My First Look at the Asus Rog Ally: A Comprehensive Review

I recently had the opportunity to get my hands on the Asus Rog Ally, and I must say that it's an impressive little handheld. One of the things that caught my attention was its unseparated d-pad, which some might find a drawback but for me, it's a feature I'd much rather have in a traditional unit. However, I'm happy to report that the roll on this device is excellent for fighting games, and it works out great for playing platformers.

I also wanted to test out the game The Last of Us Part One on the Ally, which proved to be a challenging task despite its 720p resolution. Using the RSR upscale feature, I was able to push the game's graphics up to 1080p with low settings and achieve over 60 FPS. This is a significant improvement over what I've experienced with other handhelds, and I'm excited to release a full emulation video on my channel soon.

The PS3 emulated using RPCS3 Vulcan was another test I ran on the Ally, which required extra cores and threads and was powered by older Ryzen chips that needed wattage to run at full speed. However, thanks to the Zen 4 processor, 18 watts is now the sweet spot for this game, allowing for smooth performance.

The Steam Deck is often considered one of the best handhelds on the market, but I have to say that if both the Rog Ally and Steam Deck were sitting on my table fully charged, ready to go, I would probably choose the Ally over the Steam Deck. The newer architecture of the Zen 4 CPU and Radeon DNA3 GPU on the Ally provide more access to my games that already work on Windows, as well as the ability to install Windows directly on the device.

One of the notable features that some people will miss if they upgrade or switch to the Rog Ally is the trackpads. As someone who's not a fan of trackpads no matter what, this isn't a major issue for me, but I understand that everyone has their own preferences when it comes to input devices.

Before wrapping up my review, I wanted to test out some battery life with the Ally, which proved to be quite impressive. With 100 screen brightness and playing video at 1080p, I got an astonishing 8 hours and 20 minutes of playback time. However, gaming tests showed that 8 watts was perfect for Indie games in 2D, netting me 3 hours and 7 minutes of gameplay, while 15 watts yielded 1 hour and 43 minutes of gameplay. Finally, with 25 watts, I managed to squeeze out a whopping 1 hour and 4 minutes of gameplay.

I've also had the opportunity to get hands-on experience with the built-in controls on the Rog Ally, which are truly spot on. The screen is also beautiful, with adaptive sync or Freesync capabilities that make for an excellent gaming experience. I must say that I'm thoroughly enjoying using this device and can't wait to dive deeper into its capabilities.

In conclusion, if you're interested in picking up a new handheld console, the Asus Rog Ally is definitely worth considering. With its impressive specs, beautiful display, and excellent performance, it's an amazing little device that I think will leave many people impressed. As always, I'll be releasing more content on my channel soon, including full emulation videos, Steam Deck comparisons, and more, so be sure to keep an eye out for those updates.

The official price of the Asus Rog Ally is $699, which can be pre-ordered now over at Best Buy, with a launch date set for June 13th worldwide. With its impressive specs and versatility, I'm confident that this device will be a hit among gamers and tech enthusiasts alike.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enforeign hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today I'm super excited because uh we've got our hands on the all-new Asus Rog Ally and I'll tell you yeah this is definitely going to change the handheld game this thing is absolutely amazing from the screen to the performance just the overall form factor and all of the built-in features I personally really love the new Ally and the one we're going to be taking a look at in this video has the Z1 extreme so this is the highest end model that they offer right now and the price on this officially is 6.99 so it's not much more than the highest end steam deck and for 6.99 you're getting quite a handheld gaming PC here seven inch 120 hertz freesync display an 8 core 16 threat zenforce CPU and rdna3 Graphics this makes for a very potent little gaming handheld and we've got a lot to go over in this video I will have more on the way I've got a full emulation video in the works already we're going to do a lot of testing some comparison videos between the Steam deck and the Ally but uh first and foremost for this video the overall form factor like I mentioned I've had this for about seven days and it is a very comfortable handheld to hang on to coming in at 608 grams which makes it one of the lighter handhelds on the market and the first time I pulled this out of the box I got a little confused I thought it might be just kind of a demo unit with nothing inside of it because it is really light compared to the other hand house that we've taken a look at on the channel and personally I really like the overall aesthetic that they've come up with here for the Rog Ally up top here we've got our power button slash fingerprint sensor so we can log in really quickly to Windows we've also got a volume rocker a couple status LEDs a Micro SD card slot and a 3.5 millimeter audio jack and of course up top here we've got this odd looking Port this is a proprietary ASU sport known as an XG mobile Port this supports their xge GPU line and right now they actually offer up to the 4090 which is pretty crazy it's basically a pcie interface but we've also got USB 3.2 this is how we're going to charge our unit or connect it to an external display and by the way I mean to connect it to an external display you don't need their XG dock or anything like that you can go right over USB type c I'm trying to get my hands on one of these XG mobile docs so I can do some testing with it so keep an eye on the channel when it comes to the built-in controls we've got kind of an Xbox style layout and to tell you the truth I wasn't too keen on this d-pad given that it's not separated but it's actually much better than it looks I will be testing it out in this video around back we've got two extra remappable buttons and this does have analog triggers which really helps out for racing games overall really liking the controller setup that they've come up with here it definitely works out great for PC gaming and emulation let's go ahead and get the specs out of the way so for the CPU or the Apu rather this is using the brand new AMD ryzen Z1 extreme we've got eight Zen 4 cores and 16 threads this utilizes a 12cu rdna 3 Radeon igpu up to 2700 megahertz 16 gigabytes of LP ddr5 Ram running at 6 400 megahertz and from the BIOS we've got four gigabytes dedicated to that igpu it's got a 512 gigabyte 2230 nvme it's pcie 4.0 and you can always upgrade this if you want to but one of the main things that sets this apart from other handhelds on the market is the display now I've been saying it for a while we need adaptive sync or freesync on these AMD powered handhelds and we have it here this is a 7-inch 110 Hertz IPS at 1920x1080 it supports adaptive sync and freesync 100 srgb up to 500 nits of brightness freesync or adaptive sync comes in really handy if you want to run at a lower wattage to save battery life and we'll take a look at that in a little bit but we have not seen a display that looks this good or performs this well on a handheld yet but another thing that's really important for these handhelds is the audio system and they haven't skimped out now we've got two one watt speakers and that might not sound like much but it's got an adaptive audio amp and it supports Dolby Atmos and this thing actually puts out some bass the first time I booted up a game on it I was about 50 volume and I was really impressed by how clear and Loud these speakers are we've also got Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.2 a 40 watt hour battery with 65 watt PD quick charging it does come with a 65 watt power supply in the Box it weighs only 608 grams and of course we're running Windows and that's one of the main things a lot of people were kind of worried about having a Windows handheld after we've been messing around with the steam deck using their awesome Steam OS 3 but Asus has really come through with software to allow us to easily navigate windows but uh the main claim to fame here is Armory crate SE we can press the Armory crate button at any time it's going to bring it up for us we've got our game library and this will automatically scan our directories via on internal storage or MicroSD we've also got a couple views that we can mess around with so this is going to be the default view we've got a list view if you're into this but uh one of the best things here is each one of these games can be fully customized so we can have custom profiles for each one of these games and basically change everything we need to we can remap the controller change the sensitivity on the analog joysticks and analog triggers we can change the RGB how the haptics react and of course you can choose a power profile for the ryzen Z1 extreme or you can manually create one and we'll go over that in just a little while but uh let's move over to the settings section in Armory crate SE from here we can totally configure the handheld to our liking we can change the RGB disable Wi-Fi Bluetooth also change the overall performance profile and something we haven't taken a look at yet is the command center we can edit all of our options over here but at any time if we press this left hand button it'll bring up our Command Center this is great for when you're in game or basically anytime at all because we can change everything we need to directly from the command center controller mode can be swapped from desktop to controller and in desktop mode we can use the analog sticks and buttons as kind of a mouse and cursor you can also bring up your custom game profiles from here we've got a performance overlay that can be brought up at any time you can bring up the keyboard limit the FPS change the resolution change the refresh rate your RGB you can enable rsr which is Radeon super resolution I mean they've thought of basically everything here for the command center and I know more will be added in the future heading back over to the settings section in Armory cray SC RGB now some people might not be into this personally I think it looks really good what they've done here but uh we can customize this if you don't like the rainbow effect you can change the brightness you can change the speed you can customize your color profiles if you want to we've got a few different presets that we can mess around with now personally I'm not into a lot of RGB on my main gaming PC but having it here around the analog sticks on this handheld really does set it off and the fact that we can fully customize this is pretty awesome overall I think Armory crate SC is turning out to be really great for this little handheld and more options will be added in the future it's still a bit early but uh from here we've got an update Center so we can update all of our drivers and everything like that you can sign in with our Asus account and download some pretty cool wallpapers there's also a little game platform section right now we've got Xbox EA steam epic Uplay and Gog obviously there's more on the market you can just head over to the website but from here it just gives this kind of easy access to download that game platform and install it directly on the device but one of the main sections here that's going to come in really important is the operation mode section this is basically our performance profiles that we can set up for the Apu to send more wattage or less wattage to that CPU and GPU first one here is the windows controlled mode next up we've got the silent mode which is 9 watts and this is great for 2D games indie games and a lot of emulators will run fine in silent mode the next one here is performance mode and this is their 15 watt mode but remember we've got a little boost on that up to 20. moving over to turbo mode when you're on battery turbo mode is 25 watts when you're plugged in it's 30 Watts this is going to be a really good mode for gaming but remember battery life will suffer at those higher wattages and finally we've got manual mode from here we can go from 7 Watts up to 30 Watts on battery we can also adjust the fan curve to our liking and we can independently adjust both fans we have built into the handheld you can set up several different profiles here and one kind of sweet spot that I've been messing around with is just 18 Watts kind of locked right there at 18. it does offer some really great performance and battery life but that's not all we have here because the Asus Rog Ally actually does have a dock mode like I mentioned on battery turbo mode is 25 watts plugged in is 30 but with manual mode plugged in we can go all the way up to 35 watts and we've actually got a boost up to around 40 Watts so this is going to offer the best performance that this handheld can put out in manual mode and the best thing about this is you know when we're plugged in we don't have to worry about battery life so we can take it all the way up plus we can adjust that fan curve so yeah I mean if you want to get the most out of this in dock mode this is definitely the way to go and the last thing I wanted to talk about here before we get into some game testing is Radeon super resolution rsr we can actually enable this from our Command Center but it also has to be enabled per game inside of the Radeon software at least at the time of making this video basically with this enabled using borderless Window mode our game is going to run at 720p but super resolution is going to upscale it to 1080. so it's only putting the stress on this Apu that a 720p game was but we still got a really crisp picture because super resolution is taking it up for us and I will do a full video talking about this because it will help out a lot of people when trying to run games at a lower TDP but you still want to get a really good looking picture okay so before we take a look at anything else I did want to show you a little bit of gameplay here we've got Forza Horizon 5 and I've got afterburner up in the top left-hand Corner we've got our GPU CPU usage and clocks plus we've got CPU package power which right now is at 15 watts in total system draw from the battery which is sitting at 27 Watts that's about the maximum the steam deck draws from its battery remember that's everything on the device right now screen speakers and I'm at 100 brightness Forza Horizon 5 medium settings 1080p we can get an average of around 81 FPS this is really great performance being only at 15 watts but of course we can get a lot more out of it and remember with the preset power profiles performance is 15 watts got a boost up to 20 and turbo is going to take us up to 25 with a boost up to 30. so let's go ahead and see what we can get out of this in turbo mode the only thing I've done here is that that power profile to Turbo and now we can get an average of 101 FPS out of this game but you might have noticed that our total system power draw from the batteries jumped up to around 41 Watts which is going to give us a little under an hour battery life sitting at turbo mode with a game like this but there's one last thing I wanted to test here I wanted to see if we could take advantage of that 120 hertz display with this game and yeah I mean we can in turbo mode at 720p pretty crazy running Forza Horizon 5 at 120 FPS on a handheld and speaking of 120 FPS here's OG Skyrim low settings performance mode this game will run at high 60fps in performance mode but I wanted to see if we could kind of double that from 60 up to 120 and it's totally possible checking out cyberpunk 2077 15 watts 1080p low settings we're right there on the edge running at a constant 60 with this one at 15 watts but it just needs a little more if you wanted to set it up I'd say 18 watts would be great with vsync locked at 60fps with this game here low settings but remember we're only in performance mode and of course with a little more wattage thrown at the Z1 extreme we can get a lot more out of this game same exact settings 1080p low settings but we're using turbo mode here now we can get an average of 74 FPS and remember with all of the games that I'm testing here I will have that frame rate unlocked locking it at 60 in turbo mode will lower the total system power consumption because we do need to run it up to go over that 60 FPS mark Spider-Man Miles Morales actually runs really well on this device where at 1080p low settings and FSR is set to Performance looks great like this and you know I don't mind FSR performance at 1080p but performance at 720 on a larger display definitely looks pretty bad luckily we've got this smaller seven inch display and it looks great here next up we've got Horizon zero Dawn 1080p FSR set to Performance and original settings and original is basically just medium with this one with the games I've been testing I'm at 1080P and I wanted to see how well it would do at 1080 but remember we can always drop all of these games down to 720 use the same settings and it will draw less power from the battery Warframe is another one I wanted to test I was really interested to see if we could do 120 FPS so we're at 1080p low settings and in performance mode which is 15 to 20 watts we're so close we mean we're right there on the edge just running this at a constant 120 throwing a little more wattage at it or just going up to turbo mode will allow us to do 120 with Warframe the next game on the list is Red Dead Redemption 2 we're at 1080p FSR set to Performance low settings and we're in performance mode right now and I'm getting an average of 44 FPS so with a game like this we will need to take it down to 720p in performance mode or we can just up that wattage and now in turbo mode we get an average of 64 FPS Seeing Red Dead 2 run on the handheld like this is really impressive I also wanted to test Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and I like using the built-in Benchmark we're using recommended settings but we're at 1080P and this does take FSR to Performance and with its set up like this in turbo mode on battery we got an average of 97 FPS and a low of 65 so this game is more than playable on the Rog Ally now obviously with a lot of these 2D games or indie games we won't need to be in Turbo or performance mode so I've set up a custom profile at 7 Watts I wanted to show you here with Shredder's revenge it's sending a little under six watts to the Apu and in total we're pulling under 13 Watts total from the battery here so we can expect around 3 hours and 15 minutes out of the battery I'm sure games like this would run at less wattage plus I've got the brightness on this set at 100 percent I did want to test out this d-pad for you and I mentioned that I'm not a huge fan of it just given that it's an unseparated d-pad I'd much rather have kind of a traditional unit on this but the roll on it's really good for fighting games not the best on the market but you know pulling off your favorite special moves and playing Platformers is going to work out great definitely works a lot better than it looks foreign the final game I wanted to test here was the last of us part one and if you've ever tried to run this on a handheld you know how hard it can be right now we're at 720p but I'm using rsr upscale to 1080 we're at low settings and we can get over 60 FPS with this game on a handheld I will have a full emulation video coming up real soon so keep an eye on the channel but I did want to test out at least one here we've got PS3 using rpcs3 Vulcan back in with Skate 3 which is a harder one to emulate this loves extra cores and threads and on older ryzen chips we needed a lot of wattage to get this to run at full speed but with Zen 4 now 18 watts is kind of The Sweet Spot for a game like this and yeah you're going to be able to run your favorite switch games with no issues on this at 1080p so the handheld elephant in the room is going to be the steam deck and I just want to get this out of the way steam deck is one of my favorite handhelds that's ever been made I've got three of them at the house I use mine every single day and the community behind the steam deck is absolutely amazing they've done some really great stuff with what we have here but you know if both of these were sitting on the table fully charged ready to go I would probably pick up the Ally over the steam deck now we've got newer architecture on the CPU zenfor versus Zen 2 newer architecture on the GPU are dna3 versus rdn A2 plus I can access more of my games that I already own that work on windows with the Rog Ally and of course we can install Windows on the steam deck if you want to but uh one of the big things that a lot of people were stating they'd Miss if they were to upgrade or just move over to the Ally are the track pads and for me that's not a big deal because I hate track pads no matter what it's on my laptop always has a mouse connected to it I just don't like them so I'm not going to be missing it but everybody's got their own preferences and I will have a full comparison video coming up I do want to run some benchmarks on both of them battery life tests and things like that and just give you an overall comparison between the Ally and the steam deck so that's another one that I've got in the works right now but before I wrap this video up I wanted to give you a look at what kind of battery life I got out of this so far 100 screen brightness 1080p video playback 8 hours and 20 minutes not bad at all but you know I'm not gonna watch eight hours of video on this so moving over to gaming 8 watts great for Indie gaming 2D Games 3 hours and seven minutes 15 watts netted me 1 hour and 43 minutes and finally 25 watts 1 hour and four minutes so far I'm really liking the Asus Rog Ally built-in controls are spot on beautiful screen here love that we have that adaptive sync or freesync here awesome weight and it just does feel really good in the hands now there's a lot more that I want to do with this and I will have more videos on the way I've got a full emulation video coming we want to do dock mode a steam deck comparison so keep an eye on the channel and like I mentioned and like I mentioned the official price on this is 6.99 you can pre-order it right now over on Best Buy I'll leave a link in the description and you can have one in your hands June 13th it's going to launch worldwide June 13th so you know if you're interested in picking one up definitely check out that pre-order but that's going to wrap it up for my first look video at the Asus Rog Ally if you end up getting one you won't be disappointed this is an amazing little handheld and there is a lot more that we can do with this there's more optimizations to be had and I'm super excited to see what the community does with the Ally if you've got any questions or if you want to see anything else running on this just let me know in the comment comments below but that's going to wrap it up for this video and like always thanks for watchingforeign hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today I'm super excited because uh we've got our hands on the all-new Asus Rog Ally and I'll tell you yeah this is definitely going to change the handheld game this thing is absolutely amazing from the screen to the performance just the overall form factor and all of the built-in features I personally really love the new Ally and the one we're going to be taking a look at in this video has the Z1 extreme so this is the highest end model that they offer right now and the price on this officially is 6.99 so it's not much more than the highest end steam deck and for 6.99 you're getting quite a handheld gaming PC here seven inch 120 hertz freesync display an 8 core 16 threat zenforce CPU and rdna3 Graphics this makes for a very potent little gaming handheld and we've got a lot to go over in this video I will have more on the way I've got a full emulation video in the works already we're going to do a lot of testing some comparison videos between the Steam deck and the Ally but uh first and foremost for this video the overall form factor like I mentioned I've had this for about seven days and it is a very comfortable handheld to hang on to coming in at 608 grams which makes it one of the lighter handhelds on the market and the first time I pulled this out of the box I got a little confused I thought it might be just kind of a demo unit with nothing inside of it because it is really light compared to the other hand house that we've taken a look at on the channel and personally I really like the overall aesthetic that they've come up with here for the Rog Ally up top here we've got our power button slash fingerprint sensor so we can log in really quickly to Windows we've also got a volume rocker a couple status LEDs a Micro SD card slot and a 3.5 millimeter audio jack and of course up top here we've got this odd looking Port this is a proprietary ASU sport known as an XG mobile Port this supports their xge GPU line and right now they actually offer up to the 4090 which is pretty crazy it's basically a pcie interface but we've also got USB 3.2 this is how we're going to charge our unit or connect it to an external display and by the way I mean to connect it to an external display you don't need their XG dock or anything like that you can go right over USB type c I'm trying to get my hands on one of these XG mobile docs so I can do some testing with it so keep an eye on the channel when it comes to the built-in controls we've got kind of an Xbox style layout and to tell you the truth I wasn't too keen on this d-pad given that it's not separated but it's actually much better than it looks I will be testing it out in this video around back we've got two extra remappable buttons and this does have analog triggers which really helps out for racing games overall really liking the controller setup that they've come up with here it definitely works out great for PC gaming and emulation let's go ahead and get the specs out of the way so for the CPU or the Apu rather this is using the brand new AMD ryzen Z1 extreme we've got eight Zen 4 cores and 16 threads this utilizes a 12cu rdna 3 Radeon igpu up to 2700 megahertz 16 gigabytes of LP ddr5 Ram running at 6 400 megahertz and from the BIOS we've got four gigabytes dedicated to that igpu it's got a 512 gigabyte 2230 nvme it's pcie 4.0 and you can always upgrade this if you want to but one of the main things that sets this apart from other handhelds on the market is the display now I've been saying it for a while we need adaptive sync or freesync on these AMD powered handhelds and we have it here this is a 7-inch 110 Hertz IPS at 1920x1080 it supports adaptive sync and freesync 100 srgb up to 500 nits of brightness freesync or adaptive sync comes in really handy if you want to run at a lower wattage to save battery life and we'll take a look at that in a little bit but we have not seen a display that looks this good or performs this well on a handheld yet but another thing that's really important for these handhelds is the audio system and they haven't skimped out now we've got two one watt speakers and that might not sound like much but it's got an adaptive audio amp and it supports Dolby Atmos and this thing actually puts out some bass the first time I booted up a game on it I was about 50 volume and I was really impressed by how clear and Loud these speakers are we've also got Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.2 a 40 watt hour battery with 65 watt PD quick charging it does come with a 65 watt power supply in the Box it weighs only 608 grams and of course we're running Windows and that's one of the main things a lot of people were kind of worried about having a Windows handheld after we've been messing around with the steam deck using their awesome Steam OS 3 but Asus has really come through with software to allow us to easily navigate windows but uh the main claim to fame here is Armory crate SE we can press the Armory crate button at any time it's going to bring it up for us we've got our game library and this will automatically scan our directories via on internal storage or MicroSD we've also got a couple views that we can mess around with so this is going to be the default view we've got a list view if you're into this but uh one of the best things here is each one of these games can be fully customized so we can have custom profiles for each one of these games and basically change everything we need to we can remap the controller change the sensitivity on the analog joysticks and analog triggers we can change the RGB how the haptics react and of course you can choose a power profile for the ryzen Z1 extreme or you can manually create one and we'll go over that in just a little while but uh let's move over to the settings section in Armory crate SE from here we can totally configure the handheld to our liking we can change the RGB disable Wi-Fi Bluetooth also change the overall performance profile and something we haven't taken a look at yet is the command center we can edit all of our options over here but at any time if we press this left hand button it'll bring up our Command Center this is great for when you're in game or basically anytime at all because we can change everything we need to directly from the command center controller mode can be swapped from desktop to controller and in desktop mode we can use the analog sticks and buttons as kind of a mouse and cursor you can also bring up your custom game profiles from here we've got a performance overlay that can be brought up at any time you can bring up the keyboard limit the FPS change the resolution change the refresh rate your RGB you can enable rsr which is Radeon super resolution I mean they've thought of basically everything here for the command center and I know more will be added in the future heading back over to the settings section in Armory cray SC RGB now some people might not be into this personally I think it looks really good what they've done here but uh we can customize this if you don't like the rainbow effect you can change the brightness you can change the speed you can customize your color profiles if you want to we've got a few different presets that we can mess around with now personally I'm not into a lot of RGB on my main gaming PC but having it here around the analog sticks on this handheld really does set it off and the fact that we can fully customize this is pretty awesome overall I think Armory crate SC is turning out to be really great for this little handheld and more options will be added in the future it's still a bit early but uh from here we've got an update Center so we can update all of our drivers and everything like that you can sign in with our Asus account and download some pretty cool wallpapers there's also a little game platform section right now we've got Xbox EA steam epic Uplay and Gog obviously there's more on the market you can just head over to the website but from here it just gives this kind of easy access to download that game platform and install it directly on the device but one of the main sections here that's going to come in really important is the operation mode section this is basically our performance profiles that we can set up for the Apu to send more wattage or less wattage to that CPU and GPU first one here is the windows controlled mode next up we've got the silent mode which is 9 watts and this is great for 2D games indie games and a lot of emulators will run fine in silent mode the next one here is performance mode and this is their 15 watt mode but remember we've got a little boost on that up to 20. moving over to turbo mode when you're on battery turbo mode is 25 watts when you're plugged in it's 30 Watts this is going to be a really good mode for gaming but remember battery life will suffer at those higher wattages and finally we've got manual mode from here we can go from 7 Watts up to 30 Watts on battery we can also adjust the fan curve to our liking and we can independently adjust both fans we have built into the handheld you can set up several different profiles here and one kind of sweet spot that I've been messing around with is just 18 Watts kind of locked right there at 18. it does offer some really great performance and battery life but that's not all we have here because the Asus Rog Ally actually does have a dock mode like I mentioned on battery turbo mode is 25 watts plugged in is 30 but with manual mode plugged in we can go all the way up to 35 watts and we've actually got a boost up to around 40 Watts so this is going to offer the best performance that this handheld can put out in manual mode and the best thing about this is you know when we're plugged in we don't have to worry about battery life so we can take it all the way up plus we can adjust that fan curve so yeah I mean if you want to get the most out of this in dock mode this is definitely the way to go and the last thing I wanted to talk about here before we get into some game testing is Radeon super resolution rsr we can actually enable this from our Command Center but it also has to be enabled per game inside of the Radeon software at least at the time of making this video basically with this enabled using borderless Window mode our game is going to run at 720p but super resolution is going to upscale it to 1080. so it's only putting the stress on this Apu that a 720p game was but we still got a really crisp picture because super resolution is taking it up for us and I will do a full video talking about this because it will help out a lot of people when trying to run games at a lower TDP but you still want to get a really good looking picture okay so before we take a look at anything else I did want to show you a little bit of gameplay here we've got Forza Horizon 5 and I've got afterburner up in the top left-hand Corner we've got our GPU CPU usage and clocks plus we've got CPU package power which right now is at 15 watts in total system draw from the battery which is sitting at 27 Watts that's about the maximum the steam deck draws from its battery remember that's everything on the device right now screen speakers and I'm at 100 brightness Forza Horizon 5 medium settings 1080p we can get an average of around 81 FPS this is really great performance being only at 15 watts but of course we can get a lot more out of it and remember with the preset power profiles performance is 15 watts got a boost up to 20 and turbo is going to take us up to 25 with a boost up to 30. so let's go ahead and see what we can get out of this in turbo mode the only thing I've done here is that that power profile to Turbo and now we can get an average of 101 FPS out of this game but you might have noticed that our total system power draw from the batteries jumped up to around 41 Watts which is going to give us a little under an hour battery life sitting at turbo mode with a game like this but there's one last thing I wanted to test here I wanted to see if we could take advantage of that 120 hertz display with this game and yeah I mean we can in turbo mode at 720p pretty crazy running Forza Horizon 5 at 120 FPS on a handheld and speaking of 120 FPS here's OG Skyrim low settings performance mode this game will run at high 60fps in performance mode but I wanted to see if we could kind of double that from 60 up to 120 and it's totally possible checking out cyberpunk 2077 15 watts 1080p low settings we're right there on the edge running at a constant 60 with this one at 15 watts but it just needs a little more if you wanted to set it up I'd say 18 watts would be great with vsync locked at 60fps with this game here low settings but remember we're only in performance mode and of course with a little more wattage thrown at the Z1 extreme we can get a lot more out of this game same exact settings 1080p low settings but we're using turbo mode here now we can get an average of 74 FPS and remember with all of the games that I'm testing here I will have that frame rate unlocked locking it at 60 in turbo mode will lower the total system power consumption because we do need to run it up to go over that 60 FPS mark Spider-Man Miles Morales actually runs really well on this device where at 1080p low settings and FSR is set to Performance looks great like this and you know I don't mind FSR performance at 1080p but performance at 720 on a larger display definitely looks pretty bad luckily we've got this smaller seven inch display and it looks great here next up we've got Horizon zero Dawn 1080p FSR set to Performance and original settings and original is basically just medium with this one with the games I've been testing I'm at 1080P and I wanted to see how well it would do at 1080 but remember we can always drop all of these games down to 720 use the same settings and it will draw less power from the battery Warframe is another one I wanted to test I was really interested to see if we could do 120 FPS so we're at 1080p low settings and in performance mode which is 15 to 20 watts we're so close we mean we're right there on the edge just running this at a constant 120 throwing a little more wattage at it or just going up to turbo mode will allow us to do 120 with Warframe the next game on the list is Red Dead Redemption 2 we're at 1080p FSR set to Performance low settings and we're in performance mode right now and I'm getting an average of 44 FPS so with a game like this we will need to take it down to 720p in performance mode or we can just up that wattage and now in turbo mode we get an average of 64 FPS Seeing Red Dead 2 run on the handheld like this is really impressive I also wanted to test Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and I like using the built-in Benchmark we're using recommended settings but we're at 1080P and this does take FSR to Performance and with its set up like this in turbo mode on battery we got an average of 97 FPS and a low of 65 so this game is more than playable on the Rog Ally now obviously with a lot of these 2D games or indie games we won't need to be in Turbo or performance mode so I've set up a custom profile at 7 Watts I wanted to show you here with Shredder's revenge it's sending a little under six watts to the Apu and in total we're pulling under 13 Watts total from the battery here so we can expect around 3 hours and 15 minutes out of the battery I'm sure games like this would run at less wattage plus I've got the brightness on this set at 100 percent I did want to test out this d-pad for you and I mentioned that I'm not a huge fan of it just given that it's an unseparated d-pad I'd much rather have kind of a traditional unit on this but the roll on it's really good for fighting games not the best on the market but you know pulling off your favorite special moves and playing Platformers is going to work out great definitely works a lot better than it looks foreign the final game I wanted to test here was the last of us part one and if you've ever tried to run this on a handheld you know how hard it can be right now we're at 720p but I'm using rsr upscale to 1080 we're at low settings and we can get over 60 FPS with this game on a handheld I will have a full emulation video coming up real soon so keep an eye on the channel but I did want to test out at least one here we've got PS3 using rpcs3 Vulcan back in with Skate 3 which is a harder one to emulate this loves extra cores and threads and on older ryzen chips we needed a lot of wattage to get this to run at full speed but with Zen 4 now 18 watts is kind of The Sweet Spot for a game like this and yeah you're going to be able to run your favorite switch games with no issues on this at 1080p so the handheld elephant in the room is going to be the steam deck and I just want to get this out of the way steam deck is one of my favorite handhelds that's ever been made I've got three of them at the house I use mine every single day and the community behind the steam deck is absolutely amazing they've done some really great stuff with what we have here but you know if both of these were sitting on the table fully charged ready to go I would probably pick up the Ally over the steam deck now we've got newer architecture on the CPU zenfor versus Zen 2 newer architecture on the GPU are dna3 versus rdn A2 plus I can access more of my games that I already own that work on windows with the Rog Ally and of course we can install Windows on the steam deck if you want to but uh one of the big things that a lot of people were stating they'd Miss if they were to upgrade or just move over to the Ally are the track pads and for me that's not a big deal because I hate track pads no matter what it's on my laptop always has a mouse connected to it I just don't like them so I'm not going to be missing it but everybody's got their own preferences and I will have a full comparison video coming up I do want to run some benchmarks on both of them battery life tests and things like that and just give you an overall comparison between the Ally and the steam deck so that's another one that I've got in the works right now but before I wrap this video up I wanted to give you a look at what kind of battery life I got out of this so far 100 screen brightness 1080p video playback 8 hours and 20 minutes not bad at all but you know I'm not gonna watch eight hours of video on this so moving over to gaming 8 watts great for Indie gaming 2D Games 3 hours and seven minutes 15 watts netted me 1 hour and 43 minutes and finally 25 watts 1 hour and four minutes so far I'm really liking the Asus Rog Ally built-in controls are spot on beautiful screen here love that we have that adaptive sync or freesync here awesome weight and it just does feel really good in the hands now there's a lot more that I want to do with this and I will have more videos on the way I've got a full emulation video coming we want to do dock mode a steam deck comparison so keep an eye on the channel and like I mentioned and like I mentioned the official price on this is 6.99 you can pre-order it right now over on Best Buy I'll leave a link in the description and you can have one in your hands June 13th it's going to launch worldwide June 13th so you know if you're interested in picking one up definitely check out that pre-order but that's going to wrap it up for my first look video at the Asus Rog Ally if you end up getting one you won't be disappointed this is an amazing little handheld and there is a lot more that we can do with this there's more optimizations to be had and I'm super excited to see what the community does with the Ally if you've got any questions or if you want to see anything else running on this just let me know in the comment comments below but that's going to wrap it up for this video and like always thanks for watchingforeign hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today I'm super excited because uh we've got our hands on the all-new Asus Rog Ally and I'll tell you yeah this is definitely going to change the handheld game this thing is absolutely amazing from the screen to the performance just the overall form factor and all of the built-in features I personally really love the new Ally and the one we're going to be taking a look at in this video has the Z1 extreme so this is the highest end model that they offer right now and the price on this officially is 6.99 so it's not much more than the highest end steam deck and for 6.99 you're getting quite a handheld gaming PC here seven inch 120 hertz freesync display an 8 core 16 threat zenforce CPU and rdna3 Graphics this makes for a very potent little gaming handheld and we've got a lot to go over in this video I will have more on the way I've got a full emulation video in the works already we're going to do a lot of testing some comparison videos between the Steam deck and the Ally but uh first and foremost for this video the overall form factor like I mentioned I've had this for about seven days and it is a very comfortable handheld to hang on to coming in at 608 grams which makes it one of the lighter handhelds on the market and the first time I pulled this out of the box I got a little confused I thought it might be just kind of a demo unit with nothing inside of it because it is really light compared to the other hand house that we've taken a look at on the channel and personally I really like the overall aesthetic that they've come up with here for the Rog Ally up top here we've got our power button slash fingerprint sensor so we can log in really quickly to Windows we've also got a volume rocker a couple status LEDs a Micro SD card slot and a 3.5 millimeter audio jack and of course up top here we've got this odd looking Port this is a proprietary ASU sport known as an XG mobile Port this supports their xge GPU line and right now they actually offer up to the 4090 which is pretty crazy it's basically a pcie interface but we've also got USB 3.2 this is how we're going to charge our unit or connect it to an external display and by the way I mean to connect it to an external display you don't need their XG dock or anything like that you can go right over USB type c I'm trying to get my hands on one of these XG mobile docs so I can do some testing with it so keep an eye on the channel when it comes to the built-in controls we've got kind of an Xbox style layout and to tell you the truth I wasn't too keen on this d-pad given that it's not separated but it's actually much better than it looks I will be testing it out in this video around back we've got two extra remappable buttons and this does have analog triggers which really helps out for racing games overall really liking the controller setup that they've come up with here it definitely works out great for PC gaming and emulation let's go ahead and get the specs out of the way so for the CPU or the Apu rather this is using the brand new AMD ryzen Z1 extreme we've got eight Zen 4 cores and 16 threads this utilizes a 12cu rdna 3 Radeon igpu up to 2700 megahertz 16 gigabytes of LP ddr5 Ram running at 6 400 megahertz and from the BIOS we've got four gigabytes dedicated to that igpu it's got a 512 gigabyte 2230 nvme it's pcie 4.0 and you can always upgrade this if you want to but one of the main things that sets this apart from other handhelds on the market is the display now I've been saying it for a while we need adaptive sync or freesync on these AMD powered handhelds and we have it here this is a 7-inch 110 Hertz IPS at 1920x1080 it supports adaptive sync and freesync 100 srgb up to 500 nits of brightness freesync or adaptive sync comes in really handy if you want to run at a lower wattage to save battery life and we'll take a look at that in a little bit but we have not seen a display that looks this good or performs this well on a handheld yet but another thing that's really important for these handhelds is the audio system and they haven't skimped out now we've got two one watt speakers and that might not sound like much but it's got an adaptive audio amp and it supports Dolby Atmos and this thing actually puts out some bass the first time I booted up a game on it I was about 50 volume and I was really impressed by how clear and Loud these speakers are we've also got Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.2 a 40 watt hour battery with 65 watt PD quick charging it does come with a 65 watt power supply in the Box it weighs only 608 grams and of course we're running Windows and that's one of the main things a lot of people were kind of worried about having a Windows handheld after we've been messing around with the steam deck using their awesome Steam OS 3 but Asus has really come through with software to allow us to easily navigate windows but uh the main claim to fame here is Armory crate SE we can press the Armory crate button at any time it's going to bring it up for us we've got our game library and this will automatically scan our directories via on internal storage or MicroSD we've also got a couple views that we can mess around with so this is going to be the default view we've got a list view if you're into this but uh one of the best things here is each one of these games can be fully customized so we can have custom profiles for each one of these games and basically change everything we need to we can remap the controller change the sensitivity on the analog joysticks and analog triggers we can change the RGB how the haptics react and of course you can choose a power profile for the ryzen Z1 extreme or you can manually create one and we'll go over that in just a little while but uh let's move over to the settings section in Armory crate SE from here we can totally configure the handheld to our liking we can change the RGB disable Wi-Fi Bluetooth also change the overall performance profile and something we haven't taken a look at yet is the command center we can edit all of our options over here but at any time if we press this left hand button it'll bring up our Command Center this is great for when you're in game or basically anytime at all because we can change everything we need to directly from the command center controller mode can be swapped from desktop to controller and in desktop mode we can use the analog sticks and buttons as kind of a mouse and cursor you can also bring up your custom game profiles from here we've got a performance overlay that can be brought up at any time you can bring up the keyboard limit the FPS change the resolution change the refresh rate your RGB you can enable rsr which is Radeon super resolution I mean they've thought of basically everything here for the command center and I know more will be added in the future heading back over to the settings section in Armory cray SC RGB now some people might not be into this personally I think it looks really good what they've done here but uh we can customize this if you don't like the rainbow effect you can change the brightness you can change the speed you can customize your color profiles if you want to we've got a few different presets that we can mess around with now personally I'm not into a lot of RGB on my main gaming PC but having it here around the analog sticks on this handheld really does set it off and the fact that we can fully customize this is pretty awesome overall I think Armory crate SC is turning out to be really great for this little handheld and more options will be added in the future it's still a bit early but uh from here we've got an update Center so we can update all of our drivers and everything like that you can sign in with our Asus account and download some pretty cool wallpapers there's also a little game platform section right now we've got Xbox EA steam epic Uplay and Gog obviously there's more on the market you can just head over to the website but from here it just gives this kind of easy access to download that game platform and install it directly on the device but one of the main sections here that's going to come in really important is the operation mode section this is basically our performance profiles that we can set up for the Apu to send more wattage or less wattage to that CPU and GPU first one here is the windows controlled mode next up we've got the silent mode which is 9 watts and this is great for 2D games indie games and a lot of emulators will run fine in silent mode the next one here is performance mode and this is their 15 watt mode but remember we've got a little boost on that up to 20. moving over to turbo mode when you're on battery turbo mode is 25 watts when you're plugged in it's 30 Watts this is going to be a really good mode for gaming but remember battery life will suffer at those higher wattages and finally we've got manual mode from here we can go from 7 Watts up to 30 Watts on battery we can also adjust the fan curve to our liking and we can independently adjust both fans we have built into the handheld you can set up several different profiles here and one kind of sweet spot that I've been messing around with is just 18 Watts kind of locked right there at 18. it does offer some really great performance and battery life but that's not all we have here because the Asus Rog Ally actually does have a dock mode like I mentioned on battery turbo mode is 25 watts plugged in is 30 but with manual mode plugged in we can go all the way up to 35 watts and we've actually got a boost up to around 40 Watts so this is going to offer the best performance that this handheld can put out in manual mode and the best thing about this is you know when we're plugged in we don't have to worry about battery life so we can take it all the way up plus we can adjust that fan curve so yeah I mean if you want to get the most out of this in dock mode this is definitely the way to go and the last thing I wanted to talk about here before we get into some game testing is Radeon super resolution rsr we can actually enable this from our Command Center but it also has to be enabled per game inside of the Radeon software at least at the time of making this video basically with this enabled using borderless Window mode our game is going to run at 720p but super resolution is going to upscale it to 1080. so it's only putting the stress on this Apu that a 720p game was but we still got a really crisp picture because super resolution is taking it up for us and I will do a full video talking about this because it will help out a lot of people when trying to run games at a lower TDP but you still want to get a really good looking picture okay so before we take a look at anything else I did want to show you a little bit of gameplay here we've got Forza Horizon 5 and I've got afterburner up in the top left-hand Corner we've got our GPU CPU usage and clocks plus we've got CPU package power which right now is at 15 watts in total system draw from the battery which is sitting at 27 Watts that's about the maximum the steam deck draws from its battery remember that's everything on the device right now screen speakers and I'm at 100 brightness Forza Horizon 5 medium settings 1080p we can get an average of around 81 FPS this is really great performance being only at 15 watts but of course we can get a lot more out of it and remember with the preset power profiles performance is 15 watts got a boost up to 20 and turbo is going to take us up to 25 with a boost up to 30. so let's go ahead and see what we can get out of this in turbo mode the only thing I've done here is that that power profile to Turbo and now we can get an average of 101 FPS out of this game but you might have noticed that our total system power draw from the batteries jumped up to around 41 Watts which is going to give us a little under an hour battery life sitting at turbo mode with a game like this but there's one last thing I wanted to test here I wanted to see if we could take advantage of that 120 hertz display with this game and yeah I mean we can in turbo mode at 720p pretty crazy running Forza Horizon 5 at 120 FPS on a handheld and speaking of 120 FPS here's OG Skyrim low settings performance mode this game will run at high 60fps in performance mode but I wanted to see if we could kind of double that from 60 up to 120 and it's totally possible checking out cyberpunk 2077 15 watts 1080p low settings we're right there on the edge running at a constant 60 with this one at 15 watts but it just needs a little more if you wanted to set it up I'd say 18 watts would be great with vsync locked at 60fps with this game here low settings but remember we're only in performance mode and of course with a little more wattage thrown at the Z1 extreme we can get a lot more out of this game same exact settings 1080p low settings but we're using turbo mode here now we can get an average of 74 FPS and remember with all of the games that I'm testing here I will have that frame rate unlocked locking it at 60 in turbo mode will lower the total system power consumption because we do need to run it up to go over that 60 FPS mark Spider-Man Miles Morales actually runs really well on this device where at 1080p low settings and FSR is set to Performance looks great like this and you know I don't mind FSR performance at 1080p but performance at 720 on a larger display definitely looks pretty bad luckily we've got this smaller seven inch display and it looks great here next up we've got Horizon zero Dawn 1080p FSR set to Performance and original settings and original is basically just medium with this one with the games I've been testing I'm at 1080P and I wanted to see how well it would do at 1080 but remember we can always drop all of these games down to 720 use the same settings and it will draw less power from the battery Warframe is another one I wanted to test I was really interested to see if we could do 120 FPS so we're at 1080p low settings and in performance mode which is 15 to 20 watts we're so close we mean we're right there on the edge just running this at a constant 120 throwing a little more wattage at it or just going up to turbo mode will allow us to do 120 with Warframe the next game on the list is Red Dead Redemption 2 we're at 1080p FSR set to Performance low settings and we're in performance mode right now and I'm getting an average of 44 FPS so with a game like this we will need to take it down to 720p in performance mode or we can just up that wattage and now in turbo mode we get an average of 64 FPS Seeing Red Dead 2 run on the handheld like this is really impressive I also wanted to test Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and I like using the built-in Benchmark we're using recommended settings but we're at 1080P and this does take FSR to Performance and with its set up like this in turbo mode on battery we got an average of 97 FPS and a low of 65 so this game is more than playable on the Rog Ally now obviously with a lot of these 2D games or indie games we won't need to be in Turbo or performance mode so I've set up a custom profile at 7 Watts I wanted to show you here with Shredder's revenge it's sending a little under six watts to the Apu and in total we're pulling under 13 Watts total from the battery here so we can expect around 3 hours and 15 minutes out of the battery I'm sure games like this would run at less wattage plus I've got the brightness on this set at 100 percent I did want to test out this d-pad for you and I mentioned that I'm not a huge fan of it just given that it's an unseparated d-pad I'd much rather have kind of a traditional unit on this but the roll on it's really good for fighting games not the best on the market but you know pulling off your favorite special moves and playing Platformers is going to work out great definitely works a lot better than it looks foreign the final game I wanted to test here was the last of us part one and if you've ever tried to run this on a handheld you know how hard it can be right now we're at 720p but I'm using rsr upscale to 1080 we're at low settings and we can get over 60 FPS with this game on a handheld I will have a full emulation video coming up real soon so keep an eye on the channel but I did want to test out at least one here we've got PS3 using rpcs3 Vulcan back in with Skate 3 which is a harder one to emulate this loves extra cores and threads and on older ryzen chips we needed a lot of wattage to get this to run at full speed but with Zen 4 now 18 watts is kind of The Sweet Spot for a game like this and yeah you're going to be able to run your favorite switch games with no issues on this at 1080p so the handheld elephant in the room is going to be the steam deck and I just want to get this out of the way steam deck is one of my favorite handhelds that's ever been made I've got three of them at the house I use mine every single day and the community behind the steam deck is absolutely amazing they've done some really great stuff with what we have here but you know if both of these were sitting on the table fully charged ready to go I would probably pick up the Ally over the steam deck now we've got newer architecture on the CPU zenfor versus Zen 2 newer architecture on the GPU are dna3 versus rdn A2 plus I can access more of my games that I already own that work on windows with the Rog Ally and of course we can install Windows on the steam deck if you want to but uh one of the big things that a lot of people were stating they'd Miss if they were to upgrade or just move over to the Ally are the track pads and for me that's not a big deal because I hate track pads no matter what it's on my laptop always has a mouse connected to it I just don't like them so I'm not going to be missing it but everybody's got their own preferences and I will have a full comparison video coming up I do want to run some benchmarks on both of them battery life tests and things like that and just give you an overall comparison between the Ally and the steam deck so that's another one that I've got in the works right now but before I wrap this video up I wanted to give you a look at what kind of battery life I got out of this so far 100 screen brightness 1080p video playback 8 hours and 20 minutes not bad at all but you know I'm not gonna watch eight hours of video on this so moving over to gaming 8 watts great for Indie gaming 2D Games 3 hours and seven minutes 15 watts netted me 1 hour and 43 minutes and finally 25 watts 1 hour and four minutes so far I'm really liking the Asus Rog Ally built-in controls are spot on beautiful screen here love that we have that adaptive sync or freesync here awesome weight and it just does feel really good in the hands now there's a lot more that I want to do with this and I will have more videos on the way I've got a full emulation video coming we want to do dock mode a steam deck comparison so keep an eye on the channel and like I mentioned and like I mentioned the official price on this is 6.99 you can pre-order it right now over on Best Buy I'll leave a link in the description and you can have one in your hands June 13th it's going to launch worldwide June 13th so you know if you're interested in picking one up definitely check out that pre-order but that's going to wrap it up for my first look video at the Asus Rog Ally if you end up getting one you won't be disappointed this is an amazing little handheld and there is a lot more that we can do with this there's more optimizations to be had and I'm super excited to see what the community does with the Ally if you've got any questions or if you want to see anything else running on this just let me know in the comment comments below but that's going to wrap it up for this video and like always thanks for watching\n"