The Loki Zero "Ultra" - The Definitive Upgrade and Teardown Guide

I've been using the Loki zero for the better portion of the last week as my main handheld and I got to say I still absolutely love this device while spending the last week getting some indie gaming done on this device I've also been really enjoying SE of stars but since I've been spending some time on this and since this is my main handheld for the last week I've also been doing a lot of tweaks on here to try to get the best performance possible out of it today I'm going to show you a couple different tricks here to get the absolute best performance possible out of the lowkey zero today though I wanted to do something a little special with this handheld we're going to be turning the low key Z into the lowkey Zero Ultra by doing a couple extra tweaks to this device every aspect to Performance we're going to be pushing this thing to its absolute limits we're going to be upgrading the Ram from 8 gigs to 12 and in that regard we're also going to be able to get 2 gigs of vram while still maintaining 10 gigs of ram in Windows I got something special plan for these joysticks and I'm interested to see what you guys think about it we're going to try those as well and we're also going to upgrade the storage I could have done something a little bit more excessive with the storage but since this is going to be mostly focused on Indie gaming and lighter aaa's I definitely wanted to have some some limitations here for the SSD I've gone with this Micron one here that I pulled out of my rag Ally I did have this in my steam deck but I downgraded my steam deck to 256 since I was using my R Aly more I figure 512 gigs of storage should be way more than enough for the emulation titles and the Indie titles that we're going to be playing on the Loki zero however if you want to upgrade your other Loki devices with a bigger hard drive go for it I figure 512 should be way more than enough for my purposes for the memory upgrade I chose to go with an 8 gig stick of crucial memory this is speced at 3200 MHz at 1.2 Vol cl22 that's pretty decent latency for 32 200 MHz and I figure this should be a pretty decent chip for the device itself there's a Community member that has been doing some testing on the ram itself and he figured out that the internal one that's already soldered to the board is speced at 3200 MHz the ram looks like it becomes desyn if you use anything different than 3200 MHz I believe so I'm going to try it using this and we're going to see if I can get it in sync you do lose a couple FPS if they're not in sync however if you do want to match the onboard memory you do want to have that 3200 MHz you can use a 4 gig chip if you only bought the 4 Gig model but I'm going to go for the 8 gig one here I was tempted to grab a 16 but I figured 16 was a little overkill for the CPU and I fig8 is a good balance using an 8 gig stick of memory here is also going to let me use 2 gigs of vram I have been vram Limited in a few games at 1 gig but for the most part 1 gig is the solid gold medium here that you want to aim for 2 gigs though should definitely give you some overhead and I think that's kind of what I'm going to be aiming for here and since this is 3200 it should also match the memory that solder on the board this 8 gig stick actually came out of my mini form 690 let's give this a try in this PC and see how it [Music] goes before you do any upgrades on a device like this you want to make sure that it's completely powered off in case you're wondering how that plastic has been holding up on the back it's been holding up pretty good it's actually pretty decent for anti fingerprint still and I'm not noticing much there's a couple there but for the most part it doesn't look too bad to get the back plate off we're going to need a small filp screwdriver I'm actually kind of concerned that I don't have a screwdriver with a head this small so I'm going to see if I have one of these and I'll be right back there's four screws on the back here though so we're going to need to get these off before we open the unit in case you're wondering about the screwdrive driver size this one fits perfect so this is the one I'm going to be using for the tear down let's go ahead and take those four screws out now when you've got those screws out make sure to take out your micro SD card now that we have those out and the four screws out we're ready to take off the back plate let's try getting this open I'm going to stick the pry tool here along this seam and we're going to try to pop it open so what I found worked best was actually just sticking my finger nail in the seam here and then going down along the locks just stick it in here at the start and then you can use the pry tool to go along the edge just work way around the edge with that the side might be a little bit more difficult but we should be able to get that open too yeah that's not bad I thought that was going to be harder I got to admit though this device has been pretty easy to open so far and it's just sliding it down here it is popping them open pretty easy let's continue and get the rest open rest of the other side is pretty easy to get off as well and then the back plate just lifts off make sure all the screws are out before you lift off the back plate unfortunately I didn't have it filming when I pulled it off but all you had to do is just go around that last side and just lift it straight up and it came off really easy and now we're inside the Loki this is really well built I love how they position the PCB the cooling it's really well designed you can see the SSD there we're going to have to get that out to do that we're going to have to lift off this fan and that's not too hard either I'm going to use my ceramic tip tweezers to get this little sticker off to remove the fan you're going to want a slightly bigger Phillips at this point I would probably recommend disconnecting the battery however since it's under the board here it's kind of hard to get out we should be fine though however as we are only removing the SSD and we're not touching any of the electronics here to get the fan out all we have to do is to remove these two screws and it should come up pretty easy let's go ahead and do that now now all we have to do is to peel this up a little bit bit so we can lift this fan out of the way you can use those tweezers again to do that if you take a little bit closer look at it you can kind of see how it looks the heat sink in this thing is absolutely massive this is kind of hard to see but on the lowkey Zero there is a small latch the latch is right here and that's what's holding the fan in so once you got these two screws out just pinch on each side of these locks and it should come up pretty easy there you go just be extremely careful when you're lifting this as there's still a plug in the board down here and you don't want to remove that we got to go back to our small screwdriver to get the rest of the shielding out there's a few small fan headers and power connections that we need to remove this one and this one they run on this little plastic piece here and that's blocking the memory from coming out all I did was unplug these then just pull the one that was on top up first and and just drag it down through this little crevice here then I got the other one out and now we should be good to pull this plastic piece off we might actually have to get the SSD out first so let's take this out next my model had a bywin AP 445 pcie M2 Drive never heard of it before but it's been pretty decent so far if you look closely though yeah that was holding down the board because this is going to pop right out now there you go now we can swap the ram these two locks on the sides just have to push out for it to get unlocked then the stick should come right out the Stick of ram I had was mm 2666 with a cl19 latency never heard of this either I had an 8 gig model so there's four on the board and four here if you saw the way I pulled that out the notch is up here at the top so you want to make sure that the notch is further down as you put it in if you look directly under the heat sink you'll be able to see that Notch slot that in place then push it down until it locks well what made it a heck of a lot easier was making sure that it was pushed in on both sides when it was pushed down on both sides it went down pretty easy but I checked it and it looks fine and it also doesn't seem to be damaged by being close to this now that we got that in there let's put the case back on plastic shielding can go on next now let's just put those screws back in then we just put the M2 drive back in make sure the notch lines up when you're putting these in there you go when you're sticking these in just make sure that you're following which ones you're putting in this one here that connects to the speaker you want to make sure that that one goes into the speaker one there is some text here telling you which one is which in case you're curious though the bottom one here is for the speaker and the top one here is for the rumble those are pretty easy to push in just with your fingers I would also recommend putting them in in that order as well because the bottom one here is the one that goes underneath in this little crevice then the top one is a little longer and it can go on top going into that one there the fan should just snap down into place onto these clips use the top part here first then lever it down into the bottom it'll clip onto these two clips here once you push that tape down all you have to do is put these two screws in if the screws aren't going in make sure to look down straight over top of the hole here so you can see if the screw hole underneath lines up let's get those two screws back in that was a little finicky but not too bad and there's one more thing that I want to swap out and that's these joysticks these joysticks are pretty good but the Caps also match the frame I kind of wanted to accent it a little bit so I got these These are caps from the King Kong Pro 2 Two controller and they should work absolutely flawlessly in this device I'm going to swap out the black ones for these silver ones here and I think this is going to look really sharp thankfully these joysticks are a little bit easier to get into we just have the one ribbon cable at the top and the three screws let's take out this ribbon cable and these screws and swap that cap here's a closeup of the controller boards and the cap itself this cap to remove it it's pretty easy all we have to do is just pull it straight off there you go these are not allall sensors unfortunately but they're still pretty decent joysticks let's get that silver one on there this is what the Caps look like on the back they're a little different but for the most part I think this one should work with no issues this one is also slightly smaller but I think it should be okay okay you guys got to admit this looks pretty awesome I think that looks amazing in and they're really smooth too there's a little bit of opening but I don't think that's going to be an issue because people mention that you can use Xbox caps on the King Kong Pro 2 controllers you should be able to use them on here all we have to do now is to do the other side there's still three screws on this side and the one ribbon cable so let's pull that out and swap the cap I got the other two Originals here and I'll keep these as a backup just in case I want to use them again just give a once over quick to make sure everything is plugged in before you close the back then all we have to do is just put the back on and put those four screws back in to get the back on what I generally like to do is use the hinge method so start at the top get those clips in then hinge it down to the bottom let's go ahead and do that now this part here on mine wasn't completely closed so I just had to push that shut the edges look okay and the bottom was fine as well let's get those four screws in and start it up after swapping it all all I had to do was just clone my old OS now that we've Clon the old OS you can see yeah this thing looks awesome these silver joysticks look amazing I've also previously unlocked this bios thanks to the BIOS that Ayn has shared on their Discord Channel if you haven't done so yet make sure to check their official Discord and look in the Loki zero chat it should be pinned in the comments let's power this thing on and I'll show you what's going on with it in Windows after cloning the drive the OS is the same as I left it so the only difference now is we have that extra hard drive space I've gone from a 128 to a 512 and yeah I got lots of space now this drive is also a lot quicker than the other ones so I shouldn't have any issues as far as the ram upgrade well there's a little story behind that the ram upgrade went successfully and we now have 11 gigs of RAM I have 4 gigs on board and that 8 gig memory stick that brings our total to 12 gigs of RAM however I am using 1 gig current for my vram I'm going to be Hing this to 2 gigs as I definitely don't need 11 gigs of RAM and windows and I think the extra gig would do really some wonders for the vram on this device I've also gone ahead and set the memory speed to 3200 mahz someone on the official Discord figured something out that was a little interesting so the onboard 4 GB memory on the Loki Zer is clocked in at 3200 MHz and if you remember the one that we pulled out was 2666 this causes some issues now because the memory was clocked down on both it still was fine but if you look in the CPU Z under the memory page here you can see now that the clocks are asynchronous before they were out of sync this would cause a little bit of FPS dips that's because I've gone ahead and changed that frequency of the ram systemwide to 3200 MHz we're also getting CL 20 latency which is pretty decent and the command rate of one is excellent think of a command rate as how often the car has to go around a racetrack to get the one lap there's either one timing or two if you have one well the car only has to go around the racetrack once at the top corner here it also shows us that we are still running in dual channel the only thing is now it is in sync and we are currently matching the memory frequency of the RAM on the motherboard it won't show us the specs of the motherboard Ram but someone was able to pull that off using some extra tools the memory here though does show us yet we're using single Rank and that's excellent single rank memory is a little bit quicker for gaming as opposed to dual rank the good thing is as well is we're not overclocking this memory to get this sort of frequency we're running 1.2 volts across all these different frequencies here so 3200 is 1.2 this means that battery life shouldn't be affected by the overclock either and that's good to see now that we know the RAM and the SSD are both working though let's go over to the BIOS and I'll show you how to get this all set up getting into the BIOS on this unit is pretty easy all you have to do is to turn it on and hold these two buttons down on the bottom give it a little while but it should boot into BIOS directly now that we're in the Bios just make sure that you have a keyboard plugged in the next thing that we need to do is to confirm the memory over clock go to the advaned tab scroll down to the AMD CBS then go to the UMC common options and then load up the ddr4 common options the first option here is the one that we want the dam timing configuration it's going to say yeah this is an overclock are you sure you want to do it this is where you got to be careful because you can cause issues with your unit if you set it too high I know this memory is officially okay up to 3200 MHz so that's what I'm going to set mine to once you're okay with it just go ahead and click accept make sure to enable the overclock at the top and all these options should come up the first option here the memory clock speed is the memory frequency you'll notice that this is half the rate of the memory advertised that's because DDR is double data rate so this is effectively doubled in Windows to set this to 3200 MHz well you just got to set it to 1600 MHz as mentioned earlier the memory on the motherboard is 30 3200 MHz so you want memory in this unit if you're going to do an expansion on it that is 3200 MHz so it matches if it doesn't match the memory is going to be out of sync so you want to make sure to get that 3200 MHz in there to get those extra few FPS everything else on this menu here though leave to automatic don't touch anything here press Escape escape again you can also load up the dram controller configuration and this first option here is the command rate I do recommend setting this to one as most memories should be able to handle that this does get you a little bit better fps in games but for the most part leaving it on automatic should just be fine since the memory in my unit is going to automatically set it to one anyways with it on auto I don't recommend changing this until you know what it's doing I'm going to press Escape Escape escape again all we have to do now is to change the vram setting the vram is pretty easy too it's under that AMD CBS option then scroll down to this one here we're looking for the graphics configuration which is the top one you have to make sure to set this integrated Graphics controller to forc the mode you want to make sure to set it to specified this lets us change it to whatever we want if you have an 8 gig model I do recommend only setting this to 1 gig if you have over 8 gigs of ram in your unit I would recommend sending it to two anything more than 2 GB is not really recommended on this unit as anything more is kind of wasted the Apu and this device here isn't going to be able to take full advantage of using 3 gigs of vram and up so 2 gigs or 1 gig are the only options that I would recommend I'm going to go with two since I have 12 gigs of ram in my unit using two in this unit should give me 10 gigs available memory for Windows which is more than enough once that's been set all you have to do is escape then go to the far right and save changes and exit go ahead and save those changes we've got Windows loaded up now let's check the vram to make sure that that's showing correctly under the graphics tab on CPU Z you can see yeah we got 2 gigs of vram and the memory for the GPU is set to 3200 MHz this should help immensely with gaming and as mentioned you should be getting anywhere from 10 to 20% FPS increase unfortunately I didn't record any benchmarks before but memory is also single rank so that's pretty good as that is going to be a lot better for gaming than dual Rank and the clocks are in sync now too which is nice over overall this was a really nice upgrade and it fixes a lot of issues we've given ourself a nice SSD so everything's going to load a lot quicker we've also given ourselves some extra memory and some extra vram I'm interested to see what kind of games I can play on here now so I'm going to give it a couple more tests and see where it sits have you guys upgraded the storage in your unit yet what do you think about it do you think you'll upgrade the RAM to let me know in the comments below I was going to take some performance measurements on this device after these tweaks but unfortunately even though I'm setting it to 20 watts it's only getting upwards of 16 Watts total most of the time however even when setting it to 20 wats I'm hovering around the 12 wat mark it'll occasionally jump up to 14 or 15 but it's definitely not keeping that TDP that I've selected in the lowkey control center I do know that a is aware of this issue though and they're going to be working on a fix soon hopefully however in the meantime it's pretty hard to take performance measurements when I can't use the entire processor however one thing I'm noticing for sure is because of the memory we fixed we're now getting a lot more consistent frame times and frame rates as well even though I'm limited to 16 watts and under this is still helping immensely on a lot of games even on Persona here yeah the vram is definitely going over 1 GB I've never seen it hit two and it's probably come up to about 1.4 Max but the increase to vram is helping this game most likely though we're still GPU limited as you can see at the top here it's definitely reaching 100% in this case though that's usually the factor in why we're not getting better frame rates but the vram is a welcome Improvement and going over 1 GB to 2 gigs is definitely helping the memory tweaks are also helping the frame time here and we're getting a lot more smoother frame rates zooming in a little bit while playing CS star shows a good picture of how the Ram has been fixed if you look at the frame time in the top left corner well look how smooth that is occasionally before you would see a little hiccup there and it wouldn't be very smooth this would only happen every couple minutes though and you wouldn't really notice it in gameplay but now since the vram has been up to over 1 gig we have it sitting at 2 gigs currently and with that Ram fix yeah look how smooth that is this is definitely making games more playable and I can't recommend this mod enough even if we only added the same frequency memory to the lowkey zero here I believe that it also would fix the issue as well it's not a vram amount thing here I believe we'd be fine with 1 gig of vram as well it's getting that memory tuned correctly up to 3200 MHz and keeping it in sync that's causing a lot of the issues at least that's what I'm pretty sure that's going on here without further testing or another unit I would have no weight of noticing because unfortunately I've already upgraded my BIOS and I don't want to take it apart again if you're noticing issues though on your Loki or any of of the lowkey devices in general it could be something related to the memory for now though I'm still limited to 16w TDP so hope they get a fix out for that soon but as mentioned they are aware of it so I'm sure they'll get that fix out eventually as for the most part though I still love this console and I've been having a lot of fun with it with these fixes in place this makes this console way more enjoyable and I can easily recommend it still since this fixed a lot of the latency issues with the spikes in the frame time I definitely recommend this mod even in my initial review on this unit I didn't even notice those little latency spikes due to the memory until I looked closer into it someone in the community mentioned them and when you start looking for issues you start finding fixes if that's been a problem for you well this is how you fix it and it's a good way to make your unit look a little cooler with these joysticks overall this was a really fun mod and the unit is a lot better now that I've managed to fix all that if you have any questions make sure to let me know in the comments below make make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any future videos and as always thanks for watching

Channel: Kei's Retro Gaming

Views: 16,417

Keywords: kei retro gaming, kei's retro gaming, retro handheld, handheld emulator, gaming handheld, ayn, ayn loki, loki zero, ayn loki handheld, ayn odin, odin 2, ayn odin 2, ayn zero, windows handheld, windows portable gaming, windows game handheld, windows gaming handheld, mini steam deck, steam deck mini, mini rog ally, micro gaming handheld, steam deck alternative, rog ally alternative, rog ally, steam deck, ayn loki zero, loki upgrade, loki ssd upgrade, loki ram upgrade

Id: MwR2_uR2amw

Length: 23min 15sec (1395 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 01 2023