Asus ROG Ally Z1 Extreme Review - Gaming handheld with 120 Hz display and AMD Zen4

You can even attach the XG Mobile external graphics card to the ROG Ally handheld, so you can combine the Ally with the GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop at home. Our XG Mobile sample did not arrive on time, but we will add gaming benchmarks with the 4090 in a couple of days. The combination should work very well when you use the Turbo mode since the CPU performance is not much worse compared to the recently reviewed ROG Zephyrus G14 (more on that later).

Update May 16th: We have performed synthetic and gaming benchmarks with the ROG Ally and the 2023 Asus XG Mobile, which is equipped with the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop. The results are available in the GPU section.

The ROG Ally uses a white plastic chassis with different design elements. The surfaces at the grips are textured for better grip (stripes at the front, triangle pattern at the back). This works well and the Ally is very comfortable to hold. Compared to the Steam Deck, the Ally is much more compact and denser since the weight is comparable. However, the grips on the Steam Deck are thicker, which is better for ergonomics. The chassis quality is comparable on both units.

The build quality of the ROG Ally is very good and you cannot twist or dent the case. We were not able to provoke creaking sounds on our review unit, either. There is no built-in kickstand, which can be a problem. There is a little white stand (made of cardboard) including ROG lettering, which is functional and looks good.

We like the overall design and the black buttons as well as the black bezels create a nice contrast. Fans of Aura Sync technology will be happy about the illuminated circles around the thumb sticks.

The ROG Ally is noticeably more compact compared to the Steam Deck, even though both weigh pretty much the same at little more than 600 grams. The GPD Win 4 on the other hand is even smaller with its 6-inch screen. Asus ships the ROG Ally with a 65W power adapter.

You are very limited in terms of ports since there is only a single USB-C port or the connector for the XG Mobile eGPU, respectively. This means you have to remove the power adapter when you want to attach an external hard drive, for example. Asus did not include USB 4.0, but the lack of an additional port at the bottom (for a simple docking station) was a bigger issue in practice. There is no webcam, but the power button features a fingerprint scanner. It takes a bit longer to set-up due to the small surface area, but it works flawlessly once the fingerprint is registered.

The USB-C port supports video output via DisplayPort and we had no problems to use the ROG Ally connected to our Eizo 2795 screen via USB-C including USB hub, so we could use the input devices, network connection and connected speakers of the screen. Even though this is definitely no the primary use case, the ROG Ally pretty much works like every other laptop with Windows 11 and can also be used for productive workloads.

The microSD card reader at the top is much faster compared to the Steam Deck and the GPD Win 4. We managed transfer rates of more than 260 MB/s in combination with our reference card (Angelbird AV Pro V60), which means you can also store games on fast microSD cards. 

Asus equips the ROG Ally with the current MT9722 Wi-Fi module from RealTek, which supports Bluetooth 5.2 as well as the latest Wi-Fi 6E standard. During our test, we could not connect to the corresponding 6 GHz network of our reference router from Asus, but the 5 GHz performance was impressive with fast and stable transfer rates and the Ally does not have to hide behind full-size laptops. This is good news if you want to use streaming services for games like Xbox Game Pass.

We already mentioned that the box includes a small cardboard stand, but Asus offers additional accessories like protective cases or headsets. There is also the external graphics card XG Mobile with the GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop, even though this is a very costly investment at 2500 Euros.

Then there are four smaller buttons along the screen, one of which open the extremely handy Command Center. Asus also implemented two macro buttons at the rear, which act as kind of Fn keys and allow quick actions with other keys like launching the on-screen keyboard, task manager or taking a screenshot. There is definitely a learning curve here, but even the standard Windows control works well once you are used to it.

The Asus software includes a very handy real-time monitoring tool, which shows CPU & GPU load, the current fps number and also the current power consumption on battery power, which can be extremely useful. Our review unit was still shipped with a preview version of the Armoury Crate SE software, and final retail units with get some small improvements (like the actual TDP values for the power modes). You also get a 90-day free trial of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which worked very well during our review (even though it mainly depends on your network connection).

You can quickly change the power mode via Command Center, which is obviously also possible via Armoury Crate software. There is even a manual mode where you can adjust the TDP values for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. We performed the following benchmarks and measurements with the Turbo power mode, because it is the only way to get the maximum power. The Performance power mode is already noticeably slower during gaming, which can often be the difference between smooth gameplay and stutters in modern games considering the limited iGPU performance. We listed the TDP values of the different power modes in the following table:

We also repeated all of our gaming benchmarks with the Performance power mode, so you can directly compare the results. The TDP on battery power is a bit lower, but our gaming results were only1-2 fps slower. The Quiet power mode is not suited for gaming since the performance is just too low.

Asus did not cheap out in terms of CPU and equips the ROG Ally with the brand-new AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which is effectively the new Ryzen 7 7840U. We are still waiting for corresponding laptop models, but the compact gaming handheld already gives us the chance to check the performance of AMD’s latest U-series mobile processor.

The Ryzen Z1 Extreme uses eight Zen4 cores and is manufactured in a modern 4 nm process. It can execute up to 16 threads simultaneously and the maximum clock is 5.1 GHz. We were quite surprised by the benchmark results, because the CPU performance is excellent considering the small chassis dimensions. The Z1 Extreme can consume up to 53 Watts in Turbo mode for a brief period during the first CB R15 run, then levels off at around 40 Watts for a couple of minutes an eventually drops to around 30 Watts at the end of our loop. At 40 Watts, the Z1 Extreme wipes the floor with the with the current Raptor Lake Core i7-1360P running at 38W (Lenovo Yoga 9 14) in the multi-core benchmarks. It is even much faster at 30 Watts and there is also a noticeable advantage over the old Ryzen 7 6800U. The new Ryzen 9 7940HS (65 Watts) is the only chip in our comparison group with better multi-core performance (but not by much).

AMD managed to improve the single-core performance of the new Zen4 chips noticeable (around 20 % faster than Ryzen 7 6800U). Intel still has an advantage in this respect with their performance cores, but the gap is not that big anymore. More CPU benchmarks are available in our tech section.

The system performance is very good, which is hardly surprising considering the powerful components. The performance advantage over the Steam Deck is very noticeable and the ROG Ally is much snappier and faster in every situation. Our synthetic benchmark scores are also excellent and we did not notice any issues during our review period.

The compact M.2-2230 SSD is attached via PCIe 4.0 and reaches a maximum transfer rate of 4.5 GB/s according to Asus. Our review unit is equipped with the 512 GB version of the Micron 2400, and you can use 428 GB for your own files after the initial setup. Our benchmarks show maximum transfer rates of more than 4.2 GB/s and the overall performance is good, even though there are larger M.2-2280 drives with higher transfer rates on the market. We notice some small performance drops after a couple of minutes of sustained workloads, but this is not noticeable in practice. More SSD benchmarks are listed here.