**The Asus Steam Deck: A Comprehensive Review**

We've taken a look at one accessory that I can highly recommend, the official charging dock for the Steam Deck, which allows us to charge and use our handheld device as a desktop computer. This is obviously built-in display it'll show us the percentage of the battery plus our wattage and amps and if you multiply those you can tell how fast it's charging whatever device you have it plugged into it'll do up to 65 Watts and we can also charge this at 65 Watts so we can charge it up really quickly. So yeah, this is one that I can highly recommend.

I know it seems a bit expensive coming in at $60, but it's really worth it to get that extra battery life. Another thing that I've been toying around with are kind of cases for the Steam Deck, unfortunately Asus didn't include one inside of the packaging so I recently picked up this kind of carrying case. This will actually store the Steam Deck it'll store your external battery and charger and a few more things. These are pretty cheap now, I think they were kind of popularized when the Steam Deck was released. It's got a hard outer shell nice shoulder strap with some padding on the back and it's actually got quite a bit of room so we've got a single compartment and there's another zip compartment that'll uh kind of be up against your back right in here this is where I put my battery and my charger for the Steam Deck but you can store other things in here also.

It's got this kind of faux felt in here so it doesn't scratch up your handheld plus we've got these velcro straps to hold it in place. Once we put the Steam Deck in here, this flap actually protects the screen really nice little travel bag slash case for the Steam Deck and this could definitely come in really handy if you're moving around a lot with your handheld and if you're worried about it moving around we've got those velcro straps here if I can get them out there, we go. It'll hold this thing right in place and we can store our extra accessories right in here. It's definitely not a must-have but like I mentioned if you're traveling a lot with your handheld this would help out you know protecting it and carrying it around especially if you're going to be carrying an extra battery pack and your charger with the Steam Deck.

The final thing we're going to be taking a look at is something that I'm still waiting for manufacturers to catch up on, which is HDMI slash charging docks. We've got one here from a company called AmazonBasics, but even though it says it's 100 watt PD compatible, plugging in our Steam Deck with the stock charger doesn't allow us to go into desktop mode if you're familiar with the Steam Deck, you know that once we plug it in to a 65 watt PD charger we can go over 35 Watts enabling basically desktop mode. Every one of these docks that I've tested so far we cannot do that unfortunately. The Steam Deck really isn't detecting these as a 65 watt PD charger and I've tested it with the included Steam Deck charger and a 100 watt external PD charger just to make sure, unfortunately, it's just not working.

Now if you don't mind playing at 35 Watts you could definitely use a dock like this but if we go into Armory Crate SC show you exactly what I'm talking about manual mode, we can usually go up to around 42 Watts but here we're kind of stuck right there at 35 so we just can't go over that limit to get better performance out of this using one of these docks. The only one I've been able to get to work is the official Asus HDMI charger dock. This is actually pretty cool, it's basically a 65 watt charger with HDMI so we can plug it in with a single USBC cable to the Steam Deck, HDMI is going to go to your monitor and it will work in that desktop mode so we can get that higher wattage with it.

I was really hoping that those cheaper docks on Amazon would work properly but unfortunately at the time of making this video, it's just not worth picking one up right now. But yeah, these are some of the accessories that I personally like using with the Steam Deck and really screen protector microSD card and that extra battery are where it's at keeping that screen protected is kind of a must for me, like I mentioned I'm really hard on these handhelds so I didn't want to get it scratched up adding that extra storage comes in handy for holding more games and you definitely want to play those games longer. So an external battery is a must-have at least for me but that's going to wrap it up for this video, really appreciate you watching if you're interested in picking up any of these accessories I'll leave some links in the description and if you've got any questions let me know down below but that's it for this one.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enforeign hey you what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at some must-have accessories for your Asus Rog Ally and one of these is one that I would definitely stay away from at least at the time of making this video uh we'll get into that in just a second but I've been picking up and testing out a bunch of different stuff for the Allies since I had it and recently I picked up a new one for my wife so I figured I'd pick up some extras here so we could kind of get hers all set up but with that out of the way let's go ahead and jump into it and the first thing we're going to be talking about is a screen protector for me this is really important kind of hard on my handhelds and I definitely wanted a good screen protector I've tested out two different versions from Amazon and neither of them fit the screen properly well it fit the middle of the screen but it didn't cover the bezel which is also glassier so uh recently dbrand released their new screen protectors and I'm sure they've got some more stuff coming from the Ally and I've actually used dbrand screen protectors in the past on my steam deck these were some of the best that I tested out and I did test quite a few picked up a lot from Amazon they are coming in more expensive than the ones you're going to find over on Amazon but in my opinion they are worth it this one here just happens to be a two pack comes with our cleaning cloth an alcohol wipe and this cool little spudger I've got a couple of these from the steam deck screen protectors I used application on this super easy first thing we're going to do is just use one of the included alcohol wipes to wipe the screen down comes with this little microfiber cloth go ahead and get the excess off and I let it dry for about a minute doesn't take long at all but I do have cats and hair is everywhere so I kind of try to do this quickly I mean it just gets everywhere so there's really no way around it these are pretty cool because they do have these little lineup tabs on the side so uh you can hold it right here and line it up but we do need to peel the uh back right off of it I gotta do this quickly like I mentioned that cat hair is just crazy we'll just line it up and these go on so nice actually once you get it lined up basically you're just going to set it down I usually start from the middle but this time it's going to create a bubble because it was just gonna set by itself there was kind of no need to touch that middle but luckily we've got that spudger we can get all of these out really easily and once we're finished we're going to remove that front protective film and this is sitting on here perfectly very nice application these are definitely some of the best that I've used so far so you know if you're interested in checking these out I'll leave a link in the description doesn't have a huge doesn't come up too much nice thin screen protector that fits these perfectly the next must have on the list for the Rog Ally is a Micro SD card now you can always install an SSD I've done a video on it but this is just a really easy way to up that storage I've got a one terabyte silicon power card these were 67 it's only an A2 card now download and transfer speeds aren't going to be the best but you really won't notice a difference when you're launching a game with an A2 card versus something that's going to be a lot more expensive and the price on these are great it's actually about 65 dollars right now in the past I've used a lot of these silicon Power Cards and my Raspberry Pi's I used to pick up the 128 gigs never had any issues with them and this is going to work out just fine for the Rog Ally now if you want to spend more money for a faster car be my guest but this is the one that I chose and I've had really good luck with these cards give you a quick demo on setting this up at least for uh the Ally and steam so super easy to install we've got our micro SD card slot up here once we insert it The Ally is going to detect it and most of these cards are going to be formatted ex fat we actually want to format this NTFS really easy to do from a file explorer you can see it over on the left hand side where it's going to be under my PC we check the properties it's pre-formatted ex fat we want NTFS so we can transfer larger files like Steam games here so we're going to format make sure we choose NTFS you can change the name if you'd like and there we go so we've now got our SD card formatted see it's shown right up here on the Ally but there's one more thing we need to do here to get it to work with steam from Steam we're going to go to settings storage and we're going to add a new storage device external drive it automatically detected my micro SD card now you can do it this way if you want to or let me choose another location it's really up to you I'm just going to keep it simple here we'll choose add and we can also set this as default so every time we download a game it'll go directly to the micro OSD if you want to do it this way very easy to set up in my opinion adding more storage to the Ally is one of the best upgrades you can do and you could go with a 512 card bit cheaper I'll leave some links in the description next on the list for must-haves is an external battery now we can always tweak and tune the Ally to get a little better battery life but nothing's really going to come close to you know charging that battery up again and this is one of my favorite little external batteries I actually picked this up for the steam deck when it was initially launched but it also works out really well for the Ally and basically anything else that needs to be charged it does up to 65 Watts PD out you can get it on Amazon sixty dollars with 20 off and usually there's always a coupon for this specific battery here it's got some cool features built in but I'd say the best thing is yes we can fully charge the Allies battery and with this battery pack at 100 after charging the Ally from zero to a hundred I had 32 percent left on the battery pack so I've still got more to go obviously we've got that built-in display it'll show us the percentage of the battery plus our wattage and amps and if you multiply those you can tell how fast it's charging whatever device you have it plugged into it'll do up to 65 Watts and we can also charge this at 65 Watts so we can charge it up really quickly so yeah this is one that I can highly recommend I know it seems a bit expensive coming in at 60 bucks but it's really worth it to get that extra battery life another thing that I've been toying around with are kind of cases for the Ally unfortunately Asus didn't include one inside of the packaging so I recently picked up this kind of carrying case this will actually store the Ally it'll store your external battery and charger and a few more things these are pretty cheap now I think they were kind of put out when the steam deck was released it's got a hard outer shell nice shoulder strap with some padding on the back and it's actually got quite a bit of room so we've got a single compartment and there's another zip compartment that'll uh kind of be up against your back right in here this is where I put my battery and my charger for the Ally but you can store other things in here also it's got this kind of faux felt in here so it doesn't scratch up your handheld plus we've got these velcro straps to hold it in place and once we put the Ally in here this flap actually protects the screen really nice little travel bag slash case for the Ally and this could definitely come in really handy if you're moving around a lot with your handheld and if you're worried about it moving around we've got those velcro straps here if I can get them out there we go it'll hold this thing right in place and we can store our extra accessories right in here it's definitely not a must-have but like I mentioned if you're traveling a lot with your handheld this would help out you know protecting it and carrying it around especially if you're going to be carrying an extra battery pack and your charger with the Ally the final thing we're going to be taking a look at something that I can't recommend right now not any of them that I've tested so far and I've tested quite a few we've got an HDMI slash charging dock here and these were initially designed for the steam DAC but you know the Ally fits in here unfortunately with all of these even though they say they're 100 watt PD compatible plugging it into the Ally with the stock Ally charger doesn't allow us to go into desktop mode if you're familiar with the Ally you know that once we plug it in to a 65 watt PD charger we can go over 35 Watts enabling basically desktop mode to get better performance out of it every one of these docks that I've tested so far we cannot do that unfortunately the Ally really isn't detecting these as a 65 watt PD charger and I've tested it with the included Ally charger and a 100 watt external PD charger just to make sure unfortunately it's just not working now if you don't mind playing just at 35 Watts you could definitely use a dock like this but if we go in to Armory crate SC show you exactly what I'm talking about manual mode we can usually go up to around 42 Watts but here we're kind of stuck right there at 35 so we just can't go over that limit to get better performance out of this using one of these docks right now the only one I've been able to get to work is the official Asus HDMI charger dock this is actually pretty cool it's basically a 65 watt charger with HDMI so we can plug it in with a single USBC cable to the Ally HDMI is going to go to your monitor and it will work in that desktop mode so we can get that higher wattage with it I was really hoping that those cheaper docs on Amazon would work properly but unfortunately at the time of making this video it's just not worth picking one up right now but yeah those are some of the accessories that I personally like using with the Ally and really screen protector micro SD card and that extra battery are where it's at keeping that screen protected is kind of a must for me like I mentioned I'm really hard on these handhelds so I didn't want to get it scratched up adding that extra storage comes in handy for holding more games and you definitely want to play those games longer so an external battery is a must-have at least for me but that's going to wrap it up for this video really appreciate you watching if you're interested in picking up any of these accessories I'll leave some links in the description and if you've got any questions let me know down below but that's it for this one and like always thanks for watching\n"