ROG ALLY 8 Months In: Can It Still Hold The Edge As King Of Windows Handhelds

hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again it's been 8 months since the Rog Ally hit the shelves and I've actually had mine for a little longer they were kind enough to send an earlier unit over and I've used the Ally quite a bit in those eight months in fact this has been my go-to windows handheld obviously when it comes to Linux we move over to the steam dag but there's no doubt that I've actually used the Rog Ally a lot more given that we can really get some amazing performance out of it if we don't mind sacrificing battery life so with this video I figured we'd go ahead and do an 8-month review a lot has changed since the initial launch we're seeing some great performance better battery live drivers and optimizations have been had so games that didn't perform well when this first came out actually perform amazingly now plus I'm going to be throwing in some newer games that we haven't seen running on the Ally yet but first things first the look in the field now I've always been a big fan of the design when it comes to the Rog Ally and it's super comfortable to hang on to for long periods of time it's actually a pretty light handheld when you compare it to others on the market I can reach all of these buttons not a problem and one thing a lot of people were worried about was you know this doesn't have Hall based analog sticks I haven't run into any kind of drift or anything like that but the one thing that I didn't like when it initially launched was the d-pad I'm not a fan of these dish style d-pads but it's kind of grown on me I personally haven't run into any issues when it comes to Platformers or fighting games and just to give you a look here this has been heavily played on by me and my kids for 8 months now pulling off special moves in Street Fighter 6 still super easy with this d-pad and when it comes to updates from Asus I think they've done an outstanding job we've received several major updates for the Rog Ally in the last 8 months bios updates Armory crate updates uh driver updates a lot of new stuff is here like the ability to kind of manually adjust that TDP directly from our quick menu we used to have to go into Armory crate to do it we can also disable CPU boost boost which a lot of games out there don't need those High clocks now some of them definitely do but the Z1 extreme which we have here in the Rog Ally has a base clock of 3.3 GHz and we're working with a zen4 CPU so this way we don't need to send as much power to the CPU in turn we can get higher clocks on the GPU in most cases and moving over to Armory crate SE this has been updated extensively we've got a lot of new settings here especially when it comes to Performance new little GPU section here that ows us to change the vram directly in Armory crate uh you could always do this from the BIOS plus we've got some optimizations here like radon super resolution antilag all the little AMD features can be enabled directly from there I've always loved this display 16x9 1080p up to 120 HZ now I will admit that the new steam deck OLED display does kind of beat this out the way it looks I'm a huge fan of OLED and AMOLED displays but for an IPS really great display one thing that would have been really nice on the Rog Ally is usb4 now we can connect an egpu but it's got to be the Asus or the Rog XG mobile egpus and those can get quite pricey having USB 4 or even just an extra USBC port on this would have been awesome like I mentioned at the beginning of the video performance has definitely been upped on the Rog Ally basically across the board there are games that we tested once this was released or shortly after it was released that didn't run well but now we're seeing some awesome per performance here's for of Motorsports and when this game was initially released we had to run it at 720p around 30 to 40 FPS but now we can go up to a low medium mix 900p and run this over 60 FPS I've got it locked down right now but now we can run this at 900p with a low medium mix at 60 FPS my favorite genre is racing be it arcade or simulation and a lot of the racing games that I personally love to play work great on the Ally now we're going to be hard pressed to play newer AAA games at 120 HZ given that we have this really nice refresh rate on this display but when it comes to any games it does work out really well I've been doing a lot of Hades dead cells and even older games like Left 4 Dead halflife 2 can run at 120 FPS on this and it's a really smooth experience with this freesync display and I'll tell you one thing that a lot of people get hung up about is TDP now of course everybody wants to compare this to the steam deck and I completely understand why steam deck runs at a maximum TDP of 15 watts and yeah steam deck OLED can get much better battery life than the Rog Ally but at 15 watts on the steam deck that's where we're at that's as much as we're going to get out of it without newer updates from Val with the Rog Ally we have the ability to up the performance by taking that TDP up and it can definitely help out with newer AAA games here's hell divers 2 and in order to get this to run over 60 or even at 60 20 watts is kind of The Sweet Spot here 900p low with some FS are so yeah taking that TDP up on the Rog Ally is going to take battery life down but in some cases it's definitely worth it to get a much smoother experience and in cases where you don't need to worry about battery life like let's say running in dock mode we can actually take that TDP way up and see a dramatic increase in performance so with the stock Rog Ally power supply uh 65 Watts we can go up to 30 Watts continuously 42 Watts for an extended period of time and 53 for about 10 seconds so that's kind of our maximum boost there and that's just from Armory crate se you can use a third party application to take this up a little more across the board and with this we can get those higher clocks on the CPU and GPU uh fans can definitely spin up a lot higher we've got that dual fan setup in the Rog Ally but we really don't need to worry about thermal throttling even here in desktop mode as I like to call it or dock mode cyberpunk 2077 1080p running in at 60 got a couple dips every once in a while but uh we are at a medium low mix right now taking all of the settings down to low and FSR to Performance we can do an average of around 74 FPS and just taking a look at a little more performance here we've got Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 I just Ed the built-in Benchmark here I'm at an 18 wat TDP this is kind of my sweet spot usually leave it here for most games recommended setting FSR set to balance 900p we got an average of 7 24 FPS with this Mortal Kombat 1 when this initially launched the Rog Ally had a real hard time running it but now we can do medium settings 900p FSR set the balance TDP is at 20 watts right now but we can run this game at 60 FPS and of course something like Po World actually does a pretty decent job but you got to take it up a bit the Rog Ally definitely isn't the battery King that Crown goes to the steam deck OLED you can get much better battery life out of that but with three different TDP settings here and this is true TDP not the uh built-in profiles 10 watts 15 18 screen brightness at 50% speaker volume 30% RGB off at 10 watts I can average around 3 hours of battery life 15 watts right there at 2 and at 18 Watts 1.4 hours of of course going up from here battery life starts going down but we do have 65 wat PD fast charging for this unit also now there is one ongoing issue with the Rog Ally that Asus says they fixed and that's SD cards burning up due to the placement of the SD card slot now I've got two Rog allies both Z1 extreme versions one with a 512 GB card one with a 1 TB card I haven't run into an issue yet but I know it's still ongoing a lot of people have kind of given up on the micro SD card with the Rog Ally and just upgraded the SSD I've done the same with both but I also like to have a little extra storage now I can't say for sure this has totally been fixed in new hardware revisions of the Rog Ali I've got both older ones basically launch versions and again I can't really speak on this because my SD cards have not failed in this unit yet but I know a lot of people out there have and it can definitely be a headache so in the 8 months that the Rog Ally has been on the market I've been having a great time with it I know a lot of people out there have also I think Asus has done a pretty good job with updates now it's nothing compared to the steam deck every week or every two weeks we're getting updates or official updates for the steam dag and one thing you got to keep in mind with that is yeah they definitely need to support that Hardware because they're making money from every single game you buy on that unit and that's another reason they can sell the steam deck for so low up front because they're going to make it up in the back end by you buying games they basically get a cut of every purchase on Steam so it makes sense for them to keep up to date with the steam deck keep everybody really happy with it Asus made the money from the hardware up front and that's about all they're going to make off of the Ally but yeah I do love the steam deck also definitely awesome Linux handheld I just wish it put out a little better performance and when the steam deck 2 hits with a more powerful Apu then these other companies making these handhelds are going to be in real trouble because I'll tell you I mean if I could run my games at 1080P or even 900p 60fps with everything on the steam deck I personally wouldn't need anything else but the steam deck 2 is a long ways off and there is rumor that the Rog Ally 2 is in the works some things I'd love to see there definitely an OLED display Asus does make the nebula display for their higher-end laptops or their zephrus laptops those are some amazing displays they support variable refresh rate awesome deep blacks great color gamuts if we could get one of those OLED nebula displays in the rog2 that would be awesome another thing I'd love to see is just out of the box Hall based analog sticks Hall based triggers that micro SD card slot definitely needs to be in a different location so it doesn't get so hot don't need any more failed SD cards out there and of course we need a more powerful Apu hoping for something with an rdna 4 IG GPU or even rdna 3.5 just so we can run the newer AAA games at those higher refresh rates and even if I have to lower the resolution down just a bit 900p still looks good on a 7-in display I'd be totally fine with a handheld like that but that's going to wrap it up for this video I think think that Asus has done a great job given that this is their first handheld gaming PC to hit the market updates are coming uh not as fast as some other devices out there and I'd love to know your thoughts in the comments below do you own an Rog Ally did you think about buying one did you buy one and return it if you've got one are you enjoying it why' you return it and what do you want to see out of the Rog Ally 2 let me know down in the comments below but that's going to wrap it up for this one and like always thanks for watching

Channel: ETA PRIME

Views: 166,192

Keywords: etaprime, eta prime, ROG ally 2, rog ally update, rog ally long term review, rog ally z1 extreme long term review, rog ally vs, rog ally vs steam deck, rog ally vs legion go, rog ally vs steam deck oled, rog ally vs steam deck performance, rog ally desktop mode, rog ally desktop replacement, rog ally desktop pc

Id: _YlW6cdqtRw

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024