Asus Xbox Ally X can now fine-tune performance and battery life balance

Portable handheld PC gaming is all the rage right now. But these little machines have some big limits, which means users need to carefully manage both their expectations and their hardware. For example, one popular tweak for the Steam Deck is to undervolt its CPU to give it better battery life. To that end, Asus is enabling finer user control on the new ROG Xbox Ally X with its latest software update.

The new update to the Armoury Crate driver management program adds the option to tweak the P-core and E-core settings for the flagship of the Ally line. For the unfamiliar, we’re talking about Performance cores and Efficiency cores in the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme CPU. Unlike some earlier iterations of AMD’s highly customized laptop processors with integrated graphics, the Z2 Extreme has three Zen 5 performance cores and five efficiency cores, the former used for high-intensity 3D games and the latter used for more mundane background tasks.

As Tom’s Hardware explains, the expanded settings should allow Xbox Ally X owners to more carefully target either better game performance or better battery life, a careful balancing act for any handheld. Sadly, the P-core/E-core split is exclusive to the Z2 Extreme chip, so the less powerful (white) Xbox Ally and the older ROG Ally designs don’t get access to this feature. That being said, there’s nothing stopping competitors like Lenovo from adding it to other Z2 Extreme handhelds, like the competing Legion Go 2.

Other members of the Ally family are getting tweaks, including an “improved gyro aiming algorithm” and a new 40 FPS limiter option, also aimed at balancing power and battery life. You can see the full list of changes, and which models they apply to, on the Asus ROG forum.