This is an ASUS
ROG Ally, and conceptually at least, it's a really cool product. you have here
is basically a handheld gaming PC. It's significantly more powerful
than a steam deck. Nintendo Switch or really any other
handheld on the market as long as you manage your expectations around settings
and frame rates, you can basically enjoy any game on the go,
but just not for very long. You see, this is my ROG Ally
and I've had it for a little while now and what I've learned is that it's
definitely got some big weak points. And if I'm being brutally honest,
it's failed to live up to my expectations. But fear not,
because with a little bit of ingenuity and a little bit of elbow grease,
I think we can fix all of those. That's right. Today we are going to void
my warranty Wish me luck. and we are going to build the ROG
Ally Pro. packed inside this little handheld
powerhouse is an eight core Ryzen APU with an integrated
radial and 780 AMD GPU. It also has 16 gigabytes of DDR5 memory
and in my opinion, its weakest spec
512 gigabytes of internal nvme storage. So the first of all, what I did here was just replacing that
with a one terabyte drive from Sabrent. And you can see that this is a special compact 30 millimeter
drive, I actually missed an opportunity to install a larger full sized drive here,
but we'll talk more about that later. First, I wanted to solve an issue that has
plagued the Ally since its launch. It cooks SD cards Underneath this
main heatsink is a micro SD card slot, and as you may have guessed,
based on its location, it gets really hot. So in order to fix that, I borrowed
a product from the automotive world. This is fiberglass and aluminum
heat shielding, and it comes in simple self-adhesive sheets. A few layers of it should keep your memory
card safe from the heat above. I'm actually kind of surprised Asus
doesn't do this from the factory. Once I knew that my SD card wouldn't
self-immolate, I felt much more comfortable about adding
another 512 gigabytes of storage. next I want to tackle
a different type of capacity. This is the battery pack
that comes with our rogue ally. It doesn't say anywhere on it,
but I'm pretty sure it's about 45 watt hours
and that equates to about an hour to an hour and a half of battery life
which for me is just not quite enough. So if you look over here
in this cardboard box, I actually have a replacement battery
for one of Asus gaming laptops. Same voltage, but about twice the capacity
of the one that comes in the ally. And the nice thing is
the battery connector just plugs right into it and the battery management
software should play nicely together. In its current configuration,
there was no way that this battery was going to fit inside the ally. This left me with only one choice. I had to fold it. You see, the battery is made up of four separate cells
arranged around a battery management PCB. So the first thing I did was cover that PCB in electrical tape
to avoid any accidental shorts. And then I carefully folded
the cells into a single stack. Big thanks to AllyMods.com, by the way. I read their article about this idea and it kicked off the inspiration
for this whole project. Now, obviously, the battery pack
is pretty exposed like this. But don't worry, because we're going
to reinforce it later in the video. First, though, while we're in the kitchen,
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since we already have a disassembled, this might be a good time to do another little side project
I want to upgrade the cooling of the ally so that we can crank the performance
up to ten. and also upgrading
the cooling is going to affect how we cut the back of the device. So it just makes sense to do that first. From the factory. The ally’s heatsink comes painted black,
which admittedly makes it look pretty cool, but it's going to get
in the way of what we're about to do. So the first thing I did was just use
a buffing wheel to remove that paint. Then I wanted to add some more heat pipes. These copper tubes are filled
with a liquid that very effectively transports heat from high temperature
zones to low temperature zones. can see the original heat sink is actually
just a single long, flat heat pump. But I wanted to utilize
the third dimension. So I marked out a couple of rough
indexing lines on the tubes and then took them over to my bench place
where I was going to attempt to bend them. in order to make the copper a little
softer and easier to bend, I heated it up. But I had to be very careful
because if you boil the liquid inside of the heat pipe, they'll pop up and send
shrapnel flying right into your eyes. And also, you have to be careful
that you don't kink the tubes when you're bending them, because, well,
then they won't work anymore. Thankfully, I rode the line
and managed to get the job done, but it wouldn't be the last time
that I risked popping these heat pumps. So now that we have our two heat
pipes bent, they're going to wick heat away from the CPU
and take it somewhere. And that somewhere is going to be
this copper end to heatsink like I used in my gaming phone video. its going to go a little something like that
and radiate the backside of the alloy. But there is a problem. So in my gaming phone video
I just brazed a bunch of copper together. But that won't really work here because
these heat pipes, like I said before, will pop if they get too hot. That being said, I think I've come up with a solution
in this little bag right here. I have some damn my fat fingers. I have some low temperature
soldering pastes, this stuff will melt and then solidify
at a much lower temperature. And hopefully it's somewhere below
the popping point of these heat pipes. Unlike conventional solid solder,
this stuff comes as a very viscous paste. And if you were to look at it very closely
under a microscope, you would see that it's actually just a bunch
of little solder balls suspended in flux. It's a lower melting point comes
courtesy of the introduction of Bismuth into the alloy and puts it right
in the Goldilocks zone for this project. It's melting Point is low enough that it can be used to braze these heat
pipes together without them popping. Yet it's high enough
that it can easily withstand the operating temperatures of the heat
sink. That being said,
there was still a dance to be done here. I use very short bursts of the torch
to melt the solder and regularly check my temperatures with a laser thermometer
to avoid things getting too hot. the last step was joining the heat pipes
to the heat sink directly above the CPU. This is the highest temperature
point in the whole system. So it's where they'll be
the most effective. They'll transport
heat up to the copper block, where it will then be carried away by another mod
that we're going to do a little bit later. before installing this new and
in my opinion, very cool looking heatsink. Let's talk about thermal interfaces. So from the factory, the ally’s heatsink comes pre-applied
with this little thermal pad here. And this might actually be Honeywell
PTM 7950, which is a very effective phase,
changing thermal compounds. Basically,
when it heats up, it melts and fills the gap between the heat sink of the CPU and effectively transfers
heat between the two of them. However, there is one product on the market
that's supposed to be better than this. Inside this little syringe here,
we quite literally have a liquid metal. This, as far as I know, is the most thermally conductive interface
on the market. However, it's really tricky to work with
and there are quite a few pitfalls. So before we even get into this, we had to do a little bit of preparation
on the ally. using some 99% isopropyl alcohol,
I removed the old thermal pad on both the heat sink
and on the actual dye of the APU which revealed its
very cool mirrored finish. Now, the problem with liquid metal
is that it's not only thermally conductive,
but it's also electrically conductive. So if any of it leaks out,
it can short surrounding components in order to prevent that. I applied a very generous helping
of conformal coating. This stuff solidifies into a soft rubber
skin that's electrically insulating. by applying it
the whole way around the dye, I effectively created a sealed chamber
that prevents the liquid metal from leaking out, which is obviously going to be important
in a handheld gaming machine. liquid metal itself is notoriously hard
to use and less is more here. So rather than squirting it
directly onto the dye, I opted to just put a little bit
onto this piece of plastic and then transferred over
using a cotton swab. From there
you're just trying to paint as little as possible
onto both of your mating surfaces. It doesn't need to dry or care.
So as soon as you're done your application,
you can just reinstall the heat sink. And then to pick up a thread
from earlier in the video, I use this heat shrink wrap to add
a layer of protection to the battery. This is basically the same stuff as heat, shrink
tubing that you'd use to insulate wires. Except it's bigger so that it can
accommodate a whole battery. So now our battery pack is going to sit. Something like that right there. And now we need to figure out how much
of the backplate we need to hack out. to cut into the back of the ally. I grabbed one of my favorite home
renovation tools, the oscillating multi-tool. one of the nice things about these saws
is that you can easily plunge them right into the middle of whatever
you're working on, The cut was a bit rough,
but in all honesty, it didn't need to be super accurate. We'll make it look nice later. For now, I just hacked away the plastic until my new heatsink and battery pack
could poke right out the back of the ally. Okay. We just have one last little thing
that I want to do here on the shop today. this is the cable that connects
the battery to the motherboard. And it doesn't really work with our new larger battery
because the port moves over too fast. So we're going to have to cut into
this guy and extend it ever so slightly. These is way to extend a harness
like this, is to just cut it in half and then add
in a couple more inches of wire. It is important to note, though,
that the wire you add should be the same gauge
or potentially even a bit thicker so that you don't add
any additional resistance into the system. But outside of that,
just twist the wires together, sort of the joints to reinforce them and then add some of the aforementioned
featuring tubing for insulation. So I'm sure many of you are looking
at the back of this and thinking, what the heck are we going to do with this
big hole here? Well, in order to fix that,
we are going to head back to my office. We're going to do some CAD modeling and a little bit of 3D
printing to clean this up a little bit. And also,
I want to make a dock for this thing. So we still got a lot of fun stuff to do. The first thing that I think we're going to need
is what I like to call the battery Bridge. This is just a piece of plastic that's going to sit inside of the ally
and support the battery. Above all, the internals
and give it somewhere nice to rest. Once I had my CAD model fully dialed in. Well, I just 3D printed it. So this is the piece here,
and I've actually made this out of 100% ABS, and I printed it at 100% infill. So not only is this very strong and rigid,
although it still does have a little bit of flex to it,
which is nice. It's also very heat resistant, which is important
because while it's going to be inside the ally
where it might get a little bit warm. Inside the shell, there are these four little indents
that used to support the old battery. So I figured, why not reuse those? And I made four legs on the bottom of my
battery bridge that slot right into them. Obviously, nobody wants their game console
to explode while they're using it, because the battery sits in such close
proximity to the new raised heatsink, I thought it would be prudent to wrapped
its exposed edge in some more of that heat shielding from earlier. Then in order to connect the battery to the bridge,
I use some heavy duty double sided tape. the next thing that we have to do
is cover up the back of the alley. So I have designed a new backplate
here, as you can see. This was considerably harder
to model than the bridge, but I think it's going to be worth it. It features improved air intakes,
obviously more room for the battery. And also I reused a lot of the stock
melting points, so it should bolt directly to the Ally
pretty easily. And again,
I've opted to print this in 100% abs. So not only should it be nice and impact resistant,
but it should also be thermally stable. Everything needed to be mm. Accurate. So the first thing I did was install
the four machined screws that screwed into the stock
mounting points. Then I broke up the drill
and started drilling some new holes. Okay, just kidding. At first, I just made, like, little marks
with the drill bit so that I knew where the holes needed to go. And then I disassembled the ally
and drilled the whole way through. Once I had the holes done, I reattach
the rear cover using some shorter machine screws that threaded into nuts
on the other side. And then I CA glued those nuts in place
so that the rear battery cover can be removed
separately from the rear shell if need be. There we go. Now that that back cover's in place, everything's all buttoned up
and this feels great in the hand. can easily still reach the rear buttons.
No problem. It doesn't
really get in the way of your hands. And as an added bonus, it's
got that bigger back on it you can set it upright like this, and play it
from a distance, like a Nintendo Switch. at this point we could jump right
into the thermal performance testing. However, if you’d indulge me, I'd like to do
one last thing on this project. I want to build a custom dock
for this machine. rather
than giving you a digital tour of it, I've actually already
got all the pieces printed out. So let's check them out that way
and assemble it and see how it all fits together. in terms of material, basically
this whole dock is printed in carbon fiber reinforced PETG similar to the ABS. It's more heat resistant than PLA
and it's also got this really cool kind of matte effect to it. I just love the way this stuff looks and is going to be plenty strong
for a video game console dock. The first piece we have here
is the main body and it's actually keyed so that when the ally slots into it,
it just kind of locks there in place. And then if you look around back, it has this cutout here
that is the perfect size for a fan. And it's ducted towards the intake vents
on the backside of the ally. In order to install the fan,
all we have to do is slide its two power wires
through this little hole that I've created And then fan pressure fits in here
with its little rubber corners. in order to protect the blades
from the user or the user from the blades, I have this cover that just slots
right over the fan and is keyed so that it slots
right into the dock itself This next piece is just a little bit of shameless
branding. It's a face plate for the dock. But in order to create it, I actually
utilized some really cool technology. So you see, this is made
with two different types of plastic. The base is a white plate,
and then the raise lettering is a carbon
fiber reinforced plate. And my bambu lab X1, Carbon
3D printer did this for me automatically. So at a certain point it just paused the print switch,
the filament, and then continued to print. And that happens right where the lettering
starts to raise One of the easiest and best ways that I found to bond 3D
printed parts is to just use CA glue. It sets very quickly
and it seems to hold really well. So with that out of the way, we had
to answer a very important question. how are we going to control this fan? Because you might not want it
running all the time. You might want to just put
the ally in here to charge sometimes. Well, for situations like that,
I got this little switch. So we're just going to thread it through
And it just pressure fits in here. So now we need to find a way
to power our fan. And in order to do that, I got this PCB
and funny story about this PCB. It actually started out its life
in a steam deck dock that I bought off of Amazon. I assumed that
it would be made out of plastic, but when I got it,
it was made out of aluminum, which is nice and high quality. But in order to get this out of there,
I had to get a bit destructive. safety glasses. I'm on. give me the PCB. Oh, huh? There we go. Okay, well,
that's what I needed. But we got it now. So let me show you how
it all gets hooked up. Powering this fan was not going to be
a straightforward affair. so they had to get a bit creative. I connected the gray wire from the fan
back to the switch, and then taped down all the wires into this recessed area
I created in the bottom of the dock. Then with the PCB in place,
I was ready to steal some power. You see, one trick I learned
is that USB ports almost always have a five volt pin
that you can just steal power from. So using my multimeter,
I figured out which pin it was on the backside of the port and then very carefully soldered
the positive side of the fan to it. This was precise work, but with a little bit of patience,
it's easier than it looks. And the ground wire was even easier
because I could just solder it to one of the grounding legs
on the outside of the port. And the last piece of the puzzle
is just the simple bottom plate
and should click in like that. And all of our ports are cut out
perfectly in the back of it. So now we just plug in this Usb-C power
delivery port. The ally slots in like so. then this guy wraps up
and clicks into the top. And now if we throw this switch here,
we can engage the turbo charging mode. Yeah, look at that. This thing actually moves
a ridiculous amount air. You can even feel it sucking in air here. Wow, That's crazy. So I took a little bit of time
and I did some in-depth testing on the ally,
and the results are kind of mixed. let's start with thermals,
because I think that is a bright spot. When you're in handheld mode. You're basically looking at a 15
to 20 degree drop in temperatures across the board.
No matter what you're doing. And then when you put it in the dock, it's
more like a 30 degree drop. So naturally, the next thing I did
was test the performance. Performance and here's
where things take a bit of a turn. Because basically across the board,
you were looking at a 2 to 3% jump in performance, which is kind of
like the margin for error on these tests. So as it turns out, the alloy is power
constraint, not thermally constrained. obviously that's a little bit
disappointing. But you guys know me. I was not going to let
that be the end of the story. As it turns out, there is a way to lift
the power limits of the ally. I was able to use
a custom bios called “smokeless” in order to raise the power
limits of the alloy up to 54 watts, nearly doubling what it can do from
the factory, after tinkering in the bios for a little bit and also installing
a program called Handheld Companion, I was now rocking a fully unconstrained
ally and I was ready to lay down
some serious performance numbers. Or at least that's what I thought. Turns out 54 watts To the APU isn't good for much, other
than just generating a lot more heat. Even in the dark with the fan going. The ally was hanging out right around
that 95 degree thermal cutoff and performance
saw like a 5 to 10% uplift. And that's with almost double
the energy use. I don't know what else to say here
other than that diminishing returns are a real b****. You see, processors have a sweet spot
where they get the most performance per watt. And if you push beyond that limit, well,
the performance increases are incremental
and energy use just goes exponential. so now let's talk about battery life. Or actually, maybe we should jump
right into the postmortem analysis because I feel like I've been living a lie
throughout this entire video. Okay, maybe that's a bit dramatic,
but here's what happened. When I first installed the bigger battery. Everything was great. I was getting double the battery life
across the board and actually maybe even a bit more than that. It was fantastic.
And everything that I wanted, but there was a proverbial fly
in the ointment. see, I am cheap. So I ordered a third party battery
for this project. It was $80 versus the 150 that ASUS
wanted for a genuine one. in the two weeks or so that it's taken me
to make this video. Well, the battery has since started acting all wonky,
and now it won't even take a charge. so now I am back to the original stock
battery in here. And after talking to some other members of the ally modding scene,
that's entirely to be expected. If you want a guarantee that
the big battery mod is going to work 100%, well then you need to use a first party
Asus battery. So lesson learned. I've ordered one. It's in the mail and when it arrives,
I will just swap it in here. next. I missed an opportunity
to get some more storage in here. They make these really cool, right? Angle and two adapters
that allow you to run 80 mm nvme drives. how cool would this thing be
if it had four terabytes of storage? Also, I think hall effect sticks
would have been a fun upgrade, but currently they don't work very well. You see the triggers are also hall effect. So the magnets crosstalk between them
and create all sorts of interference. I think overall, if I had to do this
whole project over again, knowing what I know now, I would just do the big battery mod, I'd build the dock,
and then I would call it a life. The extra cooling performance
doesn't really add much given how well optimized this machine is
and don't sleep on the dock. By the way, you can just plop the ally down into it
and it basically becomes a full desktop computer. A Hell, if I wanted to, I could edit
this entire 4K video footage on the ally in the dock. Oh, and then I almost forgot
my favorite new use case for this thing. I'm going to use it like a video game
console down in my living room. I'll just put it in my coffee table,
connect it to my AV receiver, and now I've got a gaming
PC connected to my TV. And if it's not powerful enough
for the latest triple-A games at 4K, well then I have a solution. One
that's actually free. I can use a program called Moonlight
Render the games on my much more powerful PC upstairs
and then stream them to the hour. And honestly, I've used it a little bit
and it works really well. You would not know
that you are streaming games, And on that note, I think we're done here. So in my next video,
hopefully I will be showing off my new modernized Nintendo 64
or if that's not done yet, well, then I might just do some DIY
Dolby Atmos speakers. Either way,
you're going to want to get subscribe so you don't miss those
and I'll see you in the next one, peace.
