When life gives you a new handheld gaming PC, you'll eventually want to connect it to a monitor and use it as a desktop. Sure, you might primarily use your handheld as the gods intended, and game on the go, but what about when you're at home? Sure, you can still use it in handheld mode, but it's a full PC — why not use it for more than just playing Hades II on your commute to work?

This is far from the first time I've connected a handheld gaming PC to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to turn it into a desktop or mini PC, and it certainly won't be the last. Based on my previous experience with the MSI Claw 7 AI+ and the Lenovo Legion Go 2, I was a bit concerned about how the Asus ROG Xbox Ally's limited hardware would hold up as a PC. But I was pleasantly surprised by how smooth it actually went.

ROG Xbox Ally desktop: The setup

How do you turn a handheld into a desktop?

Handheld gaming PCs are strange in that they don't quite fit in the desktop or laptop space, but somewhere in between. Like a laptop, a gaming handheld has a built-in display and runs on battery power, but like a desktop, it doesn't have a built-in keyboard and mouse. And unlike a tablet, handhelds run a full desktop OS, whether that's Windows or SteamOS. And you can use a handheld in place of a laptop or desktop with a bit of tweaking.

The biggest hurdle is connecting a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to the handheld, since most only have one or two USB-C ports. While you can run a monitor through USB-C, you'll need the second one to power the handheld (though a lot of USB-C monitors also support passthrough charging). Which means either using Bluetooth connections for your keyboard and mouse, or a hub or docking station to connect the keyboard, mouse, and monitor to a single USB-C port.

While I've reviewed a number of gaming handhelds and own one myself, I don't have a dock, so I went with the USB-C hub version for the ROG Xbox Ally desktop project. A docking station would look cleaner, and this project made me bump "handheld dock" up to the top of my purchase list. Regardless, once everything's plugged in, the handheld is now running as a stand-in desktop.

The only quirk with the Xbox Ally compared to other Windows-based handhelds is that the Xbox handhelds boot into the "Xbox Fullscreen Experience" by default, which doesn't always play well with a mouse and keyboard. But it's pretty easy to navigate back to the Windows desktop from there. You can also set up your Xbox Ally to boot straight to the Windows 11 desktop if you plan to use it as your main PC longterm.

ROG Xbox Ally desktop: Performance

How does the Xbox Ally hold up as a desktop PC?

Since the Xbox Ally is powered by the AMD Ryzen Z2 A APU, which features just 4 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores, and features just 16GB of system memory, I kept my expectations within reason. The Xbox Ally wasn't going to replace my gaming desktop anytime soon, but it could be a solid stand-in as a general productivity machine.

Rather than use the Xbox Fullscreen Experience, I spent a few days doing my work on the Xbox Ally, which meant I was using the handheld with the full version of Windows 11. This is mainly because the Xbox Fullscreen Experience is designed for gaming and struggles to work with non-gaming applications.

While I could launch my web browser, have a few tabs open, and still keep my email inbox from freezing due to RAM limitations, anything extra was asking a bit too much of the limited 20W APU. Just opening GIMP was an absolute hassle as the APU essentially ground to a halt.

The Xbox Ally would have been significantly more useful as a desktop when running SteamOS or another version of Linux, but Windows 11 is a bloated operating system, and that's really where the hangups lie.

The Xbox Ally wasn't useless as a desktop, but it was very much a limited productivity machine, not a workhorse. Which is still better than I expected when I began this little experiment of mine.

Build reminders

If you decide to turn your Xbox Ally into a desktop, there are a few things you should know

Connecting a monitor, keyboard, and mouse won't cause much of a performance hit on the Xbox Ally, but using the full Windows 11 desktop experience can result in a 10-15% performance hit compared to the Xbox Fullscreen Experience. Though this is tricky to quantify, as a lot of tasks will take you out of the limited Xbox Fullscreen Experience in favor of the full Windows 11 desktop. And that includes just about anything you'd be using a desktop or mini-PC for outside of launching games from the Xbox app.

The Xbox Ally APU is also just a 4-core CPU and 8-core GPU processor, so you'll need to keep your performance expectations in line with the performance capacity of the Ryzen Z2 A. But as long as you don't expect 4K gaming performance, the ROG Xbox Ally is totally capable of replacing your main computer as a productivity PC or casual gaming rig.