ROG ALLY X - We Gotta Talk.

I was originally torn as to how to approach this video because on one hand Asus launched their RG Ally X the follow-up to the RG Ally and this product is awesome way better than I thought it would be based on the rumors but on the other hand the same company Asus has been under heavy controversy over bad RMA practices and just like terrible customer support and that whole conversation stemmed around this product here the original Rog Ally so over the past few weeks that I've been testing the alliax I've been reaching out to Asus so I'm like you guys you guys need to make a statement about this you guys need to do something about this whole controversy because like people need to hear something now they finally responded with I think a message that the entire Community needs to hear uh so this video is going to be split into two parts first I'm going to evaluate this product solely on the merits of this product as it is just like separate from all the controversies and stuff but uh the second part of this video we need to talk about customer support particularly asus's approach to this whole thing okay so first the RG Alx this isn't a major overhaul of the device it's a lot of small changes that ultimately add up to make it feel like a significant update and the biggest one being its battery life so this is now an 80w hour battery now on the original Alli uh one I guess we'll call the Ali 1 this had a 40w hour battery and it's just double straight up double the battery size and from most of my testing it's literally double the battery life now for whatever reason Asus won't allow me to show you actual testing numbers but you can imagine it's simple physics right here's the battery life of the original RG li1 so if you double the battery size you can kind of imagine what the new battery life would be like on RG liix and it's a very significant bump like if you're running this on the 15 wat performance mode you can realistically get like 3 hours plus of in-game run time it's like that's crazy good and then also if you dip this down to lower wattages so if you're running it at the 10 watt profile or if you're just locking the frame rate to like 60 frames per seconds in some games you can get like Nintendo switch caliber battery life like like six seven sometimes eight hours of battery life like it's crazy how good the battery life is on a Windows handheld and I think for them to pull this off like the tech and the engineering required to pull this off was difficult to do because they doubled the battery size on this machine without it changing in form factor or ergonomics over the original one uh the other thing they've changed with lax well the other major one they've changed is Ram so now it has more RAM and faster Ram so this now has 24 gigs of RAM and faster Ram compared to the 16 gigs of RAM on the original RG Ali and because these are amds apus they're sharing the memory between the system memory and the GPU so the extra 8 gigs of RAM can have a decent impact on performance but it depends on the game uh keep in mind though that the CPU and the screen remain unchanged with the new product so uh it doesn't have an OLED screen or anything it's got the same 7in panel it's an awesome panel that was originally on alli1 but they didn't update it or anything on the Alx and same with the CPU it's still running a Z1 extreme I don't think the chip should even change until we see a fairly big step up in Energy Efficiency from AMD or Intel because that's really what these types of processors are all about right it's got to be a super energy efficient chip to able to last with good battery lights uh now a few changes in terms of like the Aesthetics and ergonomics so obviously the big change is the new one is black seemingly only comes in Black at launch uh but also the ergonomics of the device so if you'll notice the new one in black has it's just like a bigger hump on the back the original RG allies was like a flatter design and even like the kind of angular cutout so down on the bottom right it's just like a very sharp angled cut off and on the new one is like a more rounded curve and just in general the moment I picked up RG Al X you could just tell it's a more just an ergon more ergonomic feel uh buttons and inputs have all been updated the major ones are the sticks this is a more it's a more responsive stick it's got a higher tension on the spring it just bounces and moves around more responsively also the d-pad has been updated but all the inputs including the back buttons have all been tweaked a little bit now if you'll notice on the original RG Ally there was an XG mobile Port this thing was used to connect to their proprietary uh external GPU but on the new one Alli X instead of that proprietary Port they now have two USB C's one of them being us before with Thunderbolt compliance so you can connect up external gpus and docks of your choice so the overall product is just a lot a lot of little tweaks that I think make the overall product way better than the original the one thing that's a little bit disappointing is that they changed the shape just enough that a lot of accessories don't fit on this new product it's kind of annoying like I just recently picked up the kill switch like this is the dbrand case and this thing doesn't fit on the new one it's close like I tried ramming it in but it just doesn't fit so uh this is an awesome case I think this is actually one of the I think the best looking cases that you can get for the all I had this thing on the steam deck as well but doesn't fit on this new one now inside you might be wondering how do they double the battery life of this thing and the battery size of this thing without it becom way larger or heavier like the new Alli X is only about 70 G heavier than the old one and the way they did it is actually quite interesting one of the things they tackled was the weight of the casing it's a lot lighter but also the thermal system has been reduced in both size and weight and that was a little bit concerning because typically when it comes to Thermal systems you want things to be bigger and heavier like that just allows you to have the most amount of Hardware in these things to be able to pull off the heat right but somehow they made this new one smaller and lighter and they claim that it has better thermal performance than the old one so I think like 25% more air flow and when you look inside the new fans definitely have more blades but in terms of thermal performance and fan noise I do want to test this stuff properly on retail units before I draw any conclusions uh also a new SSD position so you can now have full length ssds in the allix compared to the Shorties of the original li1 so it's just a little more convenient if you want to upgrade the drive inside these devices now the last thing is the new Alli X has a brand new SD card slot so if you know the lore of the Alli x uh the SD card slot has had problems in the original one so the new one they claim it's all new and I think this is a great point to transition over to the next part of this video which is a talk about the customer service of Ally so on the very first day that I did a video of the original RG Ally one of the first comments I saw it was on y combinator some guy wrote this the RG Ally seems like a really nice piece of Hardware having said that I cannot possibly stress enough how bad of a time you will have if it breaks and you have to deal with an RMA or Asus customer support you'd probably save yourself a lot of time and frustration by just throwing it in the trash and buying a new one or a steam deck if something goes wrong with it now this was written on May 17th of 2023 so like well before any of the SD Card issues popped up and well before any of the gamers Nexus or like any of the issues could have possibly popped up with the original Ally because this came out right at the launch okay I remember reading this way way way at the beginning and I thought to myself how is this the comment the top comment on a thread on in a civilized thread right this isn't like some cess pool of red this is like actual conversations about people interested in hardware and I thought the only way that this thing's bubbled up to the top is because Asus has built themselves a reputation over the years of having dog water RMA and just customer support policy that that is why this is there now over the course of the year they proved this Asus had terrible support for Ally rmas and terrible support and Communications around the SD Card issues and it all peaked when Steve over at Gamers Nexus had a problem with his ally sent it in and after a little while the whole situation just exploded into a wonderful display of how bad the warranty and R policies really were with Asus now I think the reason why it is so bad with this particular product is it's the price I think Asus priced the original Ally too low they were too aggressive at$ 699 they wanted to compete with the steam deck and they wanted to make something that was attractive at best boy and I don't think they baked that like the whole idea of like warranties and fixing things I don't think they baked it into the price properly like the the actorial math guys they're just they they messed up and so now you have a ton of issues and the only way to fix it is to spend money like this I'm talking about Asus here Asus has to spend money to fix all these things and they just don't have it baked into the price of this product and that's why I think this product the new one is priced higher this is now $100 more at $799 and obviously it's a better product and bigger battery and whatnot but typically those types of improvements don't cost $100 more I think the reason why they they jacked up the prices because okay we get it now in order to do these things in order to fix these problems you just have to have the budget baked into the price of the product and that's why this thing is $100 more uh so my stance on this whole thing is that before I shot this video I'd been reaching out to AC I'm like dudes you guys need to have an improvement in policy or something needs to have changed internally so that people have confidence and in buying this thing or else I'm not even going to show this thing I don't even want to make a video on the Ally X until there's some kind of confirmation that there's something legitimate something real that when it comes to affecting the original Ally because there's a lot of people that are pissed about this product I don't blame them I would be if I had an issue with this thing and I couldn't get it fixed and they wanted me to do stupid things to get it fixed no so uh it turns out I just got an email this morning there's a confirmation in the email from Sasha over at AC and he's saying that they now have 2 years of warranty full warranty on the original Alli I assume this is going to be some kind of press release eventually but uh two full years so that's not just SD card but the full product two years now that I mean that's awesome to me that's a that's a good step in the in the right direction I would say that that's even like a bigger step than I would have expected like that's a very that's a good solution to the problem and they're also apparently making like more repair places in the states to be able to make this process a little bit easier for people and faster but I wouldn't buy any of these products not the old one or the new one until you see something from Asus written that jives with how you feel about this situation because it is it's been really bad and this is a gaming handheld these are not motherboards and gpus these are like you know kids buy these things too and they just want these things to work these are are inexpensive relatively and they should just work it shouldn't be crazy amounts of effort to be able to fix something that is not your fault so I'm glad that they've done that two years of warranty on the old one sounds awesome I don't know if it'll be two years on the new one but we'll see

Channel: Dave2D

Views: 509,645

Keywords: Dave2D, Review, asus, ally, rog, ally X, ally 2, versus, steam deck, legion go

Id: b6ymEz1PmBc

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 02 2024