The Best Windows Handheld We've Ever Gotten Our Hands On! ASUS ROG Ally Review

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enforeign hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be talking a little bit about the all-new Asus Rog Ally this is basically my review of the unit itself I've had this in my possession for about a month if you're a regular viewer of the channel you know I've made several videos on it and for good reason this has become my go-to handheld gaming device whether I want to play AAA games indie games or even emulation by the way emulation is amazing on this device the Z1 extreme can definitely put the power down and even play some of the harder PS3 games on the go at the time of releasing this video it's June 13th it's actually the official at least US release of the Asus Rog Ally and if you're kind of on the fence about picking this up for 6.99 I'm here to tell you what I like about it what I don't like about it and by the end you should be able to decide if this is something you want or you could wait for something else to hit the market first things first overall design feel in the hand ergonomics really like it I've seen some people say that it's got sharper corners but I've been able to play for hours on end with this unit not really having an issue and it comes down to the way it's a very very light unit only coming in at 608 grams which is much lighter than most of the other seven inch handhelds on the market right now which does make it really affordable and easy to hold on to for long periods of time talking about the buttons here we don't have any kind of Hull base sensors in the analog sticks or the triggers but for years I've been able to get by without them and what we have here works out really well we've got analog triggers around back and when it comes to this d-pad I'm not a huge fan of it I wish it was a separated d-pad but it works much better than I expected it would for Platformers and especially fighting games at least for me I can pull off all of my favorite special moves with this d-pad it would have been really nice to have kind of a swappable d-pad like an Xbox Elite controller that way we could go with the separated if we want to but this is something that I can Overlook because it does work much better than other d-pads that are designed like this on handhelds that we've seen in the past year or the past two years obviously the Ally runs windows and as a lot of us already know navigation in Windows on a handheld can be a bit cumbersome even though we've got a touch screen here Asus has also added the ability to allow us to use the analog sticks and buttons here's kind of a mouse and cursor which does make it quite easy personally I go with the touchscreen a lot more but what really kind of sets this off is Armory crate SC now some initial reviewers did have issues with Armory crate but uh personally I didn't and going into it I knew we were working with kind of early software but you know since I've had this for a month and a few days now we have got so many updates for Armory crate bios updates controller updates and everything they've been really pushing it getting everything fixed with this and alleviating a lot of those little bugs that some of the initial reviewers ran into so with Armory crate we can boot this up at any time we've got our game launcher from up front we can go through and set up custom TDP configurations and controller configurations per game it'll automatically scan your default directories you can also set it to scan you know external storage if you needed to it'll download some metadata and box art give us some information about the game and like I mentioned we've got per game profiles that we can set up we can also move over just a bit we can change the RGB on this you can totally disable it you can change the brightness you can change the speed and they have added a few more different presets personally I leave it on kind of that rainbow mode so it kind of Cycles through on both of the sticks here and I think it looks really good but you can set a solid color if you want to but I'd say one of the most important things here with Armory crate is the TDP control or the performance control we've got a few different presets here and when you're on battery it's going to be a bit different from when you're plugged into the wall we've basically got a dock mode here which will allow it to kind of up the performance on that CPU and GPU but from here you can see we've got a Windows mode which is really going to be based on our power profile we have set with windows so power saver balanced or best performance performance is 15 watts with a boost up to 20 and this is all on battery right now turbo mode is 20 watts with a boost up to 25 and we've also got a manual mode we can take this all the way up to 35 Watts on battery or we can go close to around 45 Watts if we're plugged into the wall and that really opens up this ryzen Z1 extreme personally I've been setting a manual 18 watt TDP across the board doing a little bit of a fan adjustment here we can adjust both of the built-in fans and this is kind of my go-to preset for basically anything that I want to play on this device at 18 Watts we get decent battery life and awesome performance for AAA games and we can also adjust the fan curve on both of the fans built in here that way we can keep it nice and cool and we're not going to hit any kind of thermal throttle or anything like that well playing my game I can go through at 18 Watts across the board this is what I like to do I think it works out really really well taking a look at the performance aspect of the Rog Ally in handheld mode this thing can play your favorite AAA game there's no doubt about it it's really going to depend on what game you have what settings and especially the TDP use here's Forza Horizon 5 we're at 15 watts right now 1080p medium settings and we can get an average of 84 FPS so we're working with low wattage and if you take a look at the total system power draw from the battery we're right there on par with the steam dag so uh with the steam deck running at 15 watts it pulls 26 to 27 Watts total that's with everything going here and we're right there with it at 15 watts but we're getting absolutely amazing performance I recently did a video showing off a bunch of different Esports games running on this unit here's OverWatch 2 1080p medium settings rsr is on I actually got an average of 87 FPS we've got fortnite here 1080p medium settings rsr is on and it runs at 120 FPS one of my favorite things about the Ally is the display it's a 1080p IPS at 120 hertz plus it supports freesync so we don't need to worry about any kind of screen tearing or anything like that it's got adaptive sync so if you did want to play your games at 120 FPS on the built-in display you definitely could it'd be much better for indie games and things like that but there are AAA games out there that will run at 120 with the correct settings first and foremost the Ally is a handheld gaming PC but that's not going to stop us from using it in kind of a dock mode situation you could use this as a full-fledged desktop for media playback work and especially gaming and when you're plugged into a 65 watt PD charger turbo mode actually UPS the TDP even further now personally I like manual mode but instead of 25 watts in Turbo it's going to be 30 Watts or we can go all the way up to around 45 Watts with this Apu and it definitely helps out bringing the clocks up on the GPU and CPU and just to show you how it performs we've got CS go at 1440p high and we're maxed out here in manual mode getting an average of 118 FPS at 1440p on a handheld well we're connected to an external monitor but it's still running off the handheld and the age-old question has been answered yes this will run crisis and finally here in dock mode we've got Forza Horizon 5 1440p low settings over 60 getting an average of 74 FPS and when we're set up like this we do not need to worry about battery life because we're plugged into a power source so you can use this as a desktop PC now this was all on the igpu but remember we can also use an external GPU with the Ally it's their proprietary XG Port we have up top and I recently tested out the 6900 XT they also offer the 3080 and all you got to do is just plug it directly into that XG Port up top and now instead of using the integrated Radeon 780m igpu we've got this external GPU and we can play our games at way higher frame rates and higher resolutions cyberpunk 2077 1440p Ultra I got an average of 64 FPS now that's right on the edge there at 1440 so I'd say 1440 high but it still looks absolutely amazing on a larger display and we're using that external GPU over that XG Port so it can definitely be turned into a full-fledged gaming PC with some serious GPU power so we know for a fact that the Ally can play AAA PC games very well and when it comes to emulation it's really no different this is one of the best handhelds that I've tested for emulation I've got a full video but I just wanted to show you some PS3 here we've got God of War 3 using rpcs3 and since filming this we've actually received a little better performance out of it but in the past it was almost impossible to run this at even 45 FPS on any handheld on the market but on the Ally we can run God of War 3 which just happens to be one of the hardest games to emulate for the RP CS3 emulator at 60fps a little bit of fluctuation but you know if I didn't have that frame counter on I'd call it 60 all day long really amazing performance and yeah if you wanted to play switch games not an issue when it comes to upgradeability basically the only thing we can do here is up the storage whether you want to use a Micro SD card or swap out this m.2 SSD it uses a 2230 pcie 4.0 drive and I've upgraded mine from 512 gigabytes to one terabyte really easy to do and I just did a fresh install of Windows not a big deal for me but you could always clone your drive and kind of just swap it right over if you wanted to and the final thing I wanted to talk about here was battery life when it comes to a battery-powered laptop or handheld it's really going to depend on what you need to do with that device and how much power you need to do so the Ally comes with a 65 watt charger and we can go from zero to 100 in 1.4 hours and in a 15 watt test on the Ally versus the steam DAC I got 96 Minutes of run time out of the Rog Ally obviously running at a lower TDP will Niche a more battery life running at a higher will net you less it really comes down to what you need to do with that unit but remember we do have a pretty fast charge time here when you compare to other handhelds right now the big question is going to be should you buy one well I'll tell you right now if you've got a steam deck or another Windows based handheld device and you enjoy using it right now you're playing your favorite games doesn't matter what resolution or frame rate if you're having a good time with it keep it use that one until you know you can save us some money and buy the Next Generation it's really up to you but if you're in the market right now and you don't have another device on hand this is the one that I would choose if I had to choose between the Rog Ally and the steam deck right now I'd go with the Ally you can install Steam OS on it if you want to personally I just like the design much lighter and of course we can get better performance at higher tdps with this and I don't mind carrying an extra battery pack around with me I already do that anyway but as it sits right now this is definitely my favorite handheld that we've taken a look at on the channel it's my go-to handheld at the time of making this video and of course there will be more powerful better devices coming down the road that's how technology works so in the end it's really up to you if you've already got a device you're having fun with keep it if you're in the market this is the one that I would choose but that's going to wrap it up for this video I really appreciate you watching if you're interested in learning a little more maybe even picking one of these up I'll leave some links in the description you can buy it right now on Best Buy's website and there's a chance a local store near you might have it in stock right now so definitely check that out but if there's anything else you want to see running on the Ally just let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching\n"