Im a non pc gamer im a solely console gamer and bought one. I love it. Looks like my series X on most games. Windows can be a little jank but its not that bad. Its a good product i really have fun playing.

For me (already having a steam deck) at 700 the ally would have had to be a no brainer upgrade for me to switch to it. Like going from a ps4 to a ps5 or a 1060 to a 3060. if asus continues to release handhelds the next ally could be my upgrade. All that said if I didn’t have a steam deck I would probably pick the ally up.

Been waiting for this! Picking the ally over the Steam deck makes sense. I’ve been ignoring my Steam deck after experiencing the low latency and 1080p on the Ally.

Can we appreciate that this dude is in his living room with an announcer type mic being held in one hand? lol

Thank you for this. I was considering getting this but i think you're right. When it cones down to accessibility and battery, these things just haven't quite made it just yet.

Good honest take and review. My biggest challenges with the Ally involved QC. My first unit had an IPS glow so bad that it was like an LED light pointing at my face. I returned that unit and got a 2nd one and that one had 1 fan working while the other one was completely dead (I even took it apart to see if the fan was detached). The 3rd one so far is a charm. Despite its quirks with setup and Win 11, it's not that bad. In fact, if I set my expectations realistically that this is a handheld not a PC with a 4090, then this is by far one of the best handhelds to use. However, $699.99 is pretty friggin' steep.

Honest man unlike some reviewers.thanks for your honesty keep it up

Excellent review IMO. Very informative & came across unbiased 👏🏼

great review :)! im excited to get one!!! im ready for this work-in progress of a device!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for the honest review! I hope that the issue mentioned was already resolved once I have enough money for one of these handheld consoles 😅😂 especially battery life.

best review on the ally i've seen !

Few tips for your battery problems. Go into settings, then apps, and then startup and turn off all your gaming launchers so they aint running in the background unless you are using it Also in apps go into installed apps and uninstall windows crap you won't use like word Microsoft teams etc as all that runs in the background and use battery as well.

Dudes holding a super professional mic in hand awkwardly yet his video is at like 30% volume. Good job.

Before You BUY! Make sure You Know What You’re In for. We have to play the Patience Game. Sad to say but it’s true. Im just disappointed that they released a semi finished product. They have testers for a reason I feel like they just said the “People” us customers are the guinea Pigs.

perfect honest review i completely agree this is an awesome machine but it still needs time to be perfected maybe in 2 to 3 years ill grab one for now i'll stick with my xbox series s and using remote and cloud play on my oneplus 11 with and android backbone controller.

Thanks for making me dodge this bullet. I’ll just wait for next gens. Optimization over specs all day for me!

There’s currently a bug in Armory Crate where the default performance profile for when on power adapter (they show it as AC) is ‘silent’ for some reason. It should instead be turbo or performance. You can set that for each game individually and you don’t need to change that with the button later on

Definitely an honest review, I've seen alot of reviews seem to justify the downfalls of the device.

Most of my issues during setup weren't the Ally's fault but Windows! I had the same issues setting up reg PCs - Windows needs to make a proper mobile-friendly version of Windows for tablets or handhelds like this. My biggest issue was setting up the Xbox app, that dang game service issue! Took +2hrs just to get it working to play games pass. But once I spent hours changing settings, uninstalling bloat, turning off auto startup on most apps, etc. it's been great. I played cyberpunk for ~1hr and went from full charge to 20% which is impressive to me. Get a battery bank, good to go. Maybe I just have a short attention span but I can't sit and play for hours anymore lol

I like the looks & specs of the Ally . . . BUT I just don't want to deal with Windows any longer. I'd be curious to see how (if) the Ally would run with the OS that is on the Steam Deck (what is that? SteamOS? ) Anyhow, I like where the future is going with portable gaming! Thanks for the relevant and no BS review. Seriously. THANK YOU!

Awesome honest review 😁

"about twice as performant, in a lot of tests" There's hasn't been a single benchmark that showed this. At equivalent wattage it's about 20% now performant. When pushing things to the max so that the Ally is consuming almost twice the power then it can some time reach about 50% more.

Enjoyed your straight forward assessment. I am trying so hard to love this product but I keep running in to these little annoyances that ultimately add up to an underwhelming experience.

Hes back and cuter then ever

great honest review. i also have both this and the steam deck. the biggest complaint for me so far is the lack of accessories. i absolutely will not leave the house until some one makes a protective armor case for this. asus is just being greedy trying to monopolize all the accessories for this and what makes it worse is that they weren't even ready for all their accessories to come out by launch day. good thing for me is that some of the nintendo switch cases fit the ally.

Thanks, bud. I got the Ally Z1 Extreme a week ago and have been enjoying it. The battery sucks when playing AAA or when in Turbo Mode, as we all know. But so far it didn't "kill" any game while I was playing. I keep it charging sometimes and it charges pretty quick. The fans are very silent. Performance reigns for me, so that's why I'll keep it instead of switching to the Deck OLED.

Solid review

Hey I know life is busy and I’m sure you have a lot going on but if you ever want to come back and make more reviews, I think you have a great perspective and set of values when it comes to reviewing products. Hope all is well.

I have a decent enough desktop and I may need to upgrade sometime in the next couple years but I mostly play on my switch because of the games library. I think I may just wait for a switch 2 to eventually release. I like the rog ally it would be a nice addition but if the battery life is poor in handheld I just don't know if it will be worth it for me.

The battery is the place a portable needs to excel imo. I have an ROG laptop and the battery life is comparable or better while gaming based on the data available. If it was 3-5 hours of gaming on average I'd probably buy one.

Great review dude. I returned mine after a few days. I found it to be one of the most frustrating tech products I have ever purchased. All the issues you mentioned plus alot of games crashed on mine. Not sure if i had a bad unit.

Had to exchange mine for another one.. my left analog sticks x axis stopped working randomly and was only letting me go up and down. 🤷🏾‍♂️ idk if it was software/drivers because it also wasn’t working in the bios or when I reset the settings

It's competent competition for the Steam Deck, but I'll wait for the 2nd iteration after it fully bakes, gets more refined, and Asus demonstrates how their support pans out. Most of it will be Windows related issues, and who knows how much those will be resolved and optimized down the line.

I agree that the battery is garbage due to lack of optimization and battery quality, however i am glad more companies are pushing nintendo into making something better, hell they’re having performance issues with their own exclusive games, they have to do better, Steam and asus are basically teaching them how and how not to go about it.

You are supposed to use steam big picture mode. Not windows, not armory crate. If you set your back buttons to (shift for left or m2 button) + (tab for right button m1 button) it works very seamless bringing up a similar menu to the steam deck’s home menu. I just let windows run in the background and treat my ally just like i treated my steam deck. The steam deck is a console you can give kids. The ally is the big boy hand held.

You can bring a couple portable battery packs I've done that with hand held before

Quality was good 👍

When the games run, they run fine. Outside the horrible battery life, which is to be expected on a high-end portable PC, I noticed an issue with the internet connection. During online multiplayer games, this thing could lag horribly. I did not notice this issue with the steam deck.

Ok gripe one solution, be sure to switch perf or silent before changing handheld to dock. Or just leave it in perf mode

best review of rog ally. I think i am going to buy steam deck or gpd win 4

“A porcelain play through” 😂

Calling this underpowered is wild imo. I kinda feel like when reviewing a product like this you need to keep it in context and for the most part I think you did. But saying the battery isn't good is not fair to the product, it's all weight and math. If you want more battery you need to turn down performance or increase physical size and weight. And the power of the thing is comparatively insane, if you told me just a few years ago that I could be playing games like that thing does in its form factor I'd have called you crazy. Also considering it's only ture rivals are Chinese units that are more expensive and have worse software support, I'd say the Ally has fantastic value. Also I'm not saying the product is perfect, it definitely has flaws but some of those are inherent and not the fault of any manufacturer.

Good review, you didn't even mention emulation! This is ps3 now in your palms. I hate they went proprietary with mobile gpu, I wish they embraced something like oculink that is way better than than anything else

Nice review! My Ally will ship on next week. Can you tell us please about "sleep mode". Is it working flawlessly?

i returned mine.

Battery life is fine for what it is. They had a weight goal so putting in something bigger like a 60Wh was out of the question. You just have to optimize your device more if you're playing on the goal. Things like limit it to 60fps and playing in 720p. Yeah I know it has an awesome display but if battery is your main concern than you have to do these kinda things. For me I don't care and play it on 1080p with no limits. Some games perform even better if you limit the FPS in game as well.

No track pads is a huge let down

nice review a few things i think you didn't factor in is that the 120hz screen on the Ally is also gonna pull more power from the battery along with the ton of windows telemetry always running, the crap ton of launcher problem is the damn greedy game publishers.. steam deck does a way better job at giving that console experience cause even the quick menu can be triggered from the controller. one last thing that is a plus and a negative is the linux steam os it is so light on the steam deck but proton have a long way to go before it can be considered a one button click and go experience it is getting there but still needs more work ...overall i see more promise in the deck over Ally software wise cause microsoft will never do a strip down version of windows for mobile gaming handhelds and abandon that sweet telemetry money.

It kinda amazes me that its recorded with iPhone, looks very good

Yeah the steam deck at least has a button input to bring up the quick access menus

More impressed about your house than the Ally

Can you turn off the RGB on the sticks?

Try changing vram to 8g GPU settings on armor crate. Mine is running alot better.

Why not keep it in turbo mode when docked since it’s plugged into a charger.

Our current technology isnt there yet when it comes to the battery

So about playing offline. Im able to play my single player games offline with steam (GotG and Persona 5), UPLAY (AC Valhalla), and EA App (Mass Effect LE). Its easy to set them up and i never looked back afterwards. I also turned off autostart on most apps (especially onedrive) to save more battery.

Steam Deck is what you described in wanting.

Get a big powerbank, use your mobile data for online play and this thing is great IMO

I cant stand the hiccups with W11. Just as unstable as ever. On my laptop at times and soooooo many times on the Ally. I think I should return it

The base Steam Deck plus a 512GB SD card or two, or three, is the way to go IMHO. $450-ish is cheap enough to justifiy have a dedicated portable handheld and a gaming deskop.

Hey hey man what’s up, you are so on point about this new steam deck ally.. I’m loving this over the steam deck that I been having ever since day one releasing. I can finally play the games on the ally that I couldn’t play on steam deck.. The ally dose have a learning curve and stuff. Nice video game come check me out as well.

I’m gonna try one of these babies out. For me this is a rough gaming laptop replacement. With that being said there is no such thing as a gaming laptop on the go unless you’re on a Mac. It has never ever ever been the case and at least if you’re familiar with gaming pcs in general you would never assume battery life would be remotely good. It also sounds crazy to me for this to be a desktop pc replacement. Yes $699 is expensive just for portability but have you seen how much a gaming laptop cost? Less memory, equal battery, same starting storage, gigantic power brick, a controller needs to fit in your bag. I say while I think it’s a little over priced, it’s not poorly priced. To play this on a TV also seems crazy to me for the simple fact it’s 2024, 4k it pseudo 4k is a thing. You either spend a fortune on an asus graphics card for this which costs as much as a gaming pc or look at 1080p trash on your 4k TV. Just to say, I am completely expressing my opinion it is not necessarily right or applicable to all. This device just seems to be a high end gami mg toy for avid pc enthusiast that want a portable extension of their gaming desktop without having a whole other laptop to game on the go. Unfortunately the box or advertisements need to state something like any non experienced adept PC builders/gamers with good windows skills need not apply. Which is a shame. Despite that I’m happy this product exists because our only other option was a $2000 Microsoft surface. No thanks.

steam deck 2 will be the sweet spot. In the meantime I have an Ally on order

Selling my steam deck for this, I need a portable device to do all of my gameing and the performance, screen, and gamepass support are selling me on it

I think calling the Ally light is a little misleading. For something that holds in your hands it's on the heavier side. Over twice as heavy as PS5 controller and 50% heavier than a Switch and my tablet. Now the Deck is 10% heavier than the Ally so it's not the heaviest handheld.

The "hardware performance switch" is a bit nit picky, the other comments are fair though! Can you use the Ally with a 3rd party USB-C adapter?

Fgs mine is stuck on loading screen. I have tried the volume down and power trick but had no luck

Yeah I just canceled my order honestly I’ll just wait

The battery on the deck isnt a little bit better, it's at least doble.

Guys its a pc at the end of the day. I did not enjoy setting up my high end pc. Getting all the drivers on it. Making sure my ps5 controller could play on it. Its not a ps5 or a console its a pc. So you must do pc things which comes with tedious drivers. After that first bit of installation thats it. We never talk about it again. People just can’t stand to do even the bare minimum to at least be able to enjoy something. Just get it over with and enjoy the product for what it is.

the problem on this kind of screen is light leaks

I deleted all launchers and downloaded cracked version of all games I own. It's said they do not have better optimization for battery life.

What happened to the production of your videos?

I’d just put tiny 11 should be better with battery and then get a battery pack

Beautiful screen though...I will wait to Black Friday and buy one from Best Buy :). But if Nintendo Switch is upgraded...than that...it does not need internet!!!!

Resume: the hardware is good, the software is shit. Maybe one day when they put a good ChimeraOS on that.

I have it for 5h now... Most frustrating 5h in my life... Feel like i want to give it back.

Umm, saying steam doesn't care about connecting to the tv 5:00 is absolutely wrong. If i hooked up any controller to the steam deck on a tv it has full controls of everything, including the quick menu and home menu as well

Get the Ally and a switch emulator. Best of all worlds

The reason why I'm sticking with my Switch OLED for its battery endurance.

Right now for a handheld I would rather they went with a 60 display, bigger battery and OLED. The OS needs to be custom made or a Windows stripped down mobile version maybe one you can switch back and forth with full Windows 11.

But if u ever used windows 11 it’s a walk in the park to be honest I totally understand we’re ur coming from but I have not had any problems with the Ally I have actually Ben enjoying it I am a steam deck owner to and being able to down load any game with gout having to jump through hoops is a win for me but great video I respect the review

Battery is atrocious i agree and mine has been extremely buggy. Street fighter 6 ran great for me when i got it and now it runs like dogshit. I dunno if it's the 319 bios i shouldn't of updated to or what. Im giving it 2 months if its not smoother by then ill be selling it on ebay. Beautiful piece of hardware but software and battery life is lacking. Battery isnt a huge deal for me but being a buggy mess in 2023 is. I wanna love pc but this wasnt a good experience for me so far. Im a dad that works alot and console is just a better experience for me. I dont have hours to tinker. I just wanna hop on a game quick once in awhile. I have been around technology pretty much my whole life. Familiar with windows and pretty much every operating system. Im not a dummy when it comes to tech but this hasn't been a good experience for me. Hopefully they fix it because im digging the hardware.

How much storage is actually useable

Future Windows 12 comparability?

Nintendo will always be the portable global king! Imagine if Nintendo actually made a beast console now more powerful than Xbox and PlayStation and portable with all the AAA games and there HUGH Nintendo libraries. That would be awesome lol. I think the only reason they haven’t is because switch are cheap to make and are still selling really well to date.

Can you play on five M Gta 5 role play ?

The battery is not that bad I think all these complaints come from running this thing balls to the walls in turbo mode 1080p at 120hz

Do you have backlight bleeding or uniformity?

I love how everyone comeplaines about battery. I can tell they didn't grow up putting 4 AA's in a gameboy. Battery life is always going to be a thing. It should not be a reason why you don't pick one up if you want it.

Hey guys, what's the name of the game @8:12? Thank you in advance.

I’m going to be honest. The ally seems amazing. But battery life is very concerning. For a machine to drop dead in an hour 10 minutes or less. Where u allways plug it in and charge it. It’s not good for longevity. And even digital foundry spoke about this. This is why lots of handheld devices doesn’t have that much power cus they are handhelds they are supposed to hold for atleast 2 hours. Steam deck with good optimisation in game I get 2 hours 45 in Valhalla. Even horizon. God of war. Dead space remake. And this is all triple A titles with good optimisation u get amazing battery. But ally didn’t sell it for me when I heard the battery life is a disaster. Digital foundry analysis made it even clear that this will hurt the battery’s longevity when u play in turbo mode unplugged. Because the battery drain is so fast. That it’s a concern when we talk about 1-2 years. Nintendo switch original is still having amazing battery after many years. This is because they know only power will destroy battery mix of both makes it amazing.

I hear what ur throwing down. Ur saying stick with my play date.

You should know that it's a pc. You have to see it as a gaming laptop. Your review sounds biased as a console guy

"Underpowered" Lol

Bro said porcelain play through 💀

Lol 😂 sounds like you destroying this gaming PC handheld 😂 Razer Edge 5G didn't give me that much trouble starting up and updating

On the go with 1 hour battery lol

What game is he playing at 8:15?

toilet gaming is important. Also i feel like Steam deck has superior long term support. ROG ally has zero an doesnt have that great support.