My Xbox Ally X testing shows why gaming laptops suck, and why Intel x Nvidia CPUs are such a big deal

Gaming laptops have always kind of sucked. They make for a huge compromise between portability, power, and battery life, with one or other of these factors nearly always coming up short, even if the latest models are getting ever closer to balancing all three. However, this has seldom been highlighted more clearly than with the arrival of gaming handhelds such as the Xbox Ally X.

Sure, the Asus Xbox Ally X is far from the first gaming handheld, nor even the best gaming handheld for most - the Steam Deck OLED still holds that crown - but writing my Asus ROG Xbox Ally X review alongside testing the Razer Blade 14 gaming laptop over the last week or two has really brought home just where gaming laptops are coming up short, and where they still far outperform gaming handhelds too.

The most obvious area where laptops can learn from handhelds is battery life. In my battery benchmarks for the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, it delivered just under three hours of game time in the PCMark 10 gaming test, which may not sound all that impressive, but it's over an hour longer than any gaming laptop we've tested under the same conditions (you can get longer life from both by tweaking certain settings, but this is our standardized test), and is nearly triple what most laptops manage.

Now, clearly, the big caveat here is that the Razer Blade 14 has a far faster GPU than even the most powerful gaming handhelds - as do most gaming laptops. The Blade 14's RTX 5070 GPU is rated to draw over 100W of power, and it can deliver a 97fps average at 1080p with Ultra detail settings in Cyberpunk 2077. The Xbox Ally X's Radeon 890M GPU, meanwhile, tops out at 35W and can only achieve 49fps at 1080p with medium detail settings, while also needing to rely on FSR upscaling (set to balanced), which drastically reduces the initial render resolution.

As such, with a similarly powerful GPU, you'd expect a gaming laptop to be far more competitive. However, the problem here isn't just gaming battery life, but non-gaming battery use too.

In general desktop tasks, as measured by PCMark 10's Office battery life test, the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X lasted a ridiculous 17 hours and nine minutes. The best result we've had from a gaming laptop in the same test is eight hours and 28 minutes, which was achieved by the truly excellent Razer Blade 16. The smaller Razer Blade 14 (review coming very soon btw) lasted just four hours and 24 minutes.

Some of this specific concern is to do with this style of laptop. The Razer Blade 14 is incredibly thin and light for a laptop that also contains a powerful, separate GPU alongside its 10-core CPU. In fact, to allow for this compactness, it has a much smaller battery than the Xbox Ally X, at just 61.6Wh compared to 80Wh - it's no wonder its battery life suffers. However, plenty of much bigger, chunkier gaming laptops (that admittedly have even more powerful GPUs) still only have modestly sized batteries. Some of this could be down to restrictions on taking larger batteries on flights, but many laptops don't max out the 160Wh limit.

In the case of the Blade 14, what would really elevate the overall experience of this laptop would just be for Razer to add a little extra thickness and another 100g-200g or so of weight to pack a 80-100Wh battery into this machine and double its battery life. Gaming handhelds have shown that people don't mind carting around a fairly bulky dedicated gaming device, if it actually gets them good performance, and a chonkster version of the Blade 14 would be an absolute winner in my eyes. It's not a problem exclusive to Razer either. The similar Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025) had terrible battery life too.

The other big factor that really elevates gaming handhelds above most gaming laptops right now is that most of the latter use separate GPUs, whereas handhelds use integrated graphics. Inside the Xbox Ally X is the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme CPU, which houses a Radeon 890M GPU. Meanwhile, inside the Razer Blade 14 is an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU with a Radeon 880M integrated GPU and a separate Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 laptop GPU. This combination allows the Blade 14 - and other gaming laptops - to unleash far higher levels of game-processing power, as demonstrated in the game benchmarks mentioned above.

However, to get both the power of a dedicated GPU while trying to maximize battery life, these gaming laptops switch from their second GPU to the integrated GPU, and it's in this process that the usability of these laptops leaves a lot to be desired.

Windows takes care of the switching automatically, so when you load a game, the right GPU is used, but this switch causes a prolonged pause while you wait for your system to respond, with the screen often going blank. Switching can also cause some programs to complain, cause windows to resize, and just generally mess with what you're doing.

Meanwhile, if you use apps such as Photoshop, which can benefit from GPU acceleration, or there are certain games that don't need the power of the second GPU and can run fine on the integrated graphics, you have to manually sort through all these instances to tell your system which GPU to use for which apps. In contrast, with a single integrated GPU, it all just works.

There are obviously many other factors that mean gaming laptops still have their place, thanks to much larger screens, fantastic performance, and the general usefulness of including a keyboard and trackpad. Some of their limitations are also software-based - the Xbox Ally X's optimized version of Windows helps battery life. It's just that, as pure portable gaming machines, they ultimately can lack a little something.

All this is why the Intel x Nvidia deal that will soon see Intel CPUs being kitted out with integrated Nvidia graphics is such a big deal. Not only will it mean Intel will have integrated GPUs that actually compete for performance with AMD's ones - there's a reason AMD chips power the latest Xbox and PlayStation, and most gaming handhelds - but it means we could finally see gaming laptops being able to do away with the awkward GPU switching tech.

Not that creating such powerful chips is easy. AMD already has its own super-powerful integrated GPU chip, in the shape of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 390 Max (codenamed Strix Halo) that powers the Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025). This incredibly powerful chip can churn out 50fps+ in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with high detail settings. However, there are precious few devices around that actually use this chip, which hints at the difficulty and cost of making them.

Still, if we're set to see a big fight between AMD and Intel/Nvidia to create ever more powerful integrated GPUs that can power the next generation of gaming laptops and gaming handhelds, the future is looking bright for both formats. Just let's include some bigger batteries on those laptops next time, yeah?

For our current recommendations for both gaming handhelds and laptops, check out our best gaming laptop guide and best gaming handheld guide, which include a wide range of devices from budget to big budget.