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

Laptop PC gaming is all the rage right now. But these small machines have big limitations, requiring users to carefully manage their expectations and their hardware. For example, a popular modification for the Steam Deck is to power up its processor 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 Armory Crate driver management program update adds the ability to change P-core and E-core settings for the flagship Ally line. For those unfamiliar, we’re talking about performance cores and efficiency cores in the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor. Unlike some previous 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 gaming and the latter 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 gaming performance or better battery life, a careful balancing act for any handheld. Unfortunately, the P-core/E-core split is exclusive to the Z2 Extreme chip, so the less powerful Xbox Ally (white) and older ROG Ally models do not have 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 changes, including an “improved gyroscopic 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.