I'm the Second Person to Touch This - ROG Ally Preview

the Prototype inside this box was flown and hand delivered to me by Asus and I can tell you with certainty that while I'm not allowed to tell you the exact specs this is not just another steam deck clone because it's more like two steam deck clones they are claiming literally double the performance twice the refresh rate more than double the resolution and I am one of only two people outside of Asus who gets to show off the Rog Ally prototype today and I'm the only one who gets to show you our sponsor Zoho one who's here to help you take your business to the next level their all-in-one software suite has everything you need to streamline your operations and boost productivity from CRM to finance marketing to HR Zoho one has got you covered so head to the link below for a free 30-day trial on first glance it would be pretty easy to assume that Asus simply saw the steam deck thought yeah we could do that and then sharted out the RNG Ally but their team has actually spent the last 10 years working on various handheld console Concepts just waiting for an opening in a difficult Market that is chewed up and spit out numerous experienced players over the years and the biggest thing that proves this isn't just another copycat design is what I'm doing right now Asus obsessed over how people actually use these handheld devices finding that they don't want them to be too big they also don't want them to be too small and they want them to be genuinely comfortable to hold now when you first pick up the Rog Ally it isn't very comfortable to be perfectly honest with you I have a hard time reaching the shoulder buttons and these bottom corners here just like kind of dig into my head but then watch this and it's perfect these little Contours here at the bottom right and left are designed for the device to be held at an angle with the screen actually facing your face and in many cases resting either on the desk in front of you or on your lap in terms of buttons it's a pretty bog standard Xbox layout we've got our start and select here and here or whatever Microsoft calls those buttons I actually don't know what these other buttons do oh I guess we're gonna oh okay so that switches between Windows and your game quick switcher and oh that brings up their Command Center oh I really like this quick switcher between uh Mouse mode is this is this to make it like a keyboard jointed mouse or whatever cool okay quick toggle between 16 120 hertz refresh rate oh man I have been waiting for someone to do 120 hertz I know it's worse for battery life okay I know it's more expensive but there are a lot of games particularly emulated games enthusiasts that you totally could run at 120 frames per second and would totally run on this Hardware especially this Hardware I am loving these RGB joysticks in terms of buttons the good thing about the joysticks is they're full size so you'll get the same level of control that you would get with a steam deck the bad news is you'll get the same level of control as you will with the steam deck they're not hall effect which means that even though you can calibrate the zero point so you shouldn't suffer from drift not Cottonwood uh you can't fully eliminate dead zones and they might not have the same level of durability deep pad feels solidly okay it's far from the best I felt but it's not nearly the worst and while I'm not a huge fan of long travel abxy buttons these aren't bad I mean I'd say they're about like you'd get on like an Xbox controller though it should be noted that this is a prototype device and I would love for that to improve assistant now that I'm in position the shoulder and Trigger buttons are very easy to access these seem like analog triggers though they haven't confirmed that for me yet and like the steam deck and unlike many other competing Windows handhelds on the market they've got additional buttons on the back of the device though not as many as the steam deck this looks flipping awesome I'm not allowed to show you guys FPS but Asus says that at 15 watts they are up to 50 percent faster than the steam deck and at 35 Watts they are double the performance at seven inches 1080p looks crazy Sharp okay if this is running variable refresh rate it makes sense that it was so hard for me to nail down what FPS it's running at because if it dips below the panel's variable refresh rate range then it'll really start to chug and as long as it's within that range it's going to look shockingly smooth so if I had to guess I'd say we're seeing anywhere from 45 FPS down to it's probably dipping to about 20 and that's where I'm really seeing those stutters no matter how you slice it though this is incredibly impressive we're not even in game yet I am loving this display okay not only does it run at a higher resolution than the steam deck it also hits a peak of 500 nits which is more than I think that's higher than any of the handhelds we've tested recently and it's rated at just seven milliseconds for the pixel response times now that doesn't sound that impressive compared to some of the latest gaming monitors that boasting sub 1 millisecond response times but you got to understand that even on something like a gaming laptop the native pixel response time is going to be pretty similar to this they're just overdriving those pixels so this is going to be at least a clean seven milliseconds which at 60 hertz is going to look great and 120 hertz should be okay while this is running really smooth I wasn't even thinking about it which is the mark of good okay we're only at 720p though uh you guys need to change it so that I can toggle to manual mode as well once I configure my manual mode I should be able to just toggle the manual mode dude though this is so smooth if you play lighter games Indie Games emulated games oh 120 hertz makes so much sense I'm all the way back down to 15 watts performance mode and this is still an outstanding experience it's everything it's just it's the responsiveness it's being able to nail the timing it's the smoothness of the animations if you're playing lighter games you know retro games emulated games there's just no comparison here really at 15 watts you guys are rating this at 20 decibels I mean yeah I believe it and we've got some insights to share with you guys on how they're getting it so quiet even though we're not allowed to open it today first though let's see if we're even getting the main benefit of these fans being so quiet can we play something like a rhythm game on this and actually enjoy it unlike on the steam dark foreign but um [Music] these speakers sound great though I've only got this at about 30 percent right now what that is a very full sound considering the size of this device all right it's not like I don't have any complaints right no hall effect joysticks for example but Asus pointed out that they are very replaceable so it wouldn't be a surprise if third-party options did show up I didn't notice the weight but they wanted me to mention that it's exactly 608 grams which is apparently a lucky number or something like that the triggers and shoulders no longer bothered me at all once I was actually playing games but I do want to see the stabilization of these improve okay let's change gears though and talk about cooling the way that they achieve this level of quiet aside from just putting in a quality thermal solution instead of like weird janky fans that make a lot of noise is by using a heat pipe with a two element heatsink so that's why it's got two exhausts over here and two separate intakes they managed to pack two fans into this thing in addition to this Hardware that is double the performance of the steam deck under ideal conditions now seems like a good time to talk about i o there's a headphone jack up here we've got a Micro SD slot uhs2 pretty cool a really funky looking USBC Port we'll talk more about that later volume buttons as well as a fingerprint sensor that includes a single sign on I think is what that's called or whatever basically it caches your fingerprint when you turn on the device and then logs all the way into your windows profile so if you have multiple profiles because you share your device with your kids or your so or whatever you just turn it on and it'll drop you right in your profile they're not letting me show the motherboard and the internals to you guys but I did see them and there's a couple of things that I'm allowed to share with you first that the SSD is a 2230 sized SSD so likely it'll ship with one terabyte Max storage and the second is that the battery capacity should be pretty competitive with the steam deck what I want to know though is does it fit in the little handheld storage spot on our backpack lttstore.com oh this is not the standard backpack this is a prototype one don't worry too much about that but it's the same size and the answer is okay remember how I was going to talk about that funky USBC connector that was like three times as wide the Ally has no Thunderbolt or usb4 and that's because of that connector it's Asus XG mobile connection and it allows you to plug in an external GPU like this one there is a part of me that wishes it was Thunderbolt because that would make it compatible with third-party GPU docs rather than just this one but there is an advantage to this approach it's pcie by eight rather than pcie by four with a whole bunch of Thunderbolt protocol overhead so what that means is a unlike Thunderbolt there's actually a point in connecting an RTX 4090 mobile to this thing it shouldn't be nearly as bottlenecks I absolutely love the XG mobile on my flow x13 when it works it can be a little bit flaky but the difference is that Asus sent me mine I didn't have to pay for it and at the price that this thing costs it is pretty tough to justify to be clear it's not Asus that I blame for this they won't confirm the real reason but I have no doubt in my mind that it's because of Nvidia Nvidia is extremely fussy about the products that their gpus are built into and they have arbitrary rules like well if it's connected to a laptop it has to be a mobile chip even though we're talking about the XD mobile which isn't really mobile it's a product that will only ever run plugged into the wall so in my mind Jesus got to work with AMD then to use desktop class gpus in I mean maybe a slightly larger enclosure or build compatibility with the XG mobile interface into their egpu Thunderbolt enclosures for regular graphics cards that would make the XG mobile affordable and upgradeable because right now it's neither which is a shame because with it you can easily turn this thing into the switch Pro that the market is so hungry for by the way Asus asked us to show you a couple of the new products uh this isn't one of them but this is how the hell do I pronounce this right Curie Pro this is their new rikiri Pro it has a screen on it it's almost exactly the same layout as an Xbox controller but it's slightly smaller because some people find it to be a little bit big and it's got four buttons on the back as well as these adjustable uh whether you want the trigger to work as a trigger or as just a another shoulder button little switches I forget what these are called but they also wanted me to show off this thing this is actually a super cool companion for the Ally it allows you to charge the Ally via USBC you also get an extra USB port and an HDMI output for the Ally just plugged into the wall it's really compact I would use the right Geary but it's apparently an engineering unit and does not work yet okay I mean if this is a Zen for mobile CPU based on what I've seen from Zen 4 so far and its efficiency I'm going ultimate 4K with this mobile 4090 I mean it should work right you know it's funny the Asus wraps were like yeah we were surprised at how little bottlenecking there is but mobile 49 is not as fast as a real 40 90. so yeah it's only pcie gen 3x8 but that's lots of bandwidth and because it's not Thunderbolt there's no bi-directional communication really like it's not outputting over the laptop's display or anything like that it's just the outputting to your monitor over HDMI or over a DisplayPort it's a plenty fast chip and this CPU this CPU is clearly fast enough this is well over 60 frames per second I love it when the camera is like this this is really great all right come on either way this is running amazing I mean it should once you've spent probably about twenty five hundred dollars but still over the past year we've had several other devices hit the market looking to scratch that next-gen itch that some of the more Enthusiast level handheld gamers are looking for and truthfully I am one of them because as much as I love the steam deck I don't daily drive it this is partly because of the loud fan but the size the more limited game compatibility and the performance are also factors now obviously the price of the steam deck is a major selling point all other things being equal but all other things are not equal anymore we won't know the exact price of this device until it shows up on Best Buy shelves and around the world in the next few months but being this much faster all of a sudden it could make sense and if you were hoping that valve would simply refresh the steam deck to match the Allies performance but at their existing price think again recently valve has gone on the record stating that while they are working on the steam deck 2 it's not coming for a long time which in valve time is I mean I don't know let's put it this way we just got Counter-Strike two valve's custom SOC strategy then was a big Advantage for them at launch but it's starting to look like a liability much like the cycle we see with the traditional console players where they launch new console it's absolutely killer compared to a custom PC and then it becomes long in the tooth and a custom PC starts to look like the obvious choice until they refresh and so on and so forth so while the seam deck did a great job of getting people back into handheld gaming especially playing PC games and the low barrier to entry is amazing at 400 dollars some of you have more money that you'd like to spend and this is starting to look like it could offer enough to justify whatever that higher price is there's going to be a lot more for us to cover in the full review the faster UHS 2 micro SD slot for example does it affect loading times I don't know we might be able to objectively measure device speakers in our lab by then how does it compare to the competition and how does all of this performance translate to power savings I mean what if steam deck performance is Lots but I'd rather just run it sub 15 watts to get an extra hour or two of battery you're gonna have to stay tuned to find out and stay tuned for this message from our sponsor gorgeous gorgeous is a customer support platform that aims to revolutionize the way that 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,502,595

Keywords: Asus, ROG, Ally, Handheld, Steam Deck, RDNA3, AMD, Mobile Gaming, Republic of Gamers, AyaNeo, GPD Win MAX

Id: S9a3oAiN2ik

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Educational-Purple61]

Pointless until we see the price as you can already get better that this

[u/dgafrica420lol]

Bad news, that usb c port isnt usb 4 and might not carry a signal. Hope isnt completely lost, but temper your expectations

[u/Klarts]

The thing about the deck is also the ability to repair it on your own and access to parts. Also there’s the useful trackpads and honestly steam os kinda rocks as I love having all my games siloed in their own sandboxes.

[u/ImALeaf_OnTheWind]

Already got OneXplayer 2 and GPD Win 4 incoming any day now so i can compare. I can slide the controllers off my OXP2 "Switch-style" and it just looks like a baby laptop in my business meetings with the keyboard cover.

Works great with my glasses - surprised no one has done an expo post on any of these higher-end handhelds yet.

Big takeaways: up to 32TB|2TB, Windows (for upcoming Nebula support), better formfactors than SD, 2x+ USB-C ports so no worries about "how do I charge while using my glasses" nonsense with the SD.