Asus ROG Ally Initial Review

My Ally experience after a handful of days

How we got here

Starting off, I had no intention of buying a hand held PC. October of last year, I purchased a PS5. I already owned an Xbox Series S, a decently powered PC, a Switch and an M series MacBook Pro. I had no need to pick up a handheld PC. That box was already checked.

One day while working on a project, I found myself needing to use my PC (this hadn’t been the case for a while and the PC had been powered down for at least a month. Did I mention I bought a PS5?) After pressing the power button and finding nothing happened, I put on my IT specialist hat and went to work. Long story short - I now own parts to a decently powered PC. Mostly I’m not concerned about it because I have plenty of alternatives for playing games and we’re in the 21st century of gaming.

The first game I migrate from my PC to PS5 is Destiny 2. Cross save is a thing in Destiny 2 so I feel solid in making this move. Quickly I run into my first issue. Cross purchase is not a thing in Destiny 2. For some reason Bungie decided that your DLC purchases should tie to your launcher account (Steam, Xbox, Playstation) instead of being a flag on your Bungie account. DLC I have purchased on PC is not available to me on PS5 so there’s things I was working on that I can no longer do because I have not purchased these DLCs from Sony.

The next game I want to play is Diablo 4. This game is also cross save which means it needs to be purchased on every platform that you are interested in playing on (even on PC. If you purchased it from battle net but wanted to migrate to Steam, you have to buy it again). I purchased the Ultimate Edition from Battle Net and to have my wife play with me, I bought her the Ultimate Edition on the Xbox. This gave me two potential ways to play. I was ready to go on this one. I however, did not anticipate my PC dying a quiet death while my wife went on a gaming streak that would rival most any of my friends. I’ve been locked out of the game I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on to play.

The final straw was when one of my good friends pointed out that most of the games we played together were PC games and I hadn’t really played anything with them in a while. This got me thinking on how I wanted to proceed. The PC market had towers and laptops and recently had finally broken effectively into the handheld market. 

As a father of two kids who for some reason don’t take after their father and like to go out and do things with friends and take part in community activities, I rarely find myself at home. This really pushed me towards getting a handheld and to my surprise, I had more options (a very dangerous word with me) than just the Valve Steam Deck. Options are bad - I will spend days pouring over every possible aspect of two to three options and drive myself (and friends) to the brink of insanity over decimal point differences.

I decided early on that despite the price difference, the Steam Deck was not going to be an option. The Steam Deck runs SteamOS (a custom linux build) which did not natively support Diablo 4 via Battle Net ( I didn’t buy it again for PS5, I damn sure wasn’t going to buy it again for Steam). I had narrowed the competition down to the Asus ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion Go.

The Legion Go was winning. For $50 more than the Ally, I got detachable controllers, a larger screen and double the storage. Now I was just waiting for the right financial moment. On the 25th of January, it showed itself. An open box Legion Go for just north of $100 off retail price shows up at the local Best Buy. After mulling over yet again if I want to spend that much money on PC hardware thats lesser than what I had prior, I finally accepted that anything I bought would be lesser hardware and pulled the trigger. In an hour I was going to have Lenovo’s hot new toy. I just needed to wait the hour for someone to go pull it out of the back and bring it to the front for checkout. The dopamine is flowing and I’m feeling good. I’m already heading to the car when I get an email notifying me that Best Buy in fact does not have the specified device in stock. As someone who lives on instant gratification when it comes to purchases, this was a major blow to my battleship, but it was not sunk yet. Expected delivery date was the following Friday. The sinking blow was 30 minutes later when I got the notification that my order had been canceled (assuming because they cant find an open box Legion Go that they were willing to let out of their control at that price). The insult to injury here - my refund would take up to 15 business days to be credited back.

In the mean time I’m still checking in stock options at the local Best Buy because I’m a gluten for punishment. On February 1st, I found that not only did they have an Asus ROG Ally z1 Extreme (they also have a non-extreme version but its not the same processor found in the Legion Go) for $100 off retail pricing. I slowly (relatively) jump on the deal and order the new handheld for myself. It only has 512GB of storage compared to the Go’s 1TB, but at $150 cheaper I decide its worth it to get something in my hands sooner rather than later.

What even is an Asus ROG Ally?

I had already moved on to another section when this heading occurred to me - I might actually have someone read this who has no idea what these hardwares are by name. I should at least do the courtesy of telling them about the one I bought and played with for a few days then decided to fire up Pages and write something up.

The simplest way I can think to describe this thing to my Gen X/ Early Millennial audience is think if Xbox took the Sega Game Gear design and brought it into the 21st century. For my Millennial and beyond generation, imagine a switch stretched out with Xbox controls and a worse battery life.

For those who are interested in the specifications of the handheld I bought, here’s the simple breakdown. The processor I an AMD Risen z1 Extreme. The base clock is 3.3GHz. The processor has 8 cores and 16 threads. It boosts up to 5.1GHz. Being a handheld this is designs to have a variable power rating which can range between 10 and 30 watts. This allows for increased performance when needed or increased battery life when performance isn’t necessary. This handheld PC operates with 16 gb of RAM which had me nervous, but when I remembered I’m going to treat this as a console first and not have 800,000 things running at once, the nervousness about that eased off. The GPU is integrated and historically the performance has not been as good as a dedicated GPU, but testing puts this on par with an Nvidia 1650 (for the console players out there - this is on par with a PS4 Pro). This is not the 2070 Super I was coming from, but at medium settings in games, it gets the job done. The storage is a 512GB 2230 M.2 NVMe drive. This is relatively easy to replace for anyone familiar with changing out an M.2 in a PC or laptop and the 2230 form factors have greatly increased in availability since the Steam Deck came out using the same form factor for storage.

The Ally runs a full version of Windows 11 Home. This has been a great thing, and a difficult thing at the same time. The Ally has different control modes depending on if you want to treat the thing like a console or like a PC. Doing precision selections and typing using solely the touch screen is a painful experience. Eventually I finally figured out how to convert the right stick to mouse mode which gave me a pointer to work with (thank goodness. Fat fingering a scroll bar on a 7 inch touch screen is not fun). This helped me get to the point where I could get Battle Net and any other games library/launcher I needed to install setup. After doing that and getting a handful of games installed I found Asus’ Armory Crate more useful. It has large squares of the installed games for me to easily jump into and uses the controller functions so it operates like a handheld console.

Whats Great?

All my PC games are available to me without limitations with a built in Xbox controller. I’ve always been someone to put content over quality of graphics when it comes to video games so moving all of my graphics settings from the ultra range down to medium hasn’t been a huge hit for me.

This is a full fledged PC. Its not running some limited version of Windows or running an ARM processor so you need UWP applications only. Anything my full size tower could run, this device can run too. With that being said I can use a USB-C dock to attach multiple USB ports and monitors to the Ally an use it like I would use a laptop.

The Ally has a port for an eGPU which will allow me to upgrade the graphics card up to a 4090M GPU for some more impressive gaming if so desired .

What’s Not So Great?

At the top of my list is the eGPU. The port is a proprietary connector and the 4090 model costs $2,000. This is a huge issue to me, but it was redeemed by being able to use a USB-C dock or port expander.

The next thing that gets me on this device is the air flow. There are two fans on the back of the device that pull air in through vents on the back and push out through vents at the top of the device. I find myself constantly having issues finding places to sit down my Ally because most ways I would normally sit it will majorly block the intake vents.

The battery life - Even when only doing the initial setup and mostly windows and very minimal gaming, I found that I ran through half the battery after an hour of use. With mid tier gaming I would assume this thing is going to come towards the low battery mark after 2 hours of game play. I wouldn’t go to far away from an outlet if you are looking for an extended play session.

What I’ve been playing

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot  - I caught the <insert whatever name they use for the biggest bundle here> edition on sale and have always loved DBZ so I picked this up. I got stuck at Raditz (really early in the game) and put it down until now. This game has felt really good and has performed well on the default settings.

Diablo 4 (Battle Net version) - This game was a heavy factor in why I purchased a handheld and I have not been disappointed with the results. I opted to not install the hi resolution pack and run the game at medium, but game play has run fine. I’m not good at telling  when frames drop below 60 but I’m able to play the game without any noticeable graphics issues or performance hitches.

STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order - I’m only minutes into this game but its default setting performance has been great. No noticeable graphics issues or performance hitches. It just works like I’m playing it on a console.

Rogue Company - Rogue is a difficult game to gauge. It’s current state makes it hard to figure out whats PC performance issue and what’s crazy server issues. I will say this game performs as expected.

New World - This was my PC dock test game. I didn’t actually get into the game because my world had been destroyed and I needed to select a New World. After consulting with a friend of mine who still plays the game, I came to the conclusion that I should probably just shut it off and try again another day.

Command and Conquer Remastered - I played the heck out of these games back in my PS1 days. As an RTS game its better suited for keyboard and mouse, but if I could play it on a Playstation 1 I think I can play it on the Ally I have yet to run it yet, but its on my bucket list.

Closing thoughts

The Asus ROG (Republic of Gaming in case you were wondering) Ally is very much an odd-ball device that really fits my odd-ball use case very well. If I were to buy a gaming laptop, I would use it as a console first and a PC second. This works out better for portability and at a cheaper price than I would pay for a laptop. Everyone has their own preferences on what something should do for X amount of dollars spent and I understand that. My friend Jacques did a video breaking down what the Ally is vs what it isn’t and if you should buy it. Check out that video here and let him know what you think in the comments.

With Steam, Epic, Battle Net, GoG Xbox Game Pass and remote play for both of my consoles, not to mention Amazon luna and Nvidia GeForce Now (I just did), my pool of potential video games to play on this device is vast and deep. Game Pass ultimate brings me EA Play as well. The only thing I’m missing is Ubisoft’s subscription service and its not from a lack of availability on the handheld.

The potential for this device has me so excited. I feel like I’ve bought a universal device. Its a 5g modem away from being able to do what Samsung Dex has attempted to do for years. With improved battery life I could see these devices competing with the Surface format to be an all I none type device that you use for everything.

A note from the author

Reading back this article after initially typing it up, the first thing that comes to mind is all those recipes I complain about where the author gives a huge story that leads into the recipe and I’m just there to find out if I need 3 or 4 eggs. I now have a new understanding and I apologize for the harsh judgement I gave you. I hope that you readers can also forgive me. I thought it was important to include how I got here even if most don’t (and probably shouldn’t) care.