Why the ROG Xbox Ally Is the Handheld to Buy Right Now

I paid £322 for a refurbished ROG Xbox Ally at the end of August. Two weeks earlier I had been idly pricing a Steam Deck OLED, in the way you do when you are not really in the market for anything. By the time I looked properly, the 512GB model had gone from £479 to £649. That is not a sale ending. That is an entire product category repricing itself in the space of a few months, and it has left one machine standing in a very strange position — the cheapest modern handheld gaming PC is now, by some distance, also the most sensible thing to buy.

The Market Repriced Itself

The 2026 memory crunch has done to gaming hardware what it has done to everything else built around a RAM chip. AI datacentre construction has absorbed an extraordinary share of global DRAM supply, DDR5 contract prices have roughly quadrupled over the past year, and manufacturers who spent 2024 and 2025 competing on price have spent 2026 quietly retreating from it.

Valve moved in May. The Steam Deck OLED went from £479 to £649 for the 512GB model, with the 1TB now at £779 — around 35% here, and 44 to 46% in the United States, where the two models jumped from $549 to $789 and from $649 to $949. Valve attributed the rise to “the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges”, which is the diplomatic phrasing. The cheapest LCD Deck was discontinued outright, surviving only through Valve’s own refurbished channel.

It sold out anyway. That is the detail worth pausing on, because it tells you what the market believes: demand did not flinch at a third more money, and nobody serious expects these prices to unwind. Asus has been moving the same way, with the ROG Xbox Ally X already taking increases in Australia and Japan and no particular reason to think other regions are exempt. Across the wider category — MSI’s Claw line, the retro handheld market, even microSD cards — 2026 has been a year of steady, unglamorous increases.

Against that backdrop, the base Ally spent much of the year being discounted, cleared and bundled with free Game Pass, because retailers wanted the stock gone. That has pushed a healthy supply of barely-used units into the refurbished market at precisely the moment everything around them became expensive. It is a mispricing, and mispricings close.

What £322 Actually Buys

The base ROG Xbox Ally launched in October 2025 at £499, alongside the £799 Ally X. Its specification is modest and it does no favours to pretend otherwise. The Ryzen Z2 A is a four-core, eight-thread Zen 2 part running to 3.8GHz, paired with eight RDNA 2 compute units, 16GB of LPDDR5-6400 and a 512GB SSD. Zen 2 in 2026 sounds damning until you remember that the Steam Deck runs an older implementation of the same architecture and has sustained a devoted following for four years.

What the money actually buys is a complete Windows PC with proper controller grips. Those grips deserve their own sentence, because they are the single best thing about the device. Asus borrowed the shape of an Xbox controller rather than defaulting to the flat slab that most handhelds settle for, and across a two-hour session it is the difference you notice most. At 670g the Ally is not light, but the weight sits where your hands already are.

The Games It Runs, and the Ones It Doesn’t

This is where handheld coverage tends to go soft, so let me be direct about it.

Indies, 2D games and anything from the last decade run flawlessly, and this is where the 120Hz panel earns its place. Hades, Dead Cells, Balatro, Hollow Knight, the entire accumulated debris of Steam sales past — all of it runs at native resolution without effort, and the battery lasts a proper evening. Mid-weight and slightly older AAA sits comfortably at 720p to 900p with upscaling, generally somewhere between 40 and 60fps depending on how much you are prepared to turn down.

Current heavyweight releases are possible rather than pleasant. Tom’s Hardware measured Resident Evil Requiem at 720p on low with FSR enabled running between 32 and 55fps, and a Metro Exodus stress test averaging a shade over 43fps. Playable, certainly. Not the experience you would want on a television. Battery under that kind of load runs to roughly two and a half hours at a 15W profile, though capping the frame rate at 30 or 40 stretches it considerably, and playing anything 2D means forgetting the battery exists at all.

If you buy this expecting an Ally X you will be disappointed, and the disappointment will be your own doing. The X has substantially more headroom and costs more than twice as much second-hand. The base model is a 720p machine that happens to have a 1080p screen, and if that sentence irritates you, this is not your handheld.

Thirty Years of Games in a Coat Pocket

For a great many buyers this is the entire argument, and it is curiously absent from most reviews.

The Ally handles everything up to and including the PlayStation 2 era without complaint, along with most of the GameCube and Wii libraries and a very large proportion of the PSP catalogue. That is three decades of games — the SNES and Mega Drive eras, the PS1 catalogue, the arcade years — running at higher resolutions and steadier frame rates than the original hardware ever managed, on something that fits in a coat pocket. PS3 and Switch emulation is where it runs out of road, and I would not buy it for that. But if what you actually want is the ability to play more or less anything made between 1990 and 2008 from the sofa, £322 buys a device that does it properly and does modern PC gaming as a bonus.

Why Windows, and Not SteamOS

I owned a Steam Deck for a while, about three years ago, and I sold it. SteamOS was not broken — it was fiddly. Every few games wanted a different Proton version, a launch flag, some community fix, twenty minutes of forum archaeology before I could play something for forty. I had wanted a console and had bought a hobby instead.

Valve has improved that situation considerably since, and it deserves the credit. But the Ally sidesteps the question altogether. It runs Windows, which means it runs everything: Steam, Game Pass, Epic, GOG, itch.io, your emulators, your launchers, and the game your friend insists on that only works through some obscure client nobody has thought about since 2019. There is no compatibility layer to reason about because there is no compatibility layer. The trade is that it is Windows, with all that implies — of which more below — but for anyone whose library is scattered across four storefronts it is not a close decision.

The subscription arithmetic helps. PC Game Pass came down to £10.99 a month in April, reversing last year’s increase. Whether that represents value depends entirely on how much you play, but for a device you pick up two or three evenings a week, one subscription covering the rotation is considerably easier to justify than buying titles at £60.

Buying One Refurbished

Mine came from Argos’s eBay outlet, listed as “Very Good”, for £322 — screen protector already applied, case, original box and charger included. It had been used perhaps twice.

Grading is not standardised across sellers, but it is broadly consistent. “Excellent” or “Pristine” means no visible marks; “Very Good” means light cosmetic wear you will struggle to locate; “Good” means visible scuffs. On a device that spends its life in a case, “Very Good” is usually where the value sits. Buy from a retailer’s own outlet wherever possible — Argos, Currys, Amazon Renewed and the manufacturer refurbishment channels all carry genuine warranties, typically twelve months, where a private seller carries none and the saving rarely justifies the exposure. Distance selling rules give you fourteen days as a minimum and most large retailers extend that to thirty.

Use that window properly. Within the first day, check both analogue sticks for drift by leaving the device on a menu and watching the cursor, run the triggers through their full travel, examine the screen on plain white and plain black backgrounds for dead pixels and backlight bleed, listen to the fan under load, and verify the reported battery capacity is somewhere near its 60Wh rating after an hour of something demanding. If anything is wrong, send it back. There is plenty of stock.

Where It Falls Short

Sleep and wake remain unreliable, and this is the Ally’s most-reported flaw for good reason. Sometimes it resumes instantly; sometimes it does not resume at all. It is the single most console-like behaviour a handheld needs to get right, and months after launch Asus has not got it right.

It is also, unavoidably, Windows. The Xbox full-screen experience is a real improvement over raw Windows 11 on a seven-inch display, but you will still meet the desktop, and you will still meet a dialogue box designed for a mouse. Budget an afternoon for setup and approach it in the right spirit. The IPS panel, meanwhile, looks flat beside a Deck OLED — on its own terms it is perfectly good, bright and sharp and fast, but it is the clearest place the money was saved. And it is worth saying plainly that performance is only a modest step beyond a three-year-old Steam Deck OLED. If you already own one of those, this is not an upgrade and I will not pretend it is.

The Ally X Question

Asus sells two versions of this machine, and the gap between them is wider than the badge suggests. The Ally X carries a considerably stronger processor, more memory and a larger battery, and it launched at £799 against the base model’s £499. Second-hand it commands well over £600, and it has already taken price rises in two markets.

For the Men of Means reader the calculation is a familiar one. If you intend to play current AAA releases as your primary use — if the handheld is replacing a gaming PC rather than supplementing one — the X is the machine that does it and the premium is defensible. If the handheld is for indies, back catalogue, emulation and the occasional bigger title on a train, the base model does all of that for less than half the outlay. Most people buying a handheld in 2026 fall firmly into the second group, whatever they tell themselves at the point of purchase.

The Wider Point

There is a lesson here that outlasts this particular device. New hardware is inflating across the board — handhelds, phones, graphics cards, laptops, anything with memory inside it. The refurbished and second-hand market is the only part of consumer technology still moving the other way, because it is supplied by last year’s stock rather than this year’s component prices. A twelve-month-old device carrying a retailer’s warranty is currently the best value in the shop, and the gap is widening rather than closing. The Ally is simply the clearest present example: a machine that was fairly priced at £499, is genuinely good at £322, and has spent the year standing still while its rivals became a third more expensive.

The Verdict

At £499 the base ROG Xbox Ally was a reasonable proposition in a competitive field, and a good many people would have thought about it and bought the Deck instead. At £300 to £330 refurbished, against a Steam Deck OLED at £649 and an Ally X beyond £800, it is not really a contest. You are getting a full Windows PC, the most comfortable grips in the category, three decades of emulation, every storefront you already own games on and a 120Hz screen, for less than half the price of the machine most people would name first.

Buy it if you play a broad mix of things casually, if your library is spread across several launchers, if emulation matters to you, or if you simply want the most capable handheld available for around £320. Do not buy it if you want this year’s biggest releases at high settings, if you want a device that behaves like a console the instant you press the button, or if you already own a Steam Deck OLED.

The window will not stay open indefinitely. Refurbished supply exists because retailers cleared new stock earlier in the year, and that supply is finite. When it is gone, the cheapest reasonable handheld in Britain will cost £649.

Prices correct as of 31 August 2026. This market is moving quickly — check current pricing before buying.