The Rog Ally: A Promising but Imperfect Portable Gaming Console

As I sat with the Rog Ally, a portable gaming console that promises to deliver high-performance gaming on-the-go, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and curiosity. The device's sleek design and 120Hz 10-inch display caught my eye, with its promise of fluid gameplay and fast refresh rates. But as I delved deeper into the Rog Ally's capabilities, I began to notice some notable quirks and areas for improvement.

One of the most noticeable aspects of the Rog Ally was its battery life. While it may seem counterintuitive, running a 10-inch display with a 120Hz refresh rate can quickly drain the device's battery. In fact, my experience was that the Rog Ally takes around two minutes to exit and close, which can be a bit inconvenient when you're in the middle of a gaming session. However, I did find that switching to 720p resolution made a significant difference in terms of battery life, with the device lasting much longer on a single charge.

Another area where the Rog Ally impressed me was its port selection. The top-mounted ports provided easy access to HDMI, USB, and power, which is a definite plus for gamers who are accustomed to having their devices easily accessible. Additionally, the fact that the device can be expanded with the XG mobile chip and SD card slots adds to its flexibility and versatility.

But despite these positives, there were some notable drawbacks to using the Rog Ally. For one, the joystick control scheme felt a bit wonky, particularly when it came to navigating menus or adjusting settings. The trigger button, which I assume is intended for use with certain games or applications, seemed awkwardly placed and didn't quite work as smoothly as I would have liked.

One of the most frustrating aspects of my experience with the Rog Ally was the latency associated with its Gamepad functionality. While I'm not sure if this was a software issue or a hardware limitation, I did notice a noticeable delay when using the device's controller. This made me wonder if there was a way to mitigate this effect, perhaps through firmware updates or tweaks to the gamepad settings.

In terms of performance, I found that the Rog Ally struggled to maintain its 120Hz refresh rate in most games. While some titles managed to hit this mark, many others fell short, with frame rates averaging around 55-58 FPS. This was a bit disappointing, given the device's promise of high-performance gaming on-the-go.

Despite these limitations, I do believe that the Rog Ally has a lot of potential as a portable gaming console. Its design and build quality are certainly appealing, and the ability to play games at 720p or 1080p with fast refresh rates is a major plus for gamers who want to experience high-quality visuals on-the-go. Additionally, the device's flexibility and expandability options make it an attractive option for those who want to customize their gaming setup.

Ultimately, whether or not the Rog Ally will become your next portable gaming console depends on your individual preferences and priorities. While it may not offer the same level of polish and refinement as some other devices in its class, its unique combination of design, performance, and flexibility make it an interesting alternative worth considering. As someone who's already invested in the gaming market, I think it's definitely worth keeping an eye on this device to see how it develops over time.

The question is also clear that not many games are going to be able to play at 120 FPS which does lead us on to the interesting not conclusion but I guess the end of this unboxing First Impressions thoughts. The Rog Ally has a lot of potential, but it's still not quite there in terms of polish and refinement.

In my opinion, the design of the device is actually better than that of the steam deck. While both have their quirks and flaws, I think the Rog Ally's sleek lines and compact size make it a more appealing option for those who want to carry their gaming setup with them on-the-go.

The port selection on the top of the device is also very convenient, providing easy access to HDMI, USB, and power. And while the SD card slots may not be as large as some other devices, they do add to the Rog Ally's flexibility and versatility as a portable gaming console.

I would like to point out that this is a first impressions article and I'll be doing a full review after using this for a week or two something like that. So if there are some things I've missed like the ability to open up the keyboard with that button then apologies but people want to see the first impressions and I guess the question very much does go out to you on this what do you make of the Rog Ally?

Do you think this is going to be your next portable games console? Do you already have a steam deck would you consider swapping out for this or if you are looking between the two which one do you think takes you fancy the one that's arguably a little bit better polished or the one that's more flexible and expandable?

In conclusion, while the Rog Ally has its limitations and quirks, I believe it has a lot of potential as a portable gaming console. Its design, performance, and flexibility make it an interesting alternative worth considering for those who want to experience high-quality gaming on-the-go.

As someone who's already invested in the gaming market, I think it's definitely worth keeping an eye on this device to see how it develops over time. Who knows what updates or tweaks will be made to address some of its limitations? Perhaps future firmware updates or hardware revisions will improve its performance and overall user experience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enladies and gentlemen I don't think I've been this excited for an unboxing in a very long time because inside this box we have the brand stinking new RNG alloy this of course is a portable games console that's gonna I guess go toe-to-do with a steam deck it's a little bit more expensive but comes with extra features like 120 hertz display the brand new ryzen Z1 processor and it actually rocks Windows 11 as well so you can literally play I guess any PC game on this let's open her up and take a look ah here it is our origi Ally let's get this thing unboxed on top of the PC Centric mouse mat available at pccentric dot store and let's have a look well it's very white I really like this but I do immediately worry that it will get a little bit grimy because obviously you're going to be touching this pretty much 24 7. but it does actually feel very similar to the steam deck it does have to be set I mean immediately putting them side by side they're pretty much the same sort of size actually in fact it looks to me as if the screen size is identical but the bezel is slightly smaller and then the body is just a little bit less wide I suppose your left and right bumpers and Triggers on the top headphone microphone combo Jack micro SD card and this is actually rated all the way up for uhs2 and RNG actually say that there's not really going to be that much of a drastic delay maybe a second or two versus the Gen 4 SSD that's actually in the Rog Ally and then everything from here is pretty much as you'd expect you've got a volume rocker power switch more ventilation so let's get this thing powered on see if it's actually any good and let you know whether you should be interested in buying one right after a short word from this video sponsor ASRock Sonic motherboards are here and they bring the performance and value of ASRock with a flare of everybody's favorite Hedgehog with support for the latest platform features such as ddr5 memory PCI generation 5 and Intel's 13th generation processors your gaming PC has never been so well equipped give your gaming computer that Flair it deserves today with ASRock learn more with the link down below welcome back let's get this show on the road let's press that power button and see what happens oh oh it vibrated that's new we've got RGB around the analog sticks not sure about that I guess it is a very Rog thing to do and the thing for me that's really making me think should we say is the fact that this obviously runs Windows 11 and traditionally Windows has not been a good platform for touchscreens anything small and fiddly really and we've got to hope that there aren't really too many issues with doing it like this but obviously the benefit of this is that you can run pretty much any Windows game this is actually a surprisingly powerful console with that brand new ryzen chip so regardless of whether it's steam Xbox origin epic you should actually be able to play on this as you can clearly see though this is not the Windows desktop this is using some form of overlay to actually give you all of the information that you need without Windows getting in the way and as long as it works I have no problem with that you've got your little Command Center here that you can customize with loads of different things we've got different operating modes silent Windows performance turbos so if you do want to use this as a traditional PC then you can which would be pretty cool but I think most people want to use this as more of a console and maybe for lighter titles like CS plug in a mouse into a monitor that'll be quite called weapons if we go into manual mode we can adjust the wattage for our chips fan curves we can look at our system stats and then you've also got content which gives you your media Gallery systems specifications Z1 extreme navigate down to storage this is the 500 gigabyte model but you can buy different ones depending on what you're after I suppose not too much else to do other than to go into steam and actually download some games here we go look and steam has a fatal error needs to be online that is fair enough this is also a touch screen by the way is there a button to go into Windows yes this one here and then you could just use this as a normal PC but then how easy is it to actually open up an app it's okay it's definitely not the absolute easiest but for this sort of experience it's not bad while it's doing that I'll actually show you what else is inside the box I'm imagining that it is just a power brick that's half of it and here's the other half pretty small actually this does charge over USBC So in theory you could just use this for pretty much your smartphone all of your devices maybe a laptop as well what's it rated for 65 Watts that is quite a lot that's actually a very small power brick for 65 Watts I'm impressed it's done let's see what happens then we open up steam and it does now go into Big Picture Mode which is pretty cool if it didn't do that that would be slightly concerning and now this actually looks very steam deck like this immediately feels a lot bigger and longer I've got to be honest this was this was almost almost great as far as I'm concerned in terms of the way it feels it just always felt a little bit elongated like it was fine I could make do with it but there's definitely a huge difference in terms of shape and size if I push this until it sort of lines up there it's definitely a fair bit longer but actually the profile of it this is a lot more bulbous and flat whereas this is more sculpted but of course the advantage to the same deck is that you've got their touch pads on the left and right hand side which granted you won't always use but if you're playing something like Civilization I find it really useful whereas you don't really have any such equivalent on the alloy but let's get ourselves some games installed shall we I'm gonna go with Arkham Knight there's a game I'm actually playing at the moment and I'm fairly sure that this is a game that you cannot actually run on the steam deck unless you install Windows on it so that's not to say it won't run on this but it won't run on the default OS whereas this right out the box download it and it's ready to go let's try ourselves a little bit of Halo infinite as well and then something that I did use the steam deck for a fair bit some civilization six and one of these devices is now making some noises and it's not the steam deck it is the Ally nothing crazy but there is definitely a little bit of a hum in the background now that the CPU is actually working away Roy Co then games aren't installed let's get this underway and let's start with some Batman Arkham Knight as this is I say a little bit of an older game this came out what about eight nine years ago something like that so I would expect this to run very well considering the age if you like and of course remembering that this can't run natively on the steam deck while it's doing all of this little installing I should also say that you've got this little button up here that opens up the Rog menu It's called their Command Center this is very similar to what you get on the steam deck where you can essentially change all of your quick settings so if you want to maybe change the refresh rate down to 60 hertz you can do it here turn on AMD upscaling FPS limiters resolution there's quite a lot and you do get this little monitor here as well let's go into our options menu and let's see what we can change around shall we we've got four gigabytes of vram so this should fit in there without any issues we'll change everything to Max and we'll leave all of the gamework stuff off because that's just a little bit unnecessary Now isn't it and I have to say I'm genuinely excited to see this because this really really is going to determine I guess how useful this is for me to be able to play all of my games on the go without having a nice selection of games but not all of them how do we feel well there is definitely a little bit of latency at the moment this is not the absolute smoothest it does look good but I think we're probably getting about 40 frames a second or so the Adaptive sync is definitely doing a very good job though because visually this does look great but you can actually feel a little bit of input lag from the controls but that's probably down to the frame rate rather than anything else in fact if we open this up we can see we're getting about 52 frames a second or so so it's still very powerful but don't go expecting Miracles this is ultimately a portable machine and you think this was a game that was actually really hard to drive when it came out so to be able to actually play this on the go anywhere you are it's definitely something that is quite impressive we need some volume let's hear what this sounds like okay that's good those are impressive speakers those are very impressive speakers actually I like the vibration as well this definitely feels a lot more immersive which sounds a bit weird because usually you say that like VR or just larger screen sizes but it does feel like the whole thing is reacting to better than you would get if it sort of didn't have fantastic vibration so so that's a nice touch but it's definitely a nice touch before we move on to our next title there is one more test I want to do to see how the performance of this changes versus AC power or on battery and this has a built-in Benchmark so let's try this first on our AC so let's have a look what we got an average of 53 frames a second on AC let's run this again I'm expecting there to be some difference but to be honest as this is literally a handheld games console I'd be quite disappointed if there's a drastic jump the whole point of this is that you will use it on a plane that you will use it when you're out and about transport anything like that really so if you do need to be connected to AC power that would be quite disappointing obviously you can almost bypass this but buying quite an expensive battery bank that will deliver all of the power that this actually needs but that's extra expense something else to carry around and again it would be quite annoying what do we get before 52 I think and then we get an average of 53. so there you go the difference between battery and AC at least in Batman is essentially the same I was going to say let's move on to Halo infinite but this has also brought up its own sort of problem that I'm having and I'm sure there's like a keyboard shortcut to get this up when you actually touch the screen it doesn't always bring up the keyboard and if you press a to sort of enter in again it's not actually bringing anything up and this is something on the steam deck that does just work a lot better because it always knows what you're essentially trying to achieve so when you enter text or hit a text box it does come up with a keyboard and this is the sort of Quirk that I think you can expect with like a converted Windows device into like a games console right I think we've done it we got there in the end unlocked frame rate quality preset medium turn the textures up let's jump into some multiplayer shall we and I'm really hoping that this does feel okay because actually playing Halo infinite is one of the few first-person games that I think you can play with the controller and it's not only fine it's perfectly acceptable but to me there is definitely a little bit of lag with these joysticks it's a bit of a shame I mean the frame rate of this actually seems to be pretty smooth and responsive yeah I've got to admit I'm feeling pretty disappointed right now I don't understand why there's so much disconnects between the GamePad and what you're actually seeing on screen there's definitely something that's holding this back because I refuse to believe that this thing is not capable of feeling pretty much on it I'll swap over to an actual Gamepad in a second so we can compare the latency is just nowhere near what it needs to be let's go get a controller and then let's see if that's different and yeah this now feels exactly as you'd expect don't get me wrong it's still a controller it's no mouse keyboard but there's none of that horrible disconnect that you're getting from the controls on this and this is something that I saw a little bit of on the steam deck but this was only in certain games when you had like vsync and things enabled like generally speaking especially if you use the touchpads it was actually pretty good interestingly though I have discovered that you can actually adjust all of your profiles on a per game basis so if you go into the options here you've got left and right sticks and you can actually adjust all of these dead zones and outer thresholds and things that should help the situation but it's more of a latency thing rather than a dead zone problem so I'm potentially thinking that there's maybe like a software layer that's sort of trying to do some form of conversion or there's something going on there's actually stopping this from talking to the game as natively as you'd like and there's something causing a little bit of a delay if this is the case I think this could be fixed and limited but right now if you get this out of the box and you play some Halo infinite you will notice that Using a Gamepad feels better than using this sticks on this which is definitely a shame because otherwise the actual shape of this and the button layout is really good I would say it is actually better than what you get on the steam deck obviously you do get the touch pads we mentioned this time and time again but to some people that's just not going to matter it depends what you're going to play so what we're going to do now is open up some civilization six which is a game I use these all of the time and we do a little comparison well this is just classic isn't it it's currently around about 12 o'clock the Embargo on this device is in about three hours or so but there seems to be a firmer update that has actually changed things ever so slightly with this where it has actually improved the latency of the GamePad I open up Batman and honestly it sort of played exactly how I want it to play now which is fantastic but moving back over to Halo it was still fairly similar unfortunately it was better but it does I guess feel a little bit more like four-dimensional like you're moving up down left right rather than having full use of the analog stick so I think there is still an improvement to go but the good news is that things can be improved by firmware at least it seems so so overall a fair bit more promising so here we are then civilization six melson keyboard game time if you like and this does not work at all it does with the touch screen so what we need to do is go and change it from Gamepad mode to desktop mode this is where we get our little right stick button and we can go to game options and this feels terrible because there's just not enough minute control oh my God right there we go game options yes can we make this bigger that would help UI upscaling only available at certain resolutions brilliant and let's have a look right off the bat again the game is just way too small that that is too small now to be comfortable I mean what happens if we turn the resolution down 720p it's not even coming up with 720p I've got an option of 1080P or 1080 is that is that it this is so frustrating that this control center doesn't actually seem to do anything until you restart the game I mean it does give you the option to bring up the keyboard that is good I missed that I apologize to Rog that was there the whole time but that doesn't take away from the fact that pretty much the rest of these options or at least the ones that actually matter to the performance of the game don't really seem to work until you restart which is very frustrating in something like Civ that takes you like two minutes to exit it and close it and get back into the game again it's just not really as fluid as I would like despite the irony that this has a 120 hertz 10 HP display that makes it very fluid or at least it should if you can run it this is fine you know what 720p is probably going to be your best bet because the detailed difference between this and 1080 on a screen size like this isn't drastic and the battery life is going to be a lot better and obviously you're going to get a much higher frame rate as well which when you have that 120 FPS screen is going to make a big difference I don't know why I didn't try this earlier this is definitely better question is can you actually make use of this and to be fair I think the answer is yes I would just advise changing some of the button layouts around because having this button as you click just doesn't really work whereas if you sort of change it around like you can do on a steam deck whereas the trigger can be used as clicks and things then actually I think this will be all right even though the joystick isn't as good as the touchpads you'll have on that but we're still not getting 120 FPS getting about 55 58 which does bet the question how many games are actually going to be able to play at 120 FPS and I guess this leads us on to the interesting not conclusion but I guess the end of this unboxing First Impressions thoughts that technically speaking this has a lot of potential but I do think at the moment it's not necessarily quite where it needs to be in terms of Polish anyway I I think this is going to be a real winner and fundamentally the way it feels on the hand is better than the steam deck and that alone for a lot of people people is going to make this worth the money I mean this Rog RGB thing is a little bit stupid but other than that the design is pretty on point I like the port selection on the top and the fact that you can expand this with the XG mobile chip and things like that decent SD card expansion that is very very good and obviously the ability to play your games at 720p or maybe 1080p 120 FPS that is a real winner but all the time you've got this sort of not necessarily really buggy software but software that doesn't quite cohesively match the over experience in the same way that you get on the steam deck hopefully this can get to the point where it is a lot more seamless but as I mentioned at the start of this video this is always going to be the problem with running something with Windows 11 because you've got this very heavy OS running in the background and it's not really designed for this do you think games consoles are really light that's why everything tends to work as well as it does I think the main thing for me is just this whole control Gamepad thing if there's added latency that needs to go I will be reaching out to Rag and seeing if there's a way to fix this if it's a software update fantastic if there's something I've done wrong then I will let you guys know I would like to point out that this is very much a first impressions I'll be doing a full review after using this for like a week couple weeks something like that and give you like my final verdict so if there are some things I've missed like the ability to open up the keyboard with that button then apologies but people want to see the first impressions and I guess the question very much does go out to you on this what do you make of the RG Ally do you think this is going to be your next portable games console do you already have a steam deck would you consider swapping out for this or if you are looking between the two which one do you think takes you fancy the one that's arguably a little bit better polished or the one that has more capabilities the one that feels a little bit nicer in your hands I'd love to hear from you so let me know absolutely smash the like button if you've enjoyed this video get yourself subscribed for the full review and of course if you do want to check out current pricing on the Rog Ally or anything else featured in this video you can find it linked down below with my Amazon affiliate links and while you're down there why not check out asrock's beautiful Sonic motherboards these bright blue motherboards are bound to catch anybody's eye and thanks to options in both b760 and z790 you're fully up to date with the latest features with support for I9 gaming processors with a whopping 24 cores give your gaming PC a whole new ring today with a link down below but thank you so much for watching this video we'll catch you in the next oneladies and gentlemen I don't think I've been this excited for an unboxing in a very long time because inside this box we have the brand stinking new RNG alloy this of course is a portable games console that's gonna I guess go toe-to-do with a steam deck it's a little bit more expensive but comes with extra features like 120 hertz display the brand new ryzen Z1 processor and it actually rocks Windows 11 as well so you can literally play I guess any PC game on this let's open her up and take a look ah here it is our origi Ally let's get this thing unboxed on top of the PC Centric mouse mat available at pccentric dot store and let's have a look well it's very white I really like this but I do immediately worry that it will get a little bit grimy because obviously you're going to be touching this pretty much 24 7. but it does actually feel very similar to the steam deck it does have to be set I mean immediately putting them side by side they're pretty much the same sort of size actually in fact it looks to me as if the screen size is identical but the bezel is slightly smaller and then the body is just a little bit less wide I suppose your left and right bumpers and Triggers on the top headphone microphone combo Jack micro SD card and this is actually rated all the way up for uhs2 and RNG actually say that there's not really going to be that much of a drastic delay maybe a second or two versus the Gen 4 SSD that's actually in the Rog Ally and then everything from here is pretty much as you'd expect you've got a volume rocker power switch more ventilation so let's get this thing powered on see if it's actually any good and let you know whether you should be interested in buying one right after a short word from this video sponsor ASRock Sonic motherboards are here and they bring the performance and value of ASRock with a flare of everybody's favorite Hedgehog with support for the latest platform features such as ddr5 memory PCI generation 5 and Intel's 13th generation processors your gaming PC has never been so well equipped give your gaming computer that Flair it deserves today with ASRock learn more with the link down below welcome back let's get this show on the road let's press that power button and see what happens oh oh it vibrated that's new we've got RGB around the analog sticks not sure about that I guess it is a very Rog thing to do and the thing for me that's really making me think should we say is the fact that this obviously runs Windows 11 and traditionally Windows has not been a good platform for touchscreens anything small and fiddly really and we've got to hope that there aren't really too many issues with doing it like this but obviously the benefit of this is that you can run pretty much any Windows game this is actually a surprisingly powerful console with that brand new ryzen chip so regardless of whether it's steam Xbox origin epic you should actually be able to play on this as you can clearly see though this is not the Windows desktop this is using some form of overlay to actually give you all of the information that you need without Windows getting in the way and as long as it works I have no problem with that you've got your little Command Center here that you can customize with loads of different things we've got different operating modes silent Windows performance turbos so if you do want to use this as a traditional PC then you can which would be pretty cool but I think most people want to use this as more of a console and maybe for lighter titles like CS plug in a mouse into a monitor that'll be quite called weapons if we go into manual mode we can adjust the wattage for our chips fan curves we can look at our system stats and then you've also got content which gives you your media Gallery systems specifications Z1 extreme navigate down to storage this is the 500 gigabyte model but you can buy different ones depending on what you're after I suppose not too much else to do other than to go into steam and actually download some games here we go look and steam has a fatal error needs to be online that is fair enough this is also a touch screen by the way is there a button to go into Windows yes this one here and then you could just use this as a normal PC but then how easy is it to actually open up an app it's okay it's definitely not the absolute easiest but for this sort of experience it's not bad while it's doing that I'll actually show you what else is inside the box I'm imagining that it is just a power brick that's half of it and here's the other half pretty small actually this does charge over USBC So in theory you could just use this for pretty much your smartphone all of your devices maybe a laptop as well what's it rated for 65 Watts that is quite a lot that's actually a very small power brick for 65 Watts I'm impressed it's done let's see what happens then we open up steam and it does now go into Big Picture Mode which is pretty cool if it didn't do that that would be slightly concerning and now this actually looks very steam deck like this immediately feels a lot bigger and longer I've got to be honest this was this was almost almost great as far as I'm concerned in terms of the way it feels it just always felt a little bit elongated like it was fine I could make do with it but there's definitely a huge difference in terms of shape and size if I push this until it sort of lines up there it's definitely a fair bit longer but actually the profile of it this is a lot more bulbous and flat whereas this is more sculpted but of course the advantage to the same deck is that you've got their touch pads on the left and right hand side which granted you won't always use but if you're playing something like Civilization I find it really useful whereas you don't really have any such equivalent on the alloy but let's get ourselves some games installed shall we I'm gonna go with Arkham Knight there's a game I'm actually playing at the moment and I'm fairly sure that this is a game that you cannot actually run on the steam deck unless you install Windows on it so that's not to say it won't run on this but it won't run on the default OS whereas this right out the box download it and it's ready to go let's try ourselves a little bit of Halo infinite as well and then something that I did use the steam deck for a fair bit some civilization six and one of these devices is now making some noises and it's not the steam deck it is the Ally nothing crazy but there is definitely a little bit of a hum in the background now that the CPU is actually working away Roy Co then games aren't installed let's get this underway and let's start with some Batman Arkham Knight as this is I say a little bit of an older game this came out what about eight nine years ago something like that so I would expect this to run very well considering the age if you like and of course remembering that this can't run natively on the steam deck while it's doing all of this little installing I should also say that you've got this little button up here that opens up the Rog menu It's called their Command Center this is very similar to what you get on the steam deck where you can essentially change all of your quick settings so if you want to maybe change the refresh rate down to 60 hertz you can do it here turn on AMD upscaling FPS limiters resolution there's quite a lot and you do get this little monitor here as well let's go into our options menu and let's see what we can change around shall we we've got four gigabytes of vram so this should fit in there without any issues we'll change everything to Max and we'll leave all of the gamework stuff off because that's just a little bit unnecessary Now isn't it and I have to say I'm genuinely excited to see this because this really really is going to determine I guess how useful this is for me to be able to play all of my games on the go without having a nice selection of games but not all of them how do we feel well there is definitely a little bit of latency at the moment this is not the absolute smoothest it does look good but I think we're probably getting about 40 frames a second or so the Adaptive sync is definitely doing a very good job though because visually this does look great but you can actually feel a little bit of input lag from the controls but that's probably down to the frame rate rather than anything else in fact if we open this up we can see we're getting about 52 frames a second or so so it's still very powerful but don't go expecting Miracles this is ultimately a portable machine and you think this was a game that was actually really hard to drive when it came out so to be able to actually play this on the go anywhere you are it's definitely something that is quite impressive we need some volume let's hear what this sounds like okay that's good those are impressive speakers those are very impressive speakers actually I like the vibration as well this definitely feels a lot more immersive which sounds a bit weird because usually you say that like VR or just larger screen sizes but it does feel like the whole thing is reacting to better than you would get if it sort of didn't have fantastic vibration so so that's a nice touch but it's definitely a nice touch before we move on to our next title there is one more test I want to do to see how the performance of this changes versus AC power or on battery and this has a built-in Benchmark so let's try this first on our AC so let's have a look what we got an average of 53 frames a second on AC let's run this again I'm expecting there to be some difference but to be honest as this is literally a handheld games console I'd be quite disappointed if there's a drastic jump the whole point of this is that you will use it on a plane that you will use it when you're out and about transport anything like that really so if you do need to be connected to AC power that would be quite disappointing obviously you can almost bypass this but buying quite an expensive battery bank that will deliver all of the power that this actually needs but that's extra expense something else to carry around and again it would be quite annoying what do we get before 52 I think and then we get an average of 53. so there you go the difference between battery and AC at least in Batman is essentially the same I was going to say let's move on to Halo infinite but this has also brought up its own sort of problem that I'm having and I'm sure there's like a keyboard shortcut to get this up when you actually touch the screen it doesn't always bring up the keyboard and if you press a to sort of enter in again it's not actually bringing anything up and this is something on the steam deck that does just work a lot better because it always knows what you're essentially trying to achieve so when you enter text or hit a text box it does come up with a keyboard and this is the sort of Quirk that I think you can expect with like a converted Windows device into like a games console right I think we've done it we got there in the end unlocked frame rate quality preset medium turn the textures up let's jump into some multiplayer shall we and I'm really hoping that this does feel okay because actually playing Halo infinite is one of the few first-person games that I think you can play with the controller and it's not only fine it's perfectly acceptable but to me there is definitely a little bit of lag with these joysticks it's a bit of a shame I mean the frame rate of this actually seems to be pretty smooth and responsive yeah I've got to admit I'm feeling pretty disappointed right now I don't understand why there's so much disconnects between the GamePad and what you're actually seeing on screen there's definitely something that's holding this back because I refuse to believe that this thing is not capable of feeling pretty much on it I'll swap over to an actual Gamepad in a second so we can compare the latency is just nowhere near what it needs to be let's go get a controller and then let's see if that's different and yeah this now feels exactly as you'd expect don't get me wrong it's still a controller it's no mouse keyboard but there's none of that horrible disconnect that you're getting from the controls on this and this is something that I saw a little bit of on the steam deck but this was only in certain games when you had like vsync and things enabled like generally speaking especially if you use the touchpads it was actually pretty good interestingly though I have discovered that you can actually adjust all of your profiles on a per game basis so if you go into the options here you've got left and right sticks and you can actually adjust all of these dead zones and outer thresholds and things that should help the situation but it's more of a latency thing rather than a dead zone problem so I'm potentially thinking that there's maybe like a software layer that's sort of trying to do some form of conversion or there's something going on there's actually stopping this from talking to the game as natively as you'd like and there's something causing a little bit of a delay if this is the case I think this could be fixed and limited but right now if you get this out of the box and you play some Halo infinite you will notice that Using a Gamepad feels better than using this sticks on this which is definitely a shame because otherwise the actual shape of this and the button layout is really good I would say it is actually better than what you get on the steam deck obviously you do get the touch pads we mentioned this time and time again but to some people that's just not going to matter it depends what you're going to play so what we're going to do now is open up some civilization six which is a game I use these all of the time and we do a little comparison well this is just classic isn't it it's currently around about 12 o'clock the Embargo on this device is in about three hours or so but there seems to be a firmer update that has actually changed things ever so slightly with this where it has actually improved the latency of the GamePad I open up Batman and honestly it sort of played exactly how I want it to play now which is fantastic but moving back over to Halo it was still fairly similar unfortunately it was better but it does I guess feel a little bit more like four-dimensional like you're moving up down left right rather than having full use of the analog stick so I think there is still an improvement to go but the good news is that things can be improved by firmware at least it seems so so overall a fair bit more promising so here we are then civilization six melson keyboard game time if you like and this does not work at all it does with the touch screen so what we need to do is go and change it from Gamepad mode to desktop mode this is where we get our little right stick button and we can go to game options and this feels terrible because there's just not enough minute control oh my God right there we go game options yes can we make this bigger that would help UI upscaling only available at certain resolutions brilliant and let's have a look right off the bat again the game is just way too small that that is too small now to be comfortable I mean what happens if we turn the resolution down 720p it's not even coming up with 720p I've got an option of 1080P or 1080 is that is that it this is so frustrating that this control center doesn't actually seem to do anything until you restart the game I mean it does give you the option to bring up the keyboard that is good I missed that I apologize to Rog that was there the whole time but that doesn't take away from the fact that pretty much the rest of these options or at least the ones that actually matter to the performance of the game don't really seem to work until you restart which is very frustrating in something like Civ that takes you like two minutes to exit it and close it and get back into the game again it's just not really as fluid as I would like despite the irony that this has a 120 hertz 10 HP display that makes it very fluid or at least it should if you can run it this is fine you know what 720p is probably going to be your best bet because the detailed difference between this and 1080 on a screen size like this isn't drastic and the battery life is going to be a lot better and obviously you're going to get a much higher frame rate as well which when you have that 120 FPS screen is going to make a big difference I don't know why I didn't try this earlier this is definitely better question is can you actually make use of this and to be fair I think the answer is yes I would just advise changing some of the button layouts around because having this button as you click just doesn't really work whereas if you sort of change it around like you can do on a steam deck whereas the trigger can be used as clicks and things then actually I think this will be all right even though the joystick isn't as good as the touchpads you'll have on that but we're still not getting 120 FPS getting about 55 58 which does bet the question how many games are actually going to be able to play at 120 FPS and I guess this leads us on to the interesting not conclusion but I guess the end of this unboxing First Impressions thoughts that technically speaking this has a lot of potential but I do think at the moment it's not necessarily quite where it needs to be in terms of Polish anyway I I think this is going to be a real winner and fundamentally the way it feels on the hand is better than the steam deck and that alone for a lot of people people is going to make this worth the money I mean this Rog RGB thing is a little bit stupid but other than that the design is pretty on point I like the port selection on the top and the fact that you can expand this with the XG mobile chip and things like that decent SD card expansion that is very very good and obviously the ability to play your games at 720p or maybe 1080p 120 FPS that is a real winner but all the time you've got this sort of not necessarily really buggy software but software that doesn't quite cohesively match the over experience in the same way that you get on the steam deck hopefully this can get to the point where it is a lot more seamless but as I mentioned at the start of this video this is always going to be the problem with running something with Windows 11 because you've got this very heavy OS running in the background and it's not really designed for this do you think games consoles are really light that's why everything tends to work as well as it does I think the main thing for me is just this whole control Gamepad thing if there's added latency that needs to go I will be reaching out to Rag and seeing if there's a way to fix this if it's a software update fantastic if there's something I've done wrong then I will let you guys know I would like to point out that this is very much a first impressions I'll be doing a full review after using this for like a week couple weeks something like that and give you like my final verdict so if there are some things I've missed like the ability to open up the keyboard with that button then apologies but people want to see the first impressions and I guess the question very much does go out to you on this what do you make of the RG Ally do you think this is going to be your next portable games console do you already have a steam deck would you consider swapping out for this or if you are looking between the two which one do you think takes you fancy the one that's arguably a little bit better polished or the one that has more capabilities the one that feels a little bit nicer in your hands I'd love to hear from you so let me know absolutely smash the like button if you've enjoyed this video get yourself subscribed for the full review and of course if you do want to check out current pricing on the Rog Ally or anything else featured in this video you can find it linked down below with my Amazon affiliate links and while you're down there why not check out asrock's beautiful Sonic motherboards these bright blue motherboards are bound to catch anybody's eye and thanks to options in both b760 and z790 you're fully up to date with the latest features with support for I9 gaming processors with a whopping 24 cores give your gaming PC a whole new ring today with a link down below but thank you so much for watching this video we'll catch you in the next one\n"