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The Asus ROG Xbox Ally X is perhaps costly, nevertheless it’s an actual delight to make use of and for that cause many is perhaps trying in the direction of it for his or her subsequent handheld gaming PC. One blocker to that is perhaps hesitation over the brand new bespoke model of Windows operating on the hand held. However, it seems the hand held can run Bazzite—a Linux OS extraordinarily much like SteamOS—and doing so really improves efficiency.
The finish result’s an ROG Xbox Ally X that appears to supply a greater handheld gaming expertise, although solely within the video games that really work on Linux, in fact. Bazzite is not SteamOS, nevertheless it runs Steam’s Big Picture Mode on prime of a customized Fedora Linux distribution, and appears and runs primarily the identical as SteamOS, with some additional choices and so forth.
That in itself is a degree in its favour, by my books, as a result of SteamOS may be very easy to make use of—it is one of many causes I price the Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS so highly. You also get performance improvements that are nice to have with a handheld, such as with sleep/wake functionality.
Our Dave found for his ROG Xbox Ally X review that the handheld does better than other regular Windows handhelds with sleep and resume thanks to this bespoke version of Windows. But, if judging from Cyber Dopamine’s comparison, it doesn’t come close to the speed and ease of sleeping and waking the handheld in Bazzite.
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And then we come to the actual gaming performance. While Microsoft has taken steps to debloat the background processes in the new version of Windows for its ‘Xbox full screen experience’, it’s still Windows, and it looks like that means it’s still more resource-intensive than Linux. That’s because in Cyber Dopamine’s quick and dirty frame rate tests, the handheld performed much better in Bazzite.
This, crucially, looks to be the case at around the 17 W TDP mark. I say ‘crucially’ because this is not only the kind of TDP that many gamers will be looking to run the handheld at to get a good balance between battery life and performance, but also because it’s the kind of wattage that the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip on the coronary heart of the hand held is most spectacular at, providing the largest bounce over the Z1 Extreme at this sort of average wattage.
The YouTuber discovered switching over to Bazzite elevated fps from 47 to 62 (+32%) at this wattage in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and from 50 to 62 (+24%) in Hogwarts Legacy. There was little significant distinction at 13 W and at 35 W. They additionally discovered that body charges appeared to be extra constant and steady on Bazzite, although I suppose there’s an opportunity this may very well be because of the completely different body recording applications on the 2 completely different working programs.
These are in fact simply two video games which were examined, and the testing is not essentially the most scientific or rigorous. But the distinction is definitely sufficiently big at 17 W to be greater than random variation.
There are nonetheless good the explanation why you may wish to maintain Windows put in on the hand held regardless, in fact. Linux nonetheless does not provide wherever close to the identical breadth of recreation help as Windows, and ditto another apps.
The excellent news right here, although, and the icing on the cake, is that you do not have to select and select. Cyber Dopamine has received the 2 working programs twin booted, and that appears to work simply high-quality: they simply choose which one as well into at startup. Though there’s at all times some danger of issues going unsuitable when twin booting, so strive at your individual danger.
Best handheld PC 2025
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