Back in May last year, I noticed the ROG Ally X handheld was not only in stock on JD.com, but the price was back to normal, and it even qualified for the national subsidy. Basically, a machine that originally cost over 6000 RMB ended up discounted by a little over 1000, so I got it for under 5000. The reason JD.com gives you is the “national subsidy,” but in reality you don’t need to bind any qualification for this subsidy—you just need your delivery address to be in Shanghai. A victory for the “Shanghai lords,” you could say. Naturally, I asked a fellow townsman bigshot in Shanghai to receive and buy it for me, and successfully got my hands on this handheld. A lot of people probably want to know: I’m a SteamDeck shill, so why did I buy ASUS’s handheld? How should you choose between it and the SteamDeck? I think I can explain it briefly with these points: It’s a Windows handheld, so it can play Windows-exclusive games (Galgame) It’s the only Windows handheld I know of that’s continuously optimizing power efficiency It’s the best Windows handheld I know of when it comes to self-made power control software At the time (2025), it had the largest battery capacity among Windows handhelds Some might bring up the ROG Ally + big battery mod, which has basically the same performance, but the biggest difference with the ROG Ally X is its 24GB of native RAM. The change that big memory brings is that you can allocate a large amount of VRAM to games, especially those poorly optimized ones that all need lots of VRAM. And from my observation, the root cause of stuttering when the SteamDeck runs those badly optimized games is often insufficient memory, and the ROG Ally X can clearly improve that.