs. Perhaps the bundle decision is to help cushion the blow of the handheld’s likely higher price, although it’s still a mighty shame it won’t be available separately.
So, where does that leave the ROG Xbox Ally X20? I’d wager it’s simultaneously the most exciting yet most frustrating handheld announcement of Computex 2026. Exciting because it proves the platform has more headroom than the original suggested. Frustrating because it took a 20th anniversary celebration to get there, and even then, it arrives as a bundle most people can’t justify.
With such a potentially high price tag, the X20 is less a product and more a collector’s item, which is a shame. Meanwhile, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 has been offering an OLED screen and comparable specs for some time now, and Intel’s Arc G3 Extreme entry is arriving with genuine handheld ambitions with beefy performance promises that could shake up the market further still. The tragedy of all of this is that the people who would appreciate it most are the ones who already spent their money on the device it should have replaced.
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