Their Best Yet?.. With One Issue - Anbernic RG556 In-Depth Review

hello everyone my name is the fo in this video we're going to be reviewing bernick's latest handeld their RG 556 thank you very much to amernick for sending this device out to me for review this is using the new uniso t820 chip so this is a chip that we haven't seen in any retro handheld yet so we're going to be taking a look and seeing how this performs especially compared to other devices that are out on the market it starts at around $175 we'll talk about that a little bit more let's start up with the specs first up first obviously to talk about is the 1080p 5. 5 in AML display which is actually really really nice it starts off with being a tinge bit blue but we can correct this by Android system we're going to touch base on that more in a little bit next up to talk about is obviously the uniso T20 chip this is an octacore chip however this is essentially two different CPUs that on here we have four cortex a76 however only one of those will clock up to 2.7 G the other three a76 cores will only clock up to 2.3 GHz the four remaining cortex a55 chips are clock can clock up up to 2.1 GHz now largely for our purposes when we think about this for emulation purposes the core that we're going to care about the most is that One Singular core cortex a76 that clocks up to 2.7 gz that actually gets us across the finish line for a bunch of different emulation tasks however when we compare it to other different handouts that are out on the market right now we are going to be falling behind in a few different aspects however we're going be pushing far further ahead than a lot of Cheaper handouts that are available right now so this is going to find itself in a very interesting bracket where you want to have specific amount of power but you also really want to have this very nice display on the GPU side we are looking at the quad core M g57 that runs at 850 MHz I'm also glad to see that we are getting 8 gigs of LPD r4x Ram this is a standard for the higher-end retro Android emulation handouts that are out there I think that 8 gigs is kind of the minimum that we should be looking at and this is just getting there of what we want to be looking at compared to the other models that are available especially in this price range also having 8 gigs of Ram we do have 128 gigs of ufs 2.2 storage that is on board you can expand this with a Micro SD card it is running Android 13 and we also have Wi-Fi 2.4 and 5G so you have full Wi-Fi and latest bluetooth support with Bluetooth 5.0 I am going to be showcasing a number of different emulators and types of emulation tests that going to be possible on this game we're going to have a whole segment in this video demonstrating what this device is capable of I want to first start off by talking about battery life battery life on this device is really excellent however if we compare it to something that just came now like the retroid pocket 4 Pro we're finding that there is a little bit of a difference between the uniso 820 and the mediatech uh D100 and so far is how they handle different Power Scopes so if we take a look at my particular power test here on battery we can see that I'm running the Crash Bandicoot test that I normally like to do because this is fairly intensive however not too strenuous on CPU it is a good look at what types of the maximum battery life that you're going to get out of the device reasonably speaking right you're going to be able to play something like PlayStation 1 emulation which will do some three 3D emulation as well as needing CPU as well but even running this particular task we're getting around 15 hours of gameplay this is just under what we were seeing for the retroid pocket 4 Pro which has technically a smaller battery the emck RG 556 has a 5500 mAh battery so around 10% greater in capacity than the Retro pocket 4 Pro however the Retro pocket 4 Pro is lasting about 30 minutes longer while having a slightly smaller battery but this is still a very good result having 15 hours for my Crash Bandicoot test that I have here this is a best case battery life scenario relatively speaking right like if you take a look at General emulation test and how long you'll be able to run at medium brightness you're going to find that you're going to be able to get up to 15 hours of battery life that doesn't mean you're get 15 hours of battery life everywhere with more demanding test this is going to scale back a lot if we start pushing this a lot harder put maximum brightness you're going to start really Jing down how much battery life you're going to get something to around about four or 5 hours so anticipate between 5 hours to 15 hours of battery life which is truly excellent and what we should expect from the current Suite of hand dos that are on the market today next let's take a look at with am bernick rg56 is reasonably able going to emulate on this device now I'm going to be showing you some stuff like from Atari or from Nintendo or any of the very very older generations and you should anticipate that most all of these are going to run without a hitch the only thing that I want to kind of point out here is if we're going to be doing integer base scaling there are going to be considerable uh pillar boxing and letter boxing at the same time so you will need to play around with how you're going to be scaling these elements and you may have to turn off integer scaling just to properly fill out the screen as much as possible or use widescreen hacks to try to figure out how that's going to all align up inside of the frame of the OLED 1080p display this is not to say that's a negative of the device but it's something to keep in mind because there are other handhelds that have different aspect ratios especially for retro handhelds that fill out the screen a little bit better and maximize that type of screen so in this particular Arrangement we're looking at games that are going to be playable inside of the space but we're also going to be able to play 16x9 games and other types of stuff like streaming games we'll touch more on that in just a second as we go along there are some Benchmark games that I like to run for emulation purposes when we take a look at PlayStation 2 emulation one game that I love to run as a benchmark game is Burnout 3 this is a game that honestly just recently maybe just a few years ago has been properly done so that it is actually rendering correctly it is emulating correctly it used to be that the Skybox wouldn't render so you'd have to hack it up a bunch and it's also a game that runs at 60 FPS so it is quite demanding this is a game that I consider a benchmark game and if it runs on a handheld then that is The Benchmark that we're looking for as if this game runs then there's going to be a large percentage of PlayStation 2 games that are going to run while we don't have full frame rate when running this game there are some hitches for the most part it is quite playable so in my look at this when I take a look at as a benchmark game there are going to be a number of games on PlayStation 2 that may be too demanding to run on this particular console the other thing to to notice that the Amber neck RG 556 has a standard and performance mode however in reality that doesn't do much and we'll talk more about that later on this video another Benchmark game that we like to run on the GameCube side is f-zero this is a game that demands to be run at 60 FPS and if you have any hitches it becomes very very noticeable and if you're getting something that is sub 60 frames a second quite often it's basically unplayable you really need to switch over to the pal base version which runs at 50 FPS unfortunately when I'm playing fzero on this particular retro handheld I could not find any configuration whether open GL or Vulcan or even using mmgr dolphin where this was something that was working reasonably well so this is something to keep in mind that you're not going to have every GameCube game that is going to be working on this particular retro handout also for PS2 emulation there are going to be some challenging PS2 games that are not going to run well or you're going to have to PIV your thought and not get the ntsc versions and get the pal versions to be able to play them well that's just something to keep in mind moving down the chain a little bit Saturn is a very hard emulator run in fact Dreamcast which is a more advanced console that came out is far easier to emulate than Saturn is just because of Saturn's particular architecture one game that I love demonstrating as a benchmark game for my own is Dragon Force 2 there's a translated version of this that came out I'm a huge fan of Dragon Force as it is the thing that I want to make note is that you can actually hear it just in the main menu screen if you hear audio popping that is a significant indicator that the CPU is just not able to handle the emulation to actually catch up and you need to use Beatles Saturn emulator because it's the only one that is accurate enough to actually emulate the game there is no other Saturn emulator that will actually run this game so this is a benchmark game that I like to run because if it runs this chances are it's going to run pretty much every G Saturn game underneath it so if you're looking at to play some Saturn emulation this is one particular Avenue that you want to look at and this is going to be something that's going to be really nice outside of that everything underneath it is going to run just fine N64 Game Boy Game Gear 32x Genesis Super Nintendo uh all of that is just going to run just fine and it looks absolutely stunning on the display itself self especially when you think of like all the pillar boxing and letter boxing all that from the older display is just pure black the whole package itself makes it very very nice to play especially the ergonomics of the device so it's something to also keep in mind other experiences worth mentioning are game streaming now unfortunately the analog sticks on amberx RG 556 aren't good at all so playing games via streaming just feel really not great like just moving around playing Doom it's such because the analog sticks want to snap to their cardinal directions and they will go to their maximum offset with just pushing in a little effectively the analog sticks more or less feel like digitals it would have made more sense for amck to just have bigger analog sticks bigger and better analog stick size because the ergonomics of the device are already taking up so much space why wouldn't you just at that point get bigger analog sticks on there and just have a better Control stream overall because you're already wasting space on the ergonomics so from a game streaming point of view unless you're using the d-pad it's not something that I personally find good it streams fine the Wi-Fi in it is perfectly fine I didn't have any issue with streaming and everything was crystal clear no latency all that stuff was all great however the analog sticks aren't good enough to actually be using for a streaming point of view so if you're looking at this to get as like a console companion to stream Cloud games or go on like GeForce now I really can't recommend it from that angle at all another thing worth mentioning is Android games working on this by itself also Netflix works on this device 's no problem you can go ahead and install Netflix you can download Netflix movies play Netflix stuff but also Netflix has their own game center where if you have a Netflix subscription you can download games that run on Android directly so there are going to be Android native games that are already included in your Netflix subscription and there's a bunch of games that you may not know that you already have access to that you can play if you're already a Netflix subscriber in this case I'm playing dead cells and dead cells works just fine so I'm using typically the d-pad to control everything you can use the analog and because the analog is very d-pad like it works just fine for dead cells or a very 2 based game so that's something that you should keep in mind is that Android games are going to run really well on this if they require the analog stick it's not going to be the best case scenario however you have a lot of different games that you're going to be able to play on Amber RG 556 with that out of the way let's get into the build quality part of this review where we're going to be looking at the fit and finish of the device itself especially going to be taking a closer look at that d-pad uh I really do think it's fantastic the analog stick and showing you how they aren't great at all and we're also going to be touching base on all the ergonomics of the device as well as finally stacked shoulder buttons let's get into it jumping into the build quality part of this review for amberx latest RG 556 we see Amber Nick's latest design Which is far more ergonomic than their older designs you can see their Slimline candy bar designs right there now those are far more practical for space saving considerations but if you wanted something that was honestly far more comfortable to use especially at length this new type of design that they have that is very reminiscent of a lot of different control controllers game controllers themselves it has been really good to use and feels super comfortable additionally they have the analog stick and dpad offset by a good amount so even using the analog stick to the d-pad is very comfortable overall so ergonomics Wise It's a big plus over a lot of the older Amber neck designs especially the types of plastic that the plastic that is used here I didn't really feel any type of thermal transference over there so it remain very very cool obviously it's a very low power device so you really shouldn't be expecting much of that to be transfer over but the different types of color designs that they have are really nice and I really do appreciate this translucent blue one that is the shell itself for the most part A lot of the things that you're going to we're going to be looking at here are very reminiscent of a lot of Amber Nick stuff one of the things that I love that am bernick does if we can get a closeup with this if you take a look right here you can see very clearly that the screen protector is absolutely flush with the inset of the display itself meaning that the included screen protector that they include on here number one is very easy to apply because it's going to fit into this group Groove perfectly but overall you're not going to have this weird little kind of sitting floating screen protector on top of it it feels like this is how it's supposed to be so that's one thing that amernick has done often with their types of devices where the screen protector will always be fitting inside of this inset it's one little thing that amernick often does not all the time but they often do it and it's a thing that I truly appreciate I know that some people get a little upset with very glossy types of material and having like smudges and fingerprints remaining on there this d-pad is that type of plastic where it will have that same type of feeling the d-pad is truly excellent we're going to get into that in a moment where we we talking about inputs in a moment let's just finish going around the bottom of the device we have a 3 and half mm audio jack our charging USBC Port now this USBC Port you can see that it's not really aligned all that well something that I really hope that a lot more of Amber devices maybe this one is just a oneoff that other ones have something that looks like when it's being mounted on there via the factory that it looks clean finishing off the bottom we have this micro SD card slot and because it's translucent we can actually see the bottom so you can see how it kind of slips out which is really nice so that's where you're going to be putting your micro SD card slots if you wanted to have expanded storage and not have to worry about buying or purchasing expanded storage on the board itself depending because they do sell different emmc storage sizes when you're going on the order page along the right side we just finish it off there's nothing else there it just looks rather handsome and at the top we have stacked shoulders thank goodness obviously we have a a lot of meat here for where the handle is so we should have space for having stacked shoulders as opposed to inline shoulders which has been something that Amber has been doing forever now so I'm glad that they went with these stack shoulders I don't necessarily think that it's necessary to have this much grip to have stacked shoulders as opposed to inline but I'm grateful that am bernick did it here we have our exhaust Port we have our volume up and down and our power button feel wise on the triggers they're perfectly fine I don't think that there's anything wrong or anything that I really need to comment on exactly they are very unique in their feel I wouldn't say that I could find a quick analogy towards anything they do feel like I would say elongated switch controllers obviously analog nature versus digital so that's something to kind of keep in mind but overall it is very comfortable in hand now let's start talking about these analog sticks these analog sticks are terrible they're awful so if you had any desire uh the display is also when it first boots up has a very blue tinge to it we're going to show you how you can fix that in a moment but I just want to jump over to the gam pad section of this taking a look at the analog sticks we can see that I mean they're just they might as well be digital uh they almost immediately jump out to their Outer Edge there is no problem with going to full range I mean they go to full range almost instantly there's heavy Cardinal magn magnetism you can see how they want to move is we're making this very big plus movement here and very little actual movement that's here even just like generally moving them around it doesn't feel very very good so this these analog sticks are I mean if you already have something where you have a bunch of meat here and you're not trying to save space obviously because this takes up a bunch of space at this point if you're going to be taking up this much space am bernick why wouldn't you just get bigger analog sticks because at that point we can have far better analog sticks and we're throwing away compact size here with these types of handles anyway so at that point just get better analog sticks because these are not good at all however the d-pad that is on amberx RG 556 is the best amberik d-pad that is a traditional membrane based d-pad they have ever made Bar None this is a fantastic d-pad and I would almost give it an A+ ranking I would just say that a bitos just Edge it out a bit this is still fantastic but there is a feel to it that I'm not really all sold on and 8 bitto's membrane based really are the best in that regard however that is truly Sensational if you were looking at other d-pads that are also excellent Amber am bernick makes the arcd Deep head this is reminiscent of the Saturn dead which has a high pivot point and has a completely different feeling this is also a truly excellent d-pad but it's something that I think am bernick has at this point in my opinion have made a very good name for themselves with regard to knowing what they're doing on their d-pads and this is truly their best d-pad yet jumping into the display we're going to be talking about a few different things first up I want to address that there when you first boot it up it's going to have this very blue tinge to it what you should do is go over to settings how I found mine was it was defaulted to this automatic mode in display if you go to colors and contrast right here this was set to auto mode I would get out of automatic contrast and just go to standard this alone has helped immensely it has a far less pronounced blue feel to it now I would say that this particular live wallpaper makes things worse or can kind of flavor to be far too blue so I would go ahead and say change the wallpaper this is going to make it something that is a little bit easier to see something that I wanted to do myself so I just go to home screen and set it now the other thing to note is you may be able to see on my display that there's this kind of Rippling effect that is because of the OLED panel itself and how it does its pwm if we max out the brightness you're not going to actually see anything and I'll show you that in just a second so the strobing that you're seeing is a pwm type of quality that a lot of OLED panels exhibit and this is how they kind of control their brightness is that instead of just uh dimming the pixels themselves they'll kind of roll through and uh fluctuate how fast they're turning on and off depending on the brightness is going to be how going to depend on how much strobing is happening for what it's worth this is a type of BFI as I've always seen it because there isn't a backlight like LCDs are where you're going to have the back panel that is strobing against a static set of screen because this is self emissive this is an OLED panel which should help motion Clarity so the other thing that I want to take a look at is just the display info itself taking a look at the panel itself we do have a 5.5 in 1080P AMOLED panel it is running at 60 HZ every way that I've looked at it this 60 HZ is locked is really really good the nits that is reported goes up to 500 which is very very bright and when we take a look at brightness or how dim it gets it gets really really low as well the other thing that I wanted to point out here is the touch sampling rate and this is always important this is reporting at 116 htz the sampling rate that it's getting so it's basically double of whatever the refresh rate is which is what we like to see we'd like to see touch sampling rate to be at least double of whatever the panel refresh rate is okay so let's start wrapping up my particular review for ambex RG 556 there are some things that I don't like about the device but where this device finds itself in the current landscape at the moment being at the early bird pricing at $175 with shipping on top of that it does find itself in the spot that it is comparable to other devices specifically like the retroid pocket 4 Pro which I just recently reviewed which finds itself at $200 plus shipping on top of it as well now the performance from the D100 the mediatech d1100 finds itself to be a little bit better than what we can get on here we can actually get it across cross the finish line in a lot of different ways that are better than the uniso uh ta20 that we have here so if you're looking from a Pure Performance angle I would say get the retroid pocket 4 Pro however if you're looking at ergonomics the amberin RG 556 is a clear winner obviously it's going to be bigger because the the ergonomics of the device are larger has more meat on it so from whatever angle you're looking at if you want something that's more sto stowable something that's going to take up less space the Retro pocket 4 Pro is going to win in that matter however the display the ml display on this device is superior than what is on the retroid pocket 4 Pro even though what's on the retroid pocket 4 Pro is fine there's just a lot of weird issues going on with that display and it is a very nice device however the AMOLED display on this is nice as well so you really have to think about what types of games you're looking to emulate on this device first before you go anywhere else now the things that I really don't like on this are the analog sticks the retroid pocket 4 pro has analog sticks that seemingly they're the only ones that have and honestly they're far better these ones are practically digital in nature so that's something that I don't know I just really can't get behind so that's something that I just find to be a genuine negative for this also we take a look at performance on this when we take use amic's own software to change from standard mode to Performance mode nothing really changes effectively there is no benefit to doing either or and I didn't even see any difference in terms of battery life of changing those performance levels so that's something that just seems a bit odd so from an Android system level and how things are configured on this thing the Retro pocket series of devices is a bit better in that regard as well especially updating the device I still think that with the pricing of this model especially pricing it does find itself in a really good way the moled display the ergonomics of the controls and how everything else Works minus the analog s are very good that's pretty much everything that I could say about am bernick's latest device their RG 556 I hope this was informative as always guys thank you for your time and thanks for watching

Channel: The Phawx

Views: 9,189

Keywords: Phawx Plays, Let's Play, Quick Look, Steam PC, PC Gaming, Handheld PC Gaming, emulation, retro emulation, retro handheld

Id: 2R12PTbI31g

Length: 20min 53sec (1253 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024