The ROG Ally is Still Getting Better (Updated Review)

[Music] hey everybody this is russer Metro game core the Rog Ally has been out for about 6 months at this point and they have a new firmware and software update that is coming out in the next couple days and I've been beta testing it for the past couple weeks and so as a result I want to do a check-in and just talk about maybe a six-month review of the r Ally and what my experience has been like since first getting this device so in this video we're going to talk about all the things I like about the Rog Ally and what sets it apart at least for me now we're also going to talk about some of the things I think can still be improved about it and whether or not that'll be within this model or a future one that Asus releases if they do make one either way I think this is going to be a fun video so grab a snack and drink and let's go ahead and dive [Music] in okay to start let's talk about what the r Ally is now this is a handheld windows-based PC and it is similar to other devices on the market like the steam deck or even the new Lenovo Legion go now even though I have reviewed each of those devices this isn't going to be a comparison video in the end of the day I think there's a big difference between the Steam deck and the r Ally and we'll discuss that more in the end of the video when I talk about my recommendations for the Rog Ally and other devices now there are two different Rog Ally models there's the Z1 extreme and then the Z1 and I happen to have both of them so I have tested each and done review videos as well now you've probably figured it out but the Z1 extreme processor within that model is more powerful than the Z1 non-extreme one and there's a price difference as well when it comes to retail it's $6.99 for the Z1 extreme however of note over the Black Friday weekend it went down to $5.99 and so I think there will probably be future sales like that in the coming months another thing of note is that many people have returned their Rog allies for one reason or another and so as a result there are open box options available if you buy it from Best Buy and so just at a quick glance looking on Best Buy I actually found a bunch of models for $4.99 and that's a pretty great deal considering it's $200 cheaper than the retail price now the Z1 is a little bit cheaper it is $5.99 retail but over Black Friday it was $429 and similarly the open box prices are pretty low as well $325 and considering that this is a full-fledged PC it's pretty impressive that we're getting something at that price now like I mentioned I've already reviewed both of these devices and between the two I would 100% recommend the Z1 extreme and there's a couple reasons for it number one the graphics processing is a lot better on that one so if you're going to be playing PC games especially those that are GPU intensive you're going to have a much better time on the Z1 extreme in addition I found the Z1 extreme to be more efficient as a chipset which means that you can use it at a lower power profile and still get some really good performance compared to the Z1 and that essentially means that you'll get better battery life playing the same game between the two models so anyway yes that's what the RG Ally is it's a windows-based handheld machine and I recommend the Z1 extreme over the other and and if you don't mind taking a little bit of a risk by getting an open box copy which still you know has warranty and all that then I definitely would recommend that if it's available for you next I want to talk about some of these software updates that are coming to Armory crate that's the front-end software that is made for the r Ally and this kind of works as a bandid in that it hides some of those crazy Windows functions you don't want to have on a handheld and gives you a more conso likee experience either way as I'm showing off the software you're going to see a watermark that says that is a Beta release but of course when the stable release comes out in a couple days this isn't going to be happening at all now it's just a really quick overview the game library is where I spend most of my time when I am in Armory crate this is going to show a listing of all the games that are installed on this device across a bunch of different platforms so my Steam games Xbox games Gog and so on and you can also add individual apps for example I have things like chiak for PS5 game streaming and then I could launch directly into the Xbox or steam apps or even emud for emulation now none of this is actually new this is just how Armory crate works so let's move over and talk about some of the updates since my last video number one let's talk about the command center which is kind of their quick menu within here you can customize all of these different buttons but these are the nine that I use the most now some of these are still pretty standard you can change your power mode to give it a different TDP and also your control style but a couple others have had some changes for example the realtime monitor now has three different options and two of these are actually now horizontal bars which means they're not going to take up much screen real estate but you can still see a lot of the stats if you want the smallest one is called minimal then they have one called row and then they've also got their standard one they've had before which they call square and any of these can be moved around wherever you would like on the screen at any time they've also changed out the resolution options now you have in addition to 1080P and 720p 900p and this is a great middle ground if you have something that doesn't play quite perfectly with 1080p but 720p might look a little bit too fuzzy for you now in terms of refresh rate there's no change here you can swap between 60 and 120 HZ they've also fine-tuned the FPS limiter so that's going to limit the frames per second anywhere from 30 to 45 to 60 to 90 to 120 frames per second another update is they've added a CPU boost option previously you had to go into the registry editor and actually change it yourself and so now you can turn this on or off with the tap of a button and this is going to be good if you're playing a game that doesn't require a lot of CPU power but you still want to save as much energy as possible and my friend the fox just did a video yesterday about this new firmware update and so I'll leave that link down below because he does give a couple demonstrations and it does look pretty great in fact in his example he got about a 6 wat power savings that's about 15% right then and there just by tapping that button of course it's really going to depend on the game and it's not going to be the best when it comes to emulation but all the same I love the fact that we have that choice and you can get it right here in the control center another option I've always enjoyed but has always been there is the ability to turn off the embedded controller and that's really handy if you're going to be docking the device and maybe the game is only picking up on the onboard controls but you want to use a different controller and finally there's an option to end task this will basically close out of that windows program be it a game game or anything else and immediately kill it and so that's really handy because windows can be wonky sometimes when trying to quit something and finally the last feature that's been added to this new software update is gyroscopic controls now this is something you could use with third party apps previously but now we have it baked inside of Armory crate and it's very easy to set up and calibrate in fact in the settings you can go into the calibration options and there's an option for gyro right here at the end now personally my gyro controls were working fine right out of the box but if you want to calibrate them it's very easy to do it right here now the way that you set this up is on a per game basis within Armory crate so what you want to do is hover over your game in the game Library press the x button to bring up the game specific menu within here you've got all sorts of options you can make changes to including like your button controls and power profiles and everything else however there's now a gyro settings option and you can set the gyro to mimic either a mouse movement or a left analog stick or right analog stick in this example I'm going to use right analog stick with Destiny 2 now if you'd like you can now set a button to enable the gyro or just have it on constantly and you have a ton of different options here but I'm going to use the left trigger this means that when I press and hold the left trigger like I'm aiming down the sight it's now going to turn on the gyroscopic controls so that I can aim a little bit better with motion controls on top of that you have a couple different configurations like you can invert the axises if you're crazy like me and you can also adjust the sensitivity and the dead zones anyway once you've set that up you're good to go now when you launch the game through Armory crate it's now going to embed all of those gyroscopic controls and so here's an example I'm going to press and hold the left trigger and then I can move the controller around and as you can see it's also aiming now on the steam deck they have even better motion controls but still this is the best I've ever seen on a Windows handheld I love the fact that you can make per game configurations and I have to say that for Destiny 2 one of my favorite games to play on this device I found it to work really well in general I'm still using the right analog stick to move around and to aim but when I want to do that fine-tuning aim like just a little bit to make sure I get that head shot it works out really well so I think this is a feature that I'm going to use on quite a a few games here going forward okay so those are the major changes at least for me when it comes to the software update that's coming in a couple days and I'm sure they'll have a big change log when it actually releases now I want to move over and talk about some of the reasons why I like the r Ally so much and I think first and foremost we need to talk about the screen there's a few things I really like about it number one we have a 120 HZ refresh rate and that obviously means you'll be able to play games at 120 hers but there are some other really neat features to it including something called black frame insertion which we'll talk about here later in the video now the other thing that goes part and parcel with the screen is that it has variable refresh rate and it also supports free sync essentially what that means is that if you're playing a game and it's going up and down in terms of the frame rate it's not really that big of a deal it actually is still a very smooth experience when playing on the rogg Ally if you try any other device and it's kind of going around like a yo-yo like that you can definitely feel that change in frames per second with variable refresh rate it just kind of makes it all seamless now another thing I like about the screen is that it looks really sharp it's a 1080 display but then also it has this nice anti-reflective quality to it in fact I just recently did a video where I compared the OLED steam deck models the glossy and the etched glass and I found that the Rog Ally screen kind of made those look worse it had a higher resolution so everything was nice and sharp but then also the antireflective properties just made it look really nice now this is an LCD panel it's not even OLED but all the same I think it's one of the best LCD panels I've ever seen another thing I really appreciate about the Rog Ally is the audio now I don't think it's the absolute best a a I've ever heard in a handheld I still actually prefer the steam deck audio I know a lot of people think I'm crazy for thinking that but all the same I did want to make a note that the audio is very good on this device it has front firing speakers it's very immersive when you're using it and so that is big Kudos right [Music] there additionally this is still the second most com aable handheld I've ever used I can play it for hours at a time it's lightweight it just feels really comfortable to use those triggers are so much fun to use as well I just really do enjoy this experience I think the analog sticks are nice and smooth some people have issues with the dead zones but I never have and so I really enjoy the controls on this I still think the steam deck's a little bit better but all the same it's like going from a a to an A minus or an A+ to an a these are both really good controls and I think the Rog allies is the best at least when it comes to Windows handhelds another thing I like is just the Armory crate experience it does a really good job of kind of masking all the weird things that happened within windows and so it gives you a very conso like quality now it's not a perfect experience you're still going to have to go into Windows here and there you know use the touch screen maybe use the onscreen keyboard but all the same it's probably a lot easier on this one than any other windows handheld I've used before and so I do appreciate that factor and it's very obvious that Asus is continuing to update that software and they are listening to the community because most of the major gripes that people people have had they've been addressing them headon and so I really do appreciate that about the company in that they are working towards making it better A lot of the other companies especially the chinese-based ones like IO they don't really have a good response rate when it comes to people and having their issues they just happen to like put out a new device instead and hopefully that'll fix some of those problems I would rather that somebody focus on these software issues at hand and fix that with the device that we already have now another thing that kind of goes part and parcel with the Armory crate experience is just the power profile so there's a 15 watt like standard power profile available for the device and that is just like my default one I use that for basically everything when I'm playing a game that'll go up to 120 htz often it'll hit that if it's a lightweight or indie game but then also if it's a 60 HZ game it'll do that as well and so I've always found that to be kind of a plug- Inplay setting and that I just kind of set it at that and then let it go and when you combine that with the variable refresh rate even if you are getting a frame rate that's going up and down it's not a big deal because it's still a really smooth experience this is one of those devices where I actually prefer to turn off all the metrics where I don't want to see the frame rate or any of that kind of stuff I just want the games to play well and even without looking at the frames per second I have a really great time playing these games now another feature I like about the Rog Ally which is very polarizing is the fact that you can dock it and they have a specific external GPU that you can use with it it's called The XG mobile and I did a full review video of this and so I'm not going to retread a lot of that but it has really been transformative for me in my own use case I don't have a lot lot of space at my home we know we live in kind of a cramped house in Hawaii and so as a result I don't really have space for a big old desktop and so I love the idea of using the RG Ally and the XG mobile together and what that means is when I'm out and about I can just use the RG Ally as a handheld and play all my games but when I get home I can plug it into my little dock plug in the XG mobile and then all of a sudden I have a full desktop class computer and I don't have to worry about having two different computers two different sets of files everything's just working on my one machine I bought this little double laptop stand on Amazon and this has been really helpful I can put the XG mobile here and then when I'm ready I can throw on the Rog Ally and then put them together and this is much smaller than a full desktop PC and the great thing is that when I plug it in like this I can play a lot of games at a much higher resolution or with better graphics so most games will play at at least 1440p if not 4K and still with a pretty stable 60 HZ as well and so when I'm playing a game on mobile it's like a different experience and then I can plug it into my monitor and get that full like desktop PC experience as well and so I've been really enjoying that for several months at this point now there are some downsides to this number one these gpus are expensive and proprietary it's not going to work with any other windows-based handheld it's only going to work with the r Ally and some of the other Asus laptops that they have and like I mentioned they are expensive so the most high-end model came out earlier this year it is a 4090 mobile GPU and this costs about $2,000 I do not own that one that is crazy now the other models are cheaper last year's model is the 6850 XT this is an AMD mobile GPU this one's about $7.99 but I found that it's actually sold out everywhere I'm not sure what's going on there but that is kind of disappointing that is one that I actually bought myself and I did a bunch of testing with that's what I used in my review video now since then I've upgraded to the 3080 TI that's the 2021 model and Asus actually sent that out for review and so that's why I ended up using that one instead it's a little bit more powerful than the 6850 initially I was having issues with it but once I updated all the graphics drivers on the Rog Ally then everything started to work a lot better either way I'm using the 3080 TI now and it's been working great it's about $1,000 so still very expensive but all the same it does give me desktop class performance on my computer without having to get a full desktop PC and because I'm very limited on space I do really appreciate that and I use it every day but of course I completely understand why people do not like this thing because it is very much so a one-trick pony however for my use case it is a really good fit okay a few more things that really make the r stand out for me number one is that it's easily accessible at least here in the US I can just go over to Best Buy and pick one up and the nice thing about that in addition to just being able to get it the day of is the fact that you can return it at Best Buy if you don't like it so that does make it very easily accessible if you just want to try it out and then maybe return it if you're not going to like it and like I mentioned there's a lot of open box models because many people had the same idea and so as a result if you want to pick up an open box model you can get it for even cheaper it's kind of one of those things where the community is helping themselves out by trying it out and then returning it and making it cheaper for the next guy so I really appreciate that it's pretty cool now another thing about the RG Ally that's great is that it's becoming popular and so as a result we are getting more and more accessories for it for example Tom talk which is one of my favorite case makers they made an Rog specific case previously I was using a hard shell case made by them for the steam deck and it was a little bit loose but this one is super tight on the outside it has this rugged water resistant texture which I think feels really good but then inside it's nice and soft it's like a rabbit inside and it's got a little pocket for your mic SD cards as well and it fits the Rog Ally perfectly and so I've been really enjoying using this one I'll leave a link to it down below another accessory I've been using a lot is this one it is called The Alley mate and this is made by a company called mechanism they used to be called deckmate but they Chang their name because they now support multiple devices and this essentially is an accessory system so you can hook this up into your device and then you can use all sorts of plugins that will come with it so for example a kickstand or you could hook up like an external battery there's a lot of things you can do about it and I made a full review video about this I'll leave it link down below as well and finally there have also been some thirdparty buttons available including these right here from my friend at sakuro retro modding they've been making buttons for retro handholds for years at this point they have a big Etsy store and so you can pick them up there and I think they're something like $28 but to be honest I actually plan today to go and put these into one of my RG allies however as soon as I opened it up I realized that I was going to have to basically dismantle the whole thing to get inside there that means I'd have to take out the cooling system and the full PCB because it's not just one little controller module and so as as a result I kind of got scared off because I realized it was going to take me a couple hours to do that and so we're going to have to save that for a different project either way it's pretty awesome that they have these buttons available and so if you are interested in upgrading your buttons to a different design and you don't mind really getting into the weeds with your device then this is what I would recommend okay next I want to talk about black frame insertion now this is a feature that's been around for a long time but it's something that recently came to my attention and I've really been enjoying it with Retro Gaming now in particular this will only really work when it comes to Retro games if you have a panel that's 120 H Herz or higher so for example this would also work on the Lenova Legion go either way when you're playing 60 HZ content and it can be emulated games or PC games what it does is it puts a black frame in between each of the other frames that's why you need 120 Herz because it needs to do that in order to run the 60 HZ game itself and essentially this is mimicking the same phenomenon that happened on CRT televisions what that means is it'll look a lot like a CRT when you're playing it that way and it's really hard to explain in a video here but but let me show you a couple demonstrations so right here is just me playing Super Mario World at a regular 60 HZ refresh rate and this is probably what you're used to seeing just overall now there's an option within retroarch to turn on black frame insertion but I found that it can be a little bit unpredictable with the r Ally instead I've just been using a really lightweight app that you just open up it's an exe file and it'll turn on blackf frame insertion with your 120 HZ panel and so this is a look at Super Mario World with blackf frame insertion on you're probably not seeing any sort of difference right here it's not something that my camera can pick up on and I don't think you'll be able to see it through YouTube anyway essentially all you're going to see is a black bar moving up slowly and that's just an artifact of the way that I'm filming this right now which is at 4K but at 60 frames per second and it's really hard to explain what this is without actually showing it to you so it's one of those things you have to see to believe but essentially it makes it a lot more of a smooth experience especially when you're playing scrolling games and I found in particular when it comes to Old School retro games it makes a world of difference now it doesn't have to be CRT based games specifically even handheld systems like PSP and Game Boy Advance these also still look really good in fact you can also play PC games like this this is not limited to emulation however bear in mind that if you're susceptible to flickering for example with an old CRT monitor if you used to get headaches that same thing will happen right here but for me personally I don't notice that at all with the naked eye and so it does improve the experience for me significantly so let me show you an example here playing them side by side on the left we just have it running at 120 HZ but with this 60 HZ content tent and then on the right I have black frame insertion on and as I jump with Donkey Kong you probably can't see a difference at all here however I'm going to slow everything down so now everything's running at a 10% speed and what you want to do here is watch the bottom of the feet of the rhinoceros when he's jumping up and then same thing watch when Donkey Kong is starting to jump down you'll see a little bit of blur on the left side meanwhile on the right side it is crisp and clear no matter what and so that's one of the big advantages here is that it reduces motion blur and as a result everything looks super smooth as you're playing it so if you have an Rog Ally or a Lenova Legion go anything that can play 120 htz even your computer monitor I would recommend trying this out for Retro Game emulation and it's pretty amazing that we can do this on the Rog Ally with the help of just one tiny little app and here's a great example this is Super Mario World but the widescreen version so it's taking up the full 16x9 so it's like a ridiculous widescreen version of this classic game and I'm also running it with black frame insertion and it looks amazing as I'm playing it this is something that's so far beyond what it used to be back in the day but man I still really enjoy it and it's pretty awesome that we can do that on the r Ally so in a nutshell those are all the things that I really like about the r Ally and why I keep going back to it as my main Windows PC but of course there are a few things that could be improved and some of these things could probably be fixed in software but other ones will probably have to wait for a future release now when it comes to this specific model there are two little ncks that I have number one is the brightness of the RGB lights around the analog sticks personally I love having these RGB lights but I think they're a little bit too bright on the lowest setting you actually only have four different options you have off 33% 66% and 100 and so generally I just play it at 33% but I found that to be too bright when in a low light environment so I'd love for this to be in 10% increments because I think like 10 or 20% would be just perfect another thing I think could be improved upon is the micro SD card issue if you're not familiar with it basically what happened is with the early releases of the RG allly many people had issues with their micr SD card slots burning up and we never really got a definitive answer what's going on here but many people lost SD cards that got corrupted because of this or just the slot stopped working allog together on my first review unit it actually broke completely I wasn't able to read any cards so I sent it back to Asus for forensic evidence and they went and they did all their poking and prodding and they sent me a new one now unfortunately I didn't put an SD card in that one for a couple weeks I was doing a bunch of testing and by the time I put a Micro SD card inside that one also wouldn't read the card either so I've had two for two when it comes to Broken micro SD card slots now these were very early units and I've been told that they fix this problem now so any of the new ones that you buy are a lot less prone to actually having this happen and if you do have this problem you can send yours two Aces for free and they'll fix it up or send you a new one back now I do appreciate the fact that they found the fix for it and they are able to repair your device but all the same it's a bit of a bummer that it happened in the first place and then the second one is that they didn't extend the warranty on all the r allies it has a one-year warranty which I think is pretty fair but all the same I think that they should extend it for micro SD Card issues in particular I think that 18 months or 24 months just makes a lot more sense that way if you have one of those early units and you kind of treat it like a ticking time bomb at least you'll have the comfort of knowing that you'll be covered for 18 or 24 months instead so I think it's a little thing in the fact that I wish that they would extend that warranty a little bit for micro SD Card issues and that is something the company themselves could do with basically no repercussion now the other two things I don't like about the RG Ally that I wish were fixed I don't think can be fixed in this model number one is going to be the battery life so this is is a 40w hour battery same size as the steam deck but the steam deck is a lot more efficient when it comes to low power gaming and so as a result the steam deck does give you better battery life basically when you really try to push the r Ally you can get about an hour of game play and then just on an average kind of use case where you're not pushing it too hard you're going to get about 2 hours altogether now it's not the end of the world it actually is a fast charger and so because of that you can plug it in and charge it really quickly or of course you can plug it in while playing and that's also going to alleviate that and so down the line I hope that they can improve the battery life by either giving it a bigger battery or using a more efficient chip as they get developed now the other thing I don't like about the RG Ally are the face buttons they are what I call clacky so they have a little bit of play to them that means the button will wiggle left and right if you move it and when you're playing a game especially those that you push down on buttons a lot like Hades it gives you kind of a clacky experience and so I don't really like that feeling I wish it was just a little bit tighter in the Shell that way it was a tighter experience I think that the steam deck does this really well and I think that other console controllers like the Xbox and PlayStation are also very good in that regard anyway that's a real quick summary of the things that I like and I don't like about the r Ally and so let's start wrapping up and talk about my recommendations and my own personal use case and we'll start with my own personal use case so I've been playing a lot of lightweight PC games a lot of this has to do with the fact that the battery life is going to be a lot better because it's not so demanding and so as a result it just doesn't give me as much battery anxiety on top of that those games will play at 120 Herz which always looks awesome and then the other side is that I do play a fair bit of emulation now I don't play a lot of retro games on this I usually will use a retro device for that but all the same some of the high-end stuff so like Nintendo switch Nintendo Wii U emulation those have been really great on here too in addition the Z1 extreme chip is very good when it comes to PS3 emulation this thing can basically play any PS3 game you can throw at it in fact over this past weekend I finally got God of War 3 working I had to dump my disc and then do all the decrypting stuff that you have to do to make it work but once I got it working it's pretty incredible it's not a perfect experience it's not like at 60 frames per second but all the same I would consider this to be playable there's a few graphical artifacts here and there but you know this does make me want to replay that game altogether just bear in mind that you have to pump a lot of power to make God of War 3 work on this device and so it's going to chew through that battery in about an hour so this is one where it's probably going to be better to play it docked or at least plugged in now let's talk about recommendations and as a caveat this is 100% subjective so this is just my opinion and you are welcome to have your own now the thing is the steam deck versus the RG Ally is usually one of the bigger concerns people have and I did a whole video about that comparing the two and a lot of those factors still really stand today it's a little bit different now because the OLED steam deck just makes a lot of improvements that weren't there in my initial review and so I still do prefer the steam deck even when it was an LCD panel but now it's even better with the OLED one so here's the way I look at it number one if you want a very conso like experience for example the ability to just go into the steam store pick up a game and start playing it and have the kind of Nintendo switch interface then I I think the steam deck is going to be the best in that regard now there are some limitations here for example Game Pass does not work on the steam deck in addition there are certain games that just don't work fortnite Call of Duty Destiny 2 if you want to play those games specifically then you're going to want to get a windows-based handheld and when it comes to those the RG Ally is my favorite for all the reasons that I just explained now other people enjoy other devices for example the Lenovo Legion go is one that a lot of people are enjoying right now this one has the exact same chipset but with a bigger screen and a bigger battery and detachable control rolls and so there's a lot of features that you might prefer with the legion go for me personally I like something a little bit more Compact and lightweight and so the Rog Ally works really well for me so the way I see it if you want a console-like experience overall then the steam deck is going to be your best bet but if you want the most conso like Windows Experience I think the r Ally in its Armory crate software actually gives you the best experience and if you have access to a Best Buy then I do recommend picking one up testing it out and if you don't like it no harm no foul you can bring it right back by the way the same thing is a available with the legion go so you can go to Best Buy or even Micro Center and pick that up and then test it out and see if it's going to be a good fit for you and given the fact that these are very expensive handhelds I think it's pretty awesome that you can try it out and have an easy return process if it's not a good fit and finally my last recommendation is that if you're not in a rush to buy any of these handhelds then I would say just wait because the longer you wait the cheaper they're going to be I think that both Lenovo and Asus are going to create future revisions of these devices as the years move on and so as a result you'll probably see some these devices like the original R Ally going on clearance at some point so you'll be able to pick it up for cheaper and you never know the next revision might be even better in many regards and so it's always better to wait if you're not in a rush because if you don't spend the money now you can probably get a better value later anyway that's really about all I had to say about the Rog Ally in my six-month review and let me know what you think in the comments down below did you pick one of these up are you one of the people that returned them or do you still have yours and are you enjoying it and why as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 229,275

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Id: 12AdwEfIvOM

Length: 28min 13sec (1693 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2023