Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “BEST Gaming Handheld of 2023! – ASUS ROG Ally Review”.
Foreign guys, the traffic consumer, and today we are finally taking a look at the Asus Rog Ally. If you guys know me, I’m a huge handheld gamer, it’s my favorite way to game, and I got a lot of thoughts on this guy. First off I got ta say when Aces dropped. This thing mind blown. I love the whole idea of having Windows 11 on a handheld device.
Now, let’s be real, we’re all going to be comparing this guy to the steam deck. Some might be wondering how’s. The stack up against something like the switch, but the steam deck is its real competitor. Here, I’m not gon na lie to you guys, I kind of like this more from the very first time I saw this. I thought it looked really cool, as you can see. Like this thing, screams awesome, you got the RGB circles around the thumb sticks uh.
The overall design looks really clean. It’S actually pretty comfortable to hold in the hand got your extra buttons in the back. I’M not gon na lie when I saw all the Press images. This strip that they have in the back here I thought it was rgb2. It just has like this prism effect to it. So when light hits it you see different colors and also the same for these.
These are just like stickers with like a prism effect, so those aren’t RGB but, like you know, this is enough. We don’t need too many things draining the battery colored buttons on the sides. Uh it pretty much. Has everything you’re gon na need it’s smaller than the steam deck by quite a bit? Actually, we’ve got the steam deck over here and you can just kind of see it for yourself.
It is a much smaller device. I got some customizations on my steam deck shout out to Zach from Jerry rig everything it’s actually pretty dang durable too. We got some Battle Scars. This thing fell out of our car. What we did we were doing like the road trip. Video fell out the car.
We got a couple of Nicks, but they hit concrete pretty hard and we only got NYX on the plastic screen was fine. So if durability matters to you at all, this took an extremely hard fall and honestly doesn’t have too much to show for it up top. We’Ve got some interesting stuff, so we have our power button over here, which also doubles as a fingerprint scanner. So when you turn it off and you want to log back in turn it on it’ll read and it’ll log you in so you got that Windows.
Hello feature built right into that button, very cool. Next to that, we’ve got some of our LED indicators, our volume controls, which are very nice and easy to press our USBC and our proprietary Port here. So if you want to use one of asus’s like egpus, you can go ahead and plug it in a Micro, SD card slot and a headphone jack now word on the street is that the micro SD card slot is they’ve, been getting some slack for this micro Sd card slot, because some people have been running into temperature issues where this thing gets really hot and it basically renders the micro SD card slot useless. I haven’t encountered that I honestly don’t even really have anything on my card, if I’m being honest with you guys, so it is in the future. I’Ve run into any issues with yet, but I’ve been able to access the SD card whenever I wanted, but yeah those are all of the things. You’Ve got some extra buttons here in the back.
If you feel like being a pro and mapping some extra buttons to there, but overall it feels very comfortable to use as a gamer. One thing I personally notice with my unit, was with these face buttons. I found that they stick. Sometimes I don’t know if that’s just mine or what like.
Oh look. It’S sticking right now from me just pressing that I don’t know if you guys can see it, but this x button I just enlarged it. It was actually really annoying. I at first I was like yo this thing, not starting off on the right foot, but aside from that, the overall gaming experience pressing the buttons Everything feels pretty good feels normal. So we know all about this thing, physically with the buttons and everything. But now we got to talk about this big old screen right here. It’S a seven inch display 1080p 120 hertz touch screen, so it’s pretty much everything you would want it’s an IPS panel looks really really good. I got ta say it looks quite a bit better than this theme: deck screen uh. So I’ve been very happy with the visual aspect of this and supporting 120. That’S pretty huge for a handheld shout out to Asus for doing a really good job with the screen. I personally really really like it now: let’s talk about what’s inside right, so we’ll throw up the specs over here. You guys know I’m not a big spec guy and for those of you out there who aren’t familiar with the AMD ryzen Z1 series, which is the processor, it’s actually really good. I’Ve got the extreme version and anything that I’ve done at this has worked out pretty well. I haven’t really come into any issues from a performance perspective, so I’ve been very happy on that end and what’s nice? Is that with this being a Windows device, you can pretty much do anything you want on the Windows end here as well. So not only can you game portably, but if you wanted to hook a monitor up to this thing, it’s got the performance to run whatever you want to do on window. Well, not whatever you want to do on Windows, but for the standard everyday person you can do web browsing applications game right from this device.
This is basically a portable PC and it’s absolutely amazing. We should see we should see how Adobe Premiere Adobe Premiere and some b-roll I’ll. Let you guys know how it does and, like a judge, says right here, so you guys can see. But yes, the specs definitely support this thing as a handheld system, as well as a full-blown PC.
If you’d like, like I said, I do have the egpu that Asus sells uh and I’ve been able to dock this up to a monitor and the egpu use it. Like a full-blown computer, you kind of forget that this thing even exists. So if you want to have something that can be your PC and your gaming console fully supports that.
I love that this thing is running Windows 11. and that dock that I’ve been using. Isn’T the only way to like achieve the full-blown PC experience? You can do that with like USB hubs and that kind of thing as well, if you guys, are interested in seeing like an accessories video for something like this. Let me know as a comment down below and – and you can do a lot of this – you can do similar stuff on the steam deck. You can get Windows 11 on here if you’re Savvy enough uh, but I love that right out the gate. That’S what you get on this guy, you can finagle this.
You can make it work. You can even use this as a PC. If you’d like you can dock it up using the USBC Port, just use a dock, and then you can kind of get a similar experience or right out the box.
You can make that happen over here. So I’m very happy about that. But what that also means is compatibility, which is like the most important part here is amazing, with Windows 11., and with this button right here we can open up Aces, Armory crate, and basically this is like where your game library is – and you can see with the Different games that I’ve got here, you can see the different platforms that you’re actually going to play them on so steam.
So all those Steam games are going to be running on this more compatibility than this offers, which is kind of wild, but you can play all of them here. You even have Xbox game pass on this, but the support for playing on like these different platforms is there right out of the box uh in all of the games. They work on it now, I’m gon na say all the games. I bet you that somebody’s like oh no but my my XYZ game doesn’t work. Well, I don’t know man. The compatibility here, though, has been Stellar. So we’ve talked a little bit about the specs. We talked about different platforms and being able to have all that. But what’s it like to just straight up game aim on it right guys, I have very little complaints, so some of the games that I’ve been playing I’ve been able to play just fine uh, some of the more taxing games. You got ta dial the settings down. Quite a bit like Yakuza, like a dragon, been trying to get into that a little bit more. That’S not one of the games. You really want to push the settings on and honestly when it comes to these handheld systems that can play AAA titles.
You don’t really want to push them to Crazy settings. You want to kind of keep them down, like maybe like the medium kind of settings, so you can get the best performance to battery life ratio. Uh battery life is what you’d expect it’s pretty meh, but if you don’t run this thing at like turbo like I have it, the fool that I am then you’ll be able to get a lot more time out of it. I probably wouldn’t play on the silent mode performance, probably The Sweet Spot.
You know I like playing on turbo, I’m the kind of guy who always has access to a portable charger Chargers, nearby um charger guy uh. So I don’t care. I play a term I play on turbo all the time, I’m finally towards the end of scarlet Nexus. I feel like I’ve been talking about Scarlet Nexus, for I don’t know how long at this point that game buttery smooth, Flawless, no complaints and if you want to do some of like the wild stuff like get retro games and that kind of thing emulators, you’re gon Na have a much easier time doing that on this than something like this guy, where you have to basically make it run like an entirely different operating system.
It’S a lot more work to make this thing: the everything system that I think it’s going to be for this guy now I know, listen, Linux users. I know you’re, like hey, don’t don’t trash my steam deck, I love it. I get it, but I’m talking about for the average person who doesn’t necessarily have that Linux experience uh. I think they’ll be able to jump into this and have an easier time making.
This do a little bit more than the standard stuff. Now I’m singing a lot of its Praises, but some issues that I’ve come across right. One is this thing just I don’t know when this thing wants to go to sleep like that’s my biggest issue, I’ll turn it off and it just randomly wakes up. Sometimes I don’t know why I don’t know if it’s like and it’s not usually with Windows updates or anything it’ll like sometimes it just refuse, is to sleep when your room is pitched black and you’re trying to get some sleep having these things flashing, while you got A sleeping baby, not a good time, I mean you – can bring down the brightness. It’S controllable, so check out. They’Ve got this cool Command Center, where you can basically change a bunch of the stuff here so resolution refresh rate, all that and let’s see, LED brightness. This is 66 percent. Oh, this is a hundred percent zero 33, 66 100., but yeah this whole Command Center thing is also really cool.
It’S just really handy. You can also change the control mode so, depending on, if you’re using Windows at the moment or you’re using a playing a game, you can change how you know the sticks, operate and moving the mouse and all that kind of stuff. I’M just trying to figure out sleep because with this I never had that issue now.
Clearly, it’s not cool that the micro SD card slot can potentially mess up on you. Asus is aware of that, and I think they’re going to try and fix it with a software update battery life is as bad as you’d expect for a handheld these days, especially one pushing the kind of power that this thing is the way I play I’ll get Like an hour and change like this is not gon na last a flight, you know you can get two hours out of it. I think, if you’re trying to be a little bit more conservative depending it all depends on the title, there’s so many variables. I think, if you’re of sane mind you’ll dial down the settings a little bit get yourself a little extra battery life, but I walk around with portable chargers all day, so I’m not tripping this thing. I ran into the same issues terrible battery life, everyone’s, like yo, dial down your settings. I did helped a lot with the battery life so kudos to you guys, but yeah just do the same. This will get better, but the way I play both battery lives when it comes to the switch it’s very different. This has much better Hardware. It’S far more powerful um.
Obviously, it’s not going to have any of those Nintendo games like you’re, not getting Mario you’re, not getting Pokemon on this. Unless you find some kind of emulator we’re not going to talk about that, this is clearly more powerful than the switch, but it’s not going to be as easy to use. You still got to figure out on your own how to get your games, which platform you got to go to pick them up on. So if you’ve got to go, if you want to get it from Steam, you got ta, you know.
Do your research like? Oh, this is on steam, or this is on Xbox. There are different places. You got to pull these games from, whereas with a switch you go to any Best, Buy or GameStop you buy the little cartridge or you go to the Nintendo e-store and boom you’re done now, with this power and better screen all that good stuff, it’s gon na Be a little bit more. This thing starts at like 600 bucks uh, whereas this one starts at 400 bucks worth the price difference, I’d say personally uh 600.
I think this is, I think, that’s a fair price for this, especially if you go up one, you get the Z1 extreme uh, that’s going to run you 6.99. I personally think this is an easy recommendation. If you’re familiar with Windows gaming at all or if you’re willing to learn from a form Factor performance overall, looks everything I feel like it. It checks all of the boxes in a lot of good ways.
I’M a Believer so for me personally, right now. This is my handheld of choice uh. This is what I always make sure is in my bump, who am I kidding? I want to make sure this, and this is in my backpack at all times steam deck. I have not.
I honestly have not touched since I gotten my hands on this. I honestly just don’t see any reason to, but those are my thoughts you guys. Let me know what you think of the Rog Ally and I’ll catch you guys in the next one. So then it’s your average consumer peace start Scarlet Nexus dude.
I got ta finish it. I got ta, I’m gon na I’ll, get to it. .