Hey guys, Taki here. Very rarely do I review a device that I end
up liking even more after my review is over, but that’s exactly where I
find myself with the ROG Ally. I’ve been using this every day for
the last two and half months and I can comfortably say that this is currently one
of my favorite handhelds that I’ve ever used. I like it so much that it is the first device
that I reach for when I have time to game. In this video, I want to talk about how I’ve
been using Ally, some of the new issues that I’ve faced, and why I like the device
enough to do this updated video on it. I want to first talk about how I got to this
point. I made my original video on the ROG Ally back on May 20th. At that point, I described a lot
of the strange issues that I had with my device, but I ultimately said that I enjoyed the device.
When I said that, I was mainly talking about the fact that I enjoyed using the device to make
that video, and that’s not something that is abnormal for me. There are a lot of handhelds that
I review that I enjoy using while I review them. I made another video on Ally vs. the Steam
Deck a few days after that, and then I made my final video on the device with the RTX
4090 XG Mobile on June 13th. At that point, I was pretty comfortable where I left things
and I had no further plans to make another video on the device unless there was
some drastic change to the product. Prior to the release of that RTX 4090 video, I had
been using Ally daily for a lot of things. Due to the fact that it has a 7000-series processor,
it was really useful for a lot of benchmarking that I needed to do with other hardware
that I was also reviewing for the channel. After the RTX video went live, I
didn’t have any other use for the device from a video-making standpoint,
or any other thing related to Youtube. This is usually the point where the
product would sit in a comfy spot in my studio until I need to use it in the
future, but the strange thing was that it was the first device that I reached for at
night on June 13th when I wanted to game. One thing that might be a bit strange coming from
me is that I don’t really have a lot of time to game. I play games to review devices for this
hobby that I have, but between being a father and work, I very rarely have time to just sink into a
game that I like and this is without even posting that many videos each month. If I posted more, I
would never have any free time to game. There are a lot of games in my Steam Library that I only
progress through while I am reviewing hardware. But, I really like to game, and
if I didn’t have obligations, I could sink a ton of time into
gaming like it was an Olympic sport. So yeah, from June 13th until today,
I’ve been using Ally every day solely in the small pockets of free time that I
have around all of my other obligations. During that time, I’ve learned a lot more
about the device. I faced more issues, and I have grown to enjoy the device
enough to make this updated video. I’m planning to talk about those issues
and why I like this device so much, but I want to first talk about how I’ve been
using Ally because that’s also important. I want to say that 70-80% of my time
with Ally over the last two months has been gaming at night. Usually, I will pick
up Ally to game for an hour or two in bed before I go to sleep. This is usually the
time that I would use to play the Deck, but there are things about this device that
have caused me to reach for it instead. I started out by playing a ton of Core Keeper.
I have 70 hours logged right now on Steam, and I would say 65 of those hours come right
from playing on Ally at night. That game is a darker game most of the time, which works out
well for Ally’s screen. The minimum brightness on Ally isn’t great, and it’s frankly a bit
too high to be used around anyone that might be sleeping around you. So when I want
to play a game at night on the device, I will make a conscious effort not to
play any games that are overly bright. That also means that I don’t use
the RGB lights because they are way too bright at 33% at night.
I wish those had a lower setting. Outside that game, the next group of darker
games that I’ll play are the ones that don’t run well on the Deck unless I use 13-15W TDP.
I will usually never play those games on my Deck at night because the fan is too loud. I’ve
experimented with lower custom fan curves that don’t make that much noise, but the heat is
too noticeable and I don’t have a good time. Ally makes almost no noise at 15W TDP,
and the battery life is just enough for me to usually be about ready for
sleep before the battery dies. So far, I haven’t talked at all about
emulation, because the truth is that I did not think I would ever use Ally for
emulation. I have way better handhelds that do that better and I was fine just
using this for PC gaming. After Nintendo do their announcement for the new Super
Mario RPG game, I wanted to do a replay of the original in my free time, and Aly
was already on my bedside, so it was easy. I have already beaten the normal game many
times over the years, so I wanted to try either the randomizer mod or one of the other
popular ones. I decided to go with Super Mario RPG Armageddon since I have never played it. If
you also never played it, I recommend giving it a whirl because the added difficulty and
new content were a breath of fresh air. The problem with that game is that you need to
execute a ton of timed hits in order to kill even trash mobs, and that causes the screen to flash
too much to be able to play this at night in bed. Around that time, I started messing testing
a pair of AR glasses from Viture that work perfectly with Ally. This isn’t something
new to me because I have used a pair of TCL glasses with my Steam Deck and
other devices for around 9 months. The Viture glasses are good because they
have great screens inside the glasses that have way better color, contrast,
and brightness than Ally’s screen, and they also have speakers near your ears that
are good enough to not need to use headphones. When I have those on, I don’t have to worry
about anyone waking up from seeing my screen, hearing the fan, or hearing the audio
from the game that I’m playing. Waking up from button mashing is
an entirely different topic. It took me a while to go through this
mode because I didn’t rush things, but I’m around 25-30 hours in at this point
and there’s still a lot of content left to do. All of that was done through
the glasses. It’s also the first time that I appreciated the bottom design
of Ally because it fits perfectly against my stomach when I’m laying down looking
up with the glasses on. It’s super comfy. I don’t want to spend too long
on this, but I did want to touch on some of the issues that I’ve found
with Ally after using it for this long. Full disclosure, this is the second
Ally unit that I’ve had. ROG asked for my original one back to investigate
it and they sent me this one. I swapped my old drive into this device and sent back
my old one. This one doesn’t bench as high as my review unit, but I stopped worrying
about anything like that a long time ago. I think the biggest issue that I’ve
experienced is the SD card issue. I had a card that slowly started ejecting
from the device before people started to talk about issues they had. I thought this
was a fluke thing, but I also had times when my card would stop functioning at all, or
it would seemingly disable and reenable. This wasn’t an issue for me since I only use
SD cards for emulation, and as I already said, I wasn’t planning to use this device
for emulation outside Super Mario RPG. There was a point where I was keeping this
thing fully up-to-date, but I read that they did an update to try and address this issue by
raising the lower floor of the fan controller, and that was a non-starter for me.
I haven’t updated the BIOS or Armour Crate since that happened, and I’m
in no rush to do any updates unless there is a big enough improvement
to warrant going through the hassle. The system itself has been super
stable for me. It has never crashed or locked up in the last month, and I also
haven’t had any issues with the left menu. The only thing that I have dealt with is the
device occasionally doing strange stuff while it is asleep. There were a few times when the
device would wake from sleep at night and the device would boot with the joystick LEDs at
100%. Since this thing lives by my bedside, this was a huge issue. In total, this
has happened to me three times and it usually happens when I am too
tired to try and investigate. From what I saw, there shouldn’t be any wake-locks or tasks enabled that would do
this including Windows updater. I did find that you can disable two options
in the Armour Crate settings and that at least saves me from waking up to blinding RGB
lights when I’m sleeping if the device decides that it wants to wake up. I haven’t found a
way to disable the annoying white activity light that strobes while the device is
sleeping, so I end up just covering it with my AR glasses while I sleep. I don’t
know who thought that was a good idea. The only other issue that I’ve dealt
with is around the analog sticks. The ring around the analog stick has a
rough texture applied to the plastic, and that has slowly started to eat away at my
left stick after doing a ton of Snowy attacks. This isn’t a problem that I have
on any of my other handhelds, because they all use a smooth material for this
contact point. The sticks can still wear out, but it will take a lot more
time and effort to do it. One thing that I have wanted to fix on my Ally for
a long time is the small SSD that it has. Now that I don’t use the SD card slot, I’ve been really
feeling how limited this thing is with how much power it has. To be fair, it has the same amount
of storage as the highest-end Deck, but it also has 24 gigs dedicated to a restore partition,
and it has a full Windows installation to deal with. The OS partition says 451GB, but I believe
this thing had just a bit over 400GB free after a fresh boot, which is way too small. I think my 512
Decks had a lot more free space out of the box. Ally has a lot more potential, and there
are a lot of bigger games that I now find myself wanting to play on it, so it’s time
to upgrade that small SSD to a bigger one. For this, I’m going to use this 2TB addlink card.
It’s rated for 5,000MB/s read, and 3,200 MB/s write. If those speeds are accurate, this should
be a decent upgrade over my current card for read and write. I’m sitting at around 4300 MB/s
read, and around 1800 MB/s write at this point. I haven’t done this yet, but the
entire process is supposed to be painless. I’m going to power off my unit
and review the screens on the back. Then, we just need to disconnect the battery
and take out our old SSD. After that, we can put in the new 2TB card and when can
reconnect the battery, and screw on the shell. Then we just need to reboot into the BIOS
by powering the device on. This BIOS has a handy option called ASUS Cloud Recovery, and that
should handle all of the annoying stuff for us. We just need to connect to the internet and
then the system will start to download the factory image with the operating system to
our new SSD. This process take a lot of time, but I like this a lot more than having
to flash an image over to some USB drive. Alight, well I spoke too soon. After
going through that entire process, I ended up with a Windows 11 China Home Edition,
which is literally the worst version of Windows possible because you cannot change the
display language without buying a Pro CD key. I thought this could be fixed by routing
the Cloud Recovery install through a VPN, but I ended up with the same version 2 more
times, so that must mean my motherboard on this Ally is essentially region locked
to this Windows license. My original Ally unit was an international version, but
this second one came from ROG in China and it was never an issue because I swapped
my SSD before sending back my original unit. I e-mailed ROG to ask them if they
can change the Windows license that is tied to this motherboard, but I
have no idea if they will do that. To get around this, I ended up creating an image
of my 512GB SSD and I used that to flash my 2TB SSD. If you go this route, you’ll have to
do some finagling to resize the C partition, but everything worked and I now have the
benefit of not needing to do a single thing to set this up. Everything works just as
it did before. Just make sure to disable Bitlocker before you clone your drive
if you also want to do this. I did all of this with an external 2230 adapter from
Shargeek that I made a video about recently. Now that I’ve fixed the biggest issue
that I had with my Ally, I think we can finish up with why I think this device is
so good after using it for over 2 months. The biggest reason why I use Ally
over other handhelds that I have outside of my specific use at night
is because the cooling is so good. Ally is one of the only devices outside of
the Deck that has the ability to be very quiet for a lot of what it can do. You start to get
diminishing returns with 7840U above 25W TDP, and the good thing is that Ally is really
quiet from 7-25W TDP. It’s way better than other devices that I have as you get closer to
25W. The device doesn’t make that much noise, and the areas that you touch never feel that warm. The second biggest reason why I like
this device so much is the 120Hz free sync panel. I did not know how badly I
wanted something like this in a PC handheld until I have to go back to use devices
that do not have this. It is amazing, and a lot of games can run up to 120 FPS on this
hardware without needing to max out the TDP. These are usually games that I’d play on the Deck
at 60 FPS and be fine with. Anytime I find an older game that I haven’t beaten that can render
above 60 FPS, it gets added to my Ally playlist. Because I have used this thing so much, I have
grown to love how fast it recharges. As you can probably guess by now, the charging speed
is so much better than other hardware that I have. In some instances, it can even charge 2-3x
faster than comparable devices, and that’s nuts. That’s also a great thing because this battery
isn’t that big. If I go to bed early and I want to game for a longer time, I’ll usually hook this up
to this 144Wh portable battery, and if I travel, I’ll either take that battery or this smaller
72Wh one and I’m usually good to go. But I do wish that Ally had a bigger internal battery
because 40Wh is too small for what this can do. This has not played a big role in my enjoyment
of the device over the last two months, but the speakers on this are great, and if you
use this thing normally without any headphones or any attachments that can deliver sound,
you’re gonna have a better experience than 90% of what is out there right now. A lot
of companies treat audio as an afterthought, so when you get a product that
does it well, it blows you away. This also has not played a big role in why
I personally like the device since these were sent to me or picked up at an airport,
but there’s something to be said for being able to go into a Best Buy if you live in
a region where this is sold at that store and just try it out to see if you like it.
You don’t have that kind of freedom when it comes to other stuff that this competes with,
and this is beneficial both in the ability to easily return this if you don’t like it,
or get easy support or a replacement if something goes wrong without having to
ship it back halfway across the world. So to wrap this up, I do have devices that
do some things objectively better than Ally, but I don’t have one that does everything better
than Ally, and that’s largely why this one gets so much of my free time. It is possible to make a
better device than this, but ROG is the closest to making that happen. If they decide to keep going
with this platform and sell a rebranded 8840U next year and make even the smallest improvements
over some of the glaring issues that this has, they will have the best product on the market that
you buy for the money. Hopefully, they keep going. If you enjoyed this video, take a
look at a video that I did on the AYN Loki. That’s a smaller device with awesome
ergonomics. Happy gaming everyone, Taki out.
