What Asus Didn't Tell You About The ROG Ally

so I managed to get my hand on a Rog Ally I was pretty excited to pick it up especially because I do like the steam deck quite a bit and I'm excited to see this handheld PC gaming Market continue to gain popularity and have more and more companies come in with some of their ideas and the Rog Ally certainly has some ideas to it and I know this has been going over by a bunch of people because Asus sent these out a while ago for previews so we have frame rate comparisons battery life all these different things but today I wanted to spend some time going over things that Asus really didn't mention much specifically inside of the device so if you guys enjoy the video make sure to like button and subscribe if you're new here to the spawn wave Channel let's start first with an unboxing I figured I picked it up new we might as well go ahead and have that entire experience in the video the Box itself I mean it looks fine it just has an etching of the Rog Ally itself on the front on the back there there's just information around this specific raw Ally that I have which is the Z1 extreme model opening up the box we are greeted immediately with the Rog Ally it has a plastic wrap around it which is good for protection but it also showcases how to plug it in and you know I will say that based on the i o on the top it could trip some people up so at least it's straightforward there and then of course how to power it on but moving that to the side we do have a couple of boxes underneath which does include our charger it is just an overall charge brick so you're not able to unplug the USBC cable and then plug another one in or something to The Brick there's also another box inside that has a lot of the warranty and instructional information oh and this is interesting on one side there's a little stand that's encased and it's kind of just made out of like paper styrofoam materials it's not exactly sturdy necessarily but it does work and basically it has the Rog you can see the Rog logo there but on the other side of it there's a bit of a concave and the Ally will sit in there and I guess that way you can sit it up on your desk or or something and technically it works with the charge cord plugged in considering it charges at the top so yeah I guess you can kind of leave it in there if you don't want to hold it up or something or if you just want to leave it there and kind of let it charge it's a way to sort of display it and I assume it didn't cost them a lot of money to include it just based on the materials that it's made out of okay so onto the Rog Ally itself removing the the plastic wrap around it I will say this with Asus they did at least show up to this sector with something that is a bit more aesthetically pleasing than the competition the steam deck wow it is a good handheld it it looks functional it is the right word to say whereas Asus showed up trying to make something that looks good it is all white obviously as you can see it has the RGB lighting around both thumbsticks and then on the back we do have some of the the vent holes kind of dressed up a bit one as the Rog logo itself and then you have like this color shifting strip that goes diagonal top left to the bottom right going back to the front of the system though we are greeted by the 7 inch 1920 by 1080 screen in that 16 by nine orientation it is an IPS screen and it has Gorilla Glass on the front as it is a 10 point multi-touch display it has a refresh rate of 120 hertz response time is 7 milliseconds and the brightness comes in at 500 nits for controls we have two analog sticks in the asymmetric orientation a d-pad that well it's there we'll discuss that a little more later on a b x and y in the top right we have a couple of buttons around the screen though uh start and select but then we have two buttons that act more as hotkeys that we'll discuss a little later as well and then we have two different speaker grilles on the bottom right and left on the top we do have a three point five millimeter headphone jack an SD card that does support uhs2 we have asus's like mobile connection alongside of the USB type-c input that does work to charge as well as data transfer is USB 3.2 gen 2. we have volume rocker next to that a couple of indicator lights for charging and Power on as well as our power button behind those you can see two large vents we do have a dual fan set up here inside for cooling then we also have our right bumper left bumper right trigger left trigger I do like the texture on those as it does make it a bit easier to grip them left bumper and right bumper are pretty straightforward they're just tactile buttons inside however right trigger and left trigger are a bit more interesting because they're using hall effect sensors that is magnets inside and they are tracked by different sensors on the board it's kind of neat because it does give a pretty reliable tracking method for either one one of those so whether you're playing a racing game or maybe a first person shooter it'll track the entire throw whether it's really short or the whole way and then we do have two buttons on the back that you can customize and set to whatever you would like for the game you're playing at that time I also noticed that around the edges where you would be holding the Ally it does have sort of this texture that's imprinted into it that makes for a better overall experience holding it gives you a bit of better grip right and this is something we've been seeing more and more with different controllers or handhelds and I hope it's just more of a trend going forward especially for these premium devices I will talk very briefly about my experience using the Ally this past week so initially I fire it up I go into Game Pass I start downloading different games I had a problem though in that it it wouldn't launch anything and I realized that out of the box the date and time was off so if this happens to you and you can't figure out why Game Pass isn't launching into games it's because the DRM is kind of confused and you just have to go down to the bottom right where you have the date and time and just adjust by going in there unchecking the set to internet time check it again and it should be good to go anyway after I got all that figured out I downloaded some of the the usual titles Forza Horizon 5 plague tale Yakuza like a dragon because that's an awesome game I feel like to play in this form factor and you have different Power profiles you can pick so I mentioned you have those two buttons around the screen that act as hotkeys essentially and one will launch the Asus Armory and the other will launch the extended information that you can change things up on the Fly Like Your brightness or if you want to use FSR or if you want to change your power profile so for example you can go into quiet mode and that's like 5 or 10 watts or something and then you can start moving up to Turbo and there's like an all-out mode so yeah like 15 watts then you have 30 Watts if you go up to 30 Watts you have to understand your battery life is going to be terrible and it was to the point where I could watch the percentage just go to tick down as I'm playing Forza Horizon 5. it's like you're driving these really fast cars you assume the the fuel gauge you just watch it's tick down kind of the same thing here with the battery life on that right side so because of this I feel like most people would opt to turn down settings for textures even resolution to use that 15 watt mode in order to get a better longer lasting battery out of the system the only problem is at that point that that setting it doesn't compete the best with the steam deck and we've seen that in many of these benchmarks and that kind of comes back to my biggest issue or at least the Ally's biggest issue right now it's not even really the battery life or maybe the temperature inside of it it's actually Windows as weird as that sounds because the steam deck is set up out of the box with an experience that is molded and crafted to the steam deck whereas the the Ally is attempting to use Windows so at this time it's up to Asus to continue to refine and try to optimize windows for this Ally device but also they have to kind of rely on Microsoft to understand that this Market is kind of exploding I would say right now or at least it's it's in its infancy and it has a shot at becoming very very popular so Windows needs to also be able to adapt to that and that's something I would like to see Microsoft do and the fact that they seemed very involved with the Rog Ally during the initial like introduction event that they did a couple months ago at least makes me think that they have plans to extend Windows to be more friendly with some of these handheld devices now if we just talk about performance it's pretty impressive to see things like Forza Horizon 5 running at 60 frames per second on a handheld and while again it's not necessarily going to last more than an hour or two at best using this uh the 30 watt mode I still had some pretty good frame rates at the 15 watt mode and that was at 1080p which I mean that's a big Advantage here for the Ally while it does have 120 hertz refresh rate very rarely was I able to get anything really moving above 70 or 80 frames per second of these titles and that's dropping everything a low going to 720p and upscaling it's just it's not something that's going to be utilized much unless you're playing older titles or maybe certain Esports games but finally let's actually get into the Rog Ally when I mean into the Rock Ally I mean tear it down and take a look at what's going on inside I also wanted to discuss some of the upgrade options and the repair ability to it because as we know things go wrong you're your thumb stick could get messed up the the nvme drive inside can get corrupted the fans can break so I wanted to also go over the the difficulty of fixing and repairing this thing let's start with the back though there are six Phillip head screws the one in the middle at the bottom does not come out okay so if you have to open this up just understand it's designed to sort of stay there you just have to unscrew it to the point where it's loose and that should be fine the other five though do come out they're longer screws and you're going to notice something as we go through all the other screws for the most part are the same size so it does make it a bit easier to keep track of everything here now if you flip over I do want to point out L2 and R2 as we had mentioned before they're using hall effect sensors and you can kind of see the magnets in there but what I really like about this it feels like they saw R2 and L2 and realize that is going to take a lot of abuse and there's a lot of throw to those buttons they they spent some time engineering this to be higher quality and a bit more reliable they kind of remind me of laptop hinges to a degree and they have two Springs and the the design is high quality so hats off to Asus for that unfortunately I can't say the same thing about the little back buttons here they're all plastic yes they're just designed to press one tactile switch on the back of the board but it's uh not exactly high quality stuff it's pretty cheap anyway shifting our attention back to the main unit we can see everything here for the most part we do have a do not disassemble sticker down here which I figure is just for the battery and yeah we're not going to take the battery apart that's probably not a great idea but otherwise looking around this I mean we can see our heat sink once you remove the the sticker on top of it you can see the fans you can see the nvme drive in fact everything is pretty easy to get to first though you do want to unplug the battery which once again is a little plug right right here so be able to unplug the battery that easily and then get to some of these things like the fans or the heatsink it's definitely good for mods and I'm sure many people will attempt a couple of things here I do also like the dual fan setup that Asus decided to go with rather than try to have a larger heat pipe that maybe wraps around a single fan they decided to try to split up the heat removal process between these two fans and eject all that heat out of the top as you would expect but the fact that we have two fans here and yes a single heat pipe but going kind of in the split fashion means that the fans themselves won't need to work as hard to expel the air and keep the Apu at a decent enough temperature which is probably why you're seeing fan speeds or at least fan noise how audible it is be a bit quieter than what we see with the steam deck I did remove the heatsink right because we're gonna take a look at the the chip but the thermal compound is drier than I expected I don't know if this is going to have a massive effect on temperatures maybe a degree or two I'm going to replace this with mx4 but that was a bit surprising the thumb sticks are on their own separate board and in fact the rumble motor is there which is a good spot for it considering it's right up against the palm of your hands as you are using the Ally so you will get the the maximum effect from it then but when I remove the board I realized that the the analog stick it's plugged in but also screwed down on that side which means replacing the analog sticks are pretty easy so if these do drift on you which from what I can tell they're just regular analog sticks so they probably will it's not too bad and really you just have to have four screws come out to remove that board after unplugging the RGB ring and then just a couple of screws to unplug the analog stick and replace it with a new one oh and the split battery design is a good idea it works to balance the device when you're holding it in your hands as you want to have at least some weight to it but trying to figure out where to put the battery in these systems is a whole other thing when it comes to the engineering but I think doing it this way where you have the battery essentially split into two and then resting in the palm area it is good the Wi-Fi antenna does run down to the bottom of the system which typically you can kind of mess with reception by covering up with your hands but that's a good spot as you're not really covering that at all removing the board and taking a look at it it is a bit larger than the the steam deck I do like the the red look it kind of reminds me of my old fatality motherboard that's a that's a trip down memory lane after cleaning off the dried compound we are treated to the ryzen Z1 extreme processor the Zen four architecture from AMD on a four nanometer process eight core 16 threads 24 megabytes of total cash up to a 5.1 gigahertz boost yeah it's not messing around you can kind of see why it just destroys the battery in this system but on the GPU side Radeon graphics AMD or dna3 12 cus up to 2.7 gigahertz and as they mentioned 8.6 teraflops the biggest weak weak point to what we're dealing with now for these apus is certainly memory and just overall speed and bandwidth as that continues to improve then we'll probably see some of these devices be able to tackle that 120 hertz display at 1080p I do like they stuck with the theme and also used red glue around around the chip it's a little touch that no one's really going to notice but I don't know it's just a it's a fun little detail there I do want to point out a few issues here a few problem spots all right so while the power button is modular which is great that means like if you mash in the power button or maybe you drop it and it lands on it you can replace that you have to remove the board and do a lot to get there but it is doable the headphone jack and SD card slot are not and I am already envisioning SD cards going in backwards or some weird thing happening to where it destroys that and that's really the only method of expanding the storage outside of breaking this down and inserting a new nvme drives like a one terabyte or something so unfortunately if your SD card slot gets messed up you're gonna have to desolder inside our new one down to the main board and that is not a fun process it would have just been way better to have the SD card on its own board something you can unplug and then plug in and we see that on devices all the time so I guess this is just what Asus had to do to make it fit in this form factor headphone jack is the same thing and that's unfortunate because if you mess up your headphone jack it can cause all kinds of audio issues with the the system to where it thinks something's always plugged in and that's just another issue that probably could have been resolved with a separate board oh and I said I would talk about the d-pad it's just not very good and looking at it from the inside is I mean the pivot point is small it doesn't make contact with the board and what you end up getting are a bunch of false presses because you can just mash the whole thing down it just hits three or even four all of them at once so yeah definitely a big weak point here that Asus will have to go back to the drawing board the d-pad needs some work but for the most part looking at the Ally I have to give ASU some credit here it's not difficult to get into the system and when you do get the back off you can pretty much get to whatever you need to with minimal screws having to come out so if you have to replace the thermal compound replace a fan maybe upgrade or change out just the nvme drive because there are issues it's all right there with a couple of screws after the back comes off so when it comes to repairability outside of some issues like the SD card the headphone jack I'd say Asus did a pretty good job here for the most part but that's going to do it here for a look inside the Rog Ally and some of my early thoughts and Impressions on the device I think it is a pretty pretty neat system for the most part and I I feel like right now I'm more excited for the future of this sector than anything we have right this second and a lot of that has to do with overcoming battery life concerns and even trying to figure out how to really open up these apus barring obviously the the memory speed and bandwidth issues that they're currently facing but for what it can do it's still impressive to see how far we've come with these handheld devices and be able to play a lot of these console level experiences on the go again 1080p 60 frames for larger titles like Forza Horizon 5 it is impressive but let me know what you guys think about all this down below with the Rog Ally let me know if you picked one up and what your thoughts on on it so far thanks guys for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Spawn Wave

Views: 119,525

Keywords: rog ally, ally, asus, steamdeck, pc, pc gaming, pc gaming handheld, rog ally teardown, amd, amd z1, z1 extreme, forza, rog ally gameplay, rog ally unboxing, video games, spawn wave, spawn wave media, should you buy, is it worth it

Id: hGc-Fzbu-b4

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023