Review of the ROG Ally

DreamCat04 · February 29

Since I couldn't find anything about the ROG Ally on this forum, I decided to write my own short review of it.

I've had the Ally for around a month now and I've really enjoyed it so far. It is very comfortable to hold, but for my hands it's only comfortable if I can rest my hands on some surface. When I lift it off and hold it in the air, the sides start to dig into my hand and it gets uncomfortable. I'm not an expert on colors or response times, but I can tell you that the screen is amazing. The colors are very vibrant and the pixel density is unlike anything I've ever seen on a Windows device (granted I am running 24" 1080p monitors). Windows hasn't caused many issues and I haven't had any major issues with putting it to sleep, it has just worked for me so far, even when I put it to sleep while a game was running, so they definitely improved that since the launch. I haven't found myself needing to use it for more than two hours at a time, so the meh battery life didn't bother me. Performance-wise, it's okay. I had to turn down some of my games to 720p medium settings, but modern games still look great on medium settings. Plus at a screen size of 7", 720p is still very sharp. Lighter games like Trackmania 2020 I could run at high settings (one down from the highest) at 1080p and I still got more than 60FPS, even getting close to 120FPS at times. One minor complaint I have about it is the fan curve that ASUS forces you to use. You are forced to apply 74% fan speed to the fan under the SD card slot in the 60°C to 69°C range, which is just way too much so the fan wramps up way too quickly. I just ended up setting both fans to 74% at 65°C since it was gonna get loud anyways, so I made it get equally loud on both sides. This made the APU still approach 90°C towards the end of the 2min boost time to 43W, but at 30W, the APU sat at around 72°C. When switching beetween my different custom power profiles the fan profile would sometimes glitch out and be set to 100% in all but the left-most two points. I also have another small complaint: When you use a different 65W power brick than the one that it was shipped with, the GPU is limited to 1686MHz when the battery is below around 60 or 65% when plugged in. As soon as I unplug it however (at any battery percentage), the GPU goes right up to its usual 2200MHz. I found the joysticks good to play on, even if they don't have that much resistance to them with the much bigger deadzones than I was used to from my XBOX controller. The RGB on the joysticks also wouldn't turn off with the regular effects in Armoury Crate. They only turned off(when setting them to 0% brightness) when I applied the same effect in Aura. I found the back buttons a bit annoying at times as I kept hitting them while pressing the ABXY buttons, which ended up in me accidentally screen-capturing for 50 minutes until I realised it and in countless accidental screenshots and notification center openings. I also tried AMFMF on it with the method of updating the driver through device manager. It's very useful even for games that can go down to 40FPS, it makes everything so much smoother until you look around too quickly. I did notice the increased latency but it never really bothered me, I just got used to it since I wasn't using it for fast-paced games. The weight of it also wasn't an issue for me. I didn't expect for the speakers to sound as good as they did. I don't know how it was possible for me to hear sounds behind me from speakers that were in front of me. I loved the speakers and only had headphones on when I was out in public and didn't want to disturb others with my game sounds. The last annoyance I've had with it was that it would get stuck on waiting for a service to terminate when I tried shutting it down after I hadn't shut it down or restarted it for a few days

If you don't want to read my wall of text, here are the pros and cons:

Pro:

-great screen

-comfortable to hold if you can rest your hands on a surface

-performance considering the size

-charging time

-low noise level in default power profiles

-great speakers

Cons:

-Meh battery life

-Joysticks have little resistance with bigger than usual dead zones

-dug into my hands when not resting on a surface

-fan profiles would get messed up at times when I switched between them

-RGB on the joysticks only turns off when applying Aura effects

-shutting down or restarting got stuck on terminating one service when the device has not been shut down or restarted in a few days

Overall I've had a great time with it and would recommend it to people that want to play demanding games for short amounts of time. I'll attach some pictures below in the hidden section

Spoiler

Edited February 29 by DreamCat04
Must have accidentally tabbed over the "send" button when I pressed space

Agall · February 29

13 hours ago, DreamCat04 said:

Since I couldn't find anything about the ROG Ally on this forum, I decided to write my own short review of it.

I've had the Ally for around a month now and I've really enjoyed it so far. It is very comfortable to hold, but for my hands it's only comfortable if I can rest my hands on some surface. When I lift it off and hold it in the air, the sides start to dig into my hand and it gets uncomfortable. I'm not an expert on colors or response times, but I can tell you that the screen is amazing. The colors are very vibrant and the pixel density is unlike anything I've ever seen on a Windows device (granted I am running 24" 1080p monitors). Windows hasn't caused many issues and I haven't had any major issues with putting it to sleep, it has just worked for me so far, even when I put it to sleep while a game was running, so they definitely improved that since the launch. I haven't found myself needing to use it for more than two hours at a time, so the meh battery life didn't bother me. Performance-wise, it's okay. I had to turn down some of my games to 720p medium settings, but modern games still look great on medium settings. Plus at a screen size of 7", 720p is still very sharp. Lighter games like Trackmania 2020 I could run at high settings (one down from the highest) at 1080p and I still got more than 60FPS, even getting close to 120FPS at times. One minor complaint I have about it is the fan curve that ASUS forces you to use. You are forced to apply 74% fan speed to the fan under the SD card slot in the 60°C to 69°C range, which is just way too much so the fan wramps up way too quickly. I just ended up setting both fans to 74% at 65°C since it was gonna get loud anyways, so I made it get equally loud on both sides. This made the APU still approach 90°C towards the end of the 2min boost time to 43W, but at 30W, the APU sat at around 72°C. When switching beetween my different custom power profiles the fan profile would sometimes glitch out and be set to 100% in all but the left-most two points. I also have another small complaint: When you use a different 65W power brick than the one that it was shipped with, the GPU is limited to 1686MHz when the battery is below around 60 or 65% when plugged in. As soon as I unplug it however (at any battery percentage), the GPU goes right up to its usual 2200MHz. I found the joysticks good to play on, even if they don't have that much resistance to them with the much bigger deadzones than I was used to from my XBOX controller. The RGB on the joysticks also wouldn't turn off with the regular effects in Armoury Crate. They only turned off(when setting them to 0% brightness) when I applied the same effect in Aura. I found the back buttons a bit annoying at times as I kept hitting them while pressing the ABXY buttons, which ended up in me accidentally screen-capturing for 50 minutes until I realised it and in countless accidental screenshots and notification center openings. I also tried AMFMF on it with the method of updating the driver through device manager. It's very useful even for games that can go down to 40FPS, it makes everything so much smoother until you look around too quickly. I did notice the increased latency but it never really bothered me, I just got used to it since I wasn't using it for fast-paced games. The weight of it also wasn't an issue for me. I didn't expect for the speakers to sound as good as they did. I don't know how it was possible for me to hear sounds behind me from speakers that were in front of me. I loved the speakers and only had headphones on when I was out in public and didn't want to disturb others with my game sounds. The last annoyance I've had with it was that it would get stuck on waiting for a service to terminate when I tried shutting it down after I hadn't shut it down or restarted it for a few days

If you don't want to read my wall of text, here are the pros and cons:

Pro:

-great screen

-comfortable to hold if you can rest your hands on a surface

-performance considering the size

-charging time

-low noise level in default power profiles

-great speakers

Cons:

-Meh battery life

-Joysticks have little resistance with bigger than usual dead zones

-dug into my hands when not resting on a surface

-fan profiles would get messed up at times when I switched between them

-RGB on the joysticks only turns off when applying Aura effects

-shutting down or restarting got stuck on terminating one service when the device has not been shut down or restarted in a few days

Overall I've had a great time with it and would recommend it to people that want to play demanding games for short amounts of time. I'll attach some pictures below in the hidden section

Reveal hidden contents

I have a friend at work who's been a console player but has a lot of scenarios where he's wanted to use a PC for PC exclusive games or games without crossplay. He also regularly streams from his Xbox to a tablet to play games. He bought an Ally yesterday and is impressed with its capabilities so far, including native games and Xbox streaming.

Between the options, its probably the best choice for someone who wants a pseudo desktop replacement and plays on Xbox, who might stream to it to use as a handheld. The Steam Deck OLED is still the best overall 'no wall power available' handheld though, which is what I opted for on release.

jre84 · March 4

thanks for the review. I was thinking of getting a portable system aside from my cell phone. Looking into the ally and your review helps immensely

DreamCat04 · March 8

On 3/4/2024 at 1:38 AM, jre84 said:

thanks for the review. I was thinking of getting a portable system aside from my cell phone. Looking into the ally and your review helps immensely

Glad that I could help. Feel free to ask any questions that you might have about it or my experience with it and I'll get back to you

DreamCat04 · April 17

Small update one and a half months later: The 512GB of storage is on the edge of being not enough. I had to uninstall Need for Speed Unbound so that I could install Forza Horizon 5, which is 150GB big. The battery has gone down to around 90% capacity now, which might be because I got it used or maybe lithium batteries just lose a lot of capacity at first or smth, I don't know... I haven't been able to use it as much as I used to because there was much more to do. It's still a great device.

Another thing I've started to do is emulation. Running Nintendo DS games I can get around 330min on a full charge, which is really good. I'm also emulating Mario Kart 8 Deluxe from the Nintendo Switch and it runs very well too, drawing around 15-17W from the battery. It's a lot of fun to play with four people, though I have to hook up a Dock because Windows only allows for two controllers to be connected via Bluetooth simultaneously