Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “We are not friends. – ROG Ally Z1”.
The Rog allly Z1 has been criticized for being underpowered overpriced, and do you really need a third thing? That’S kind, that’s kind of enough reason to not like it, but I disagree. Well, I don’t disagree that it’s overpriced and I don’t disagree that it’s underpowered, but I think there could be a justification for its existence. Let’S start by taking a look at what comes included, though power adapter, fixed cable, because why would you ever want to replace it with a longer or shorter one if this Cable’s good enough forus, it’s good enough for you we’re developing a bit of a tone in This article, okay, warranty information, form that’ll, come in handy who would fill this out moving on to the device, then there’s a lot to like here. We’Ve got a power button with a fingerprint sensor: volume, rocker, XG mobile interface, allowing you to hook up an external graphics card to the Ally micro SD slot talk about that later, headset Jack vents for The shockingly Quiet cooling system, then flipping around to the face. We have again, surprisingly good stereo speakers, an Xbox alike layout with full-sized joysticks, a serviceable, d-pad and abxy buttons, then the whatever this button Rog button – I don’t know whatever it – brings up their Command Center, allowing you to adjust Quick Settings like the power profile of the Devices running in the operating mode of the joysticks uh radon super resolution, toggle ooh, even toggles, for the display resolution and refresh rate you see natively. It runs at 1920 x, 1080 at up to 120 Herz, but the SE toggles can be useful so that games don’t get confused and try to run it anything higher than 720, 60 htz and uh.
The reason I say that games would have to be confused to do. That is because this, for those of you who have not been paying close attention, is the Rog Ally Z1, not the Rog Ali Z1 extreme, which means it has everything. That’S good about the Ally that I reviewed about 6 months ago and have been using very actively ever since, except the high-powered processor we get cut from from eight CPU cores down to six and the onboard graphics.
Processor goes from 12 cus down to just four. By the way I realized I didn’t finish going through the buttons, more Xbox buttons, and then this will return to the desktop. I believe this one’s programmable, though so uh your myage, may vary on that one now I thought that maybe other reviewers overlooked a potential outstanding use case for this version of the Ally, because one of the things that I don’t like about my Z1 extreme Ally is The extremely short battery life most of the gaming that I’ve done on that device has been playing sea of stars and playing chained EOS, both of which are pretty light games and not being able to get more than a few hours away from. The wall has been kind of a downer, so I thought, okay, why don’t we give this thing to the labs and see if there’s a way for us to push way better battery life out of this thanks to its same siiz battery unit, but much less powerful Hardware and unfortunately, I ended up sorely disappointed I’ll explain what I mean after this message from our sponsor ant lion audio, you probably know them from their versatile mod mic, which is a great mic to add to any headphones or VR headsets.
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Let’S look at these performance numbers as expected at 15 or 30 Watts. It lags behind significantly, though I was surprised to find that at 10 Watts – hey the Z1, actually not that far behind, which seems to suggest that the Z1 extreme for all its extra cus has to throttle the clock speed down even further. In order to achieve the same kind of power envelope, looking good so far, where Things Fall Apart is when we do our battery life endurance, test, playing back YouTube videos, and you can see that even with all that extra horsepower on board with the Z1 extreme, it Ends up lasting for the same amount of time.
Now, that’s not the case in our CPU or GPU stress tests, where we managed over 20 additional minutes of battery life on the Z1 versus the Z1 extreme, which seems to suggest that my idea of this being a way more power, efficient handheld for people who just Want to play light games on the go is not entirely wrong, but where it falls apart is in the Raw numbers, guys 20 to 25, more minutes away from the wall when fully loaded. That being an absolute best case scenario, this thing would need to offer me double the battery life to justify the fact that it performs so much worse when it’s running in high power mode and only costs $ 100 less than the full fat Z1 extreme, and that Ignores the fact that by the time Asus actually managed to get this thing out into the wild, it turned out that valve had a refreshed steam deck waiting in the wings that was going to make it look absolutely pointless. I mean at least the screen is good.
It manages to hit the claimed 500 nits Peak brightness, it’s quite accurate, especially compared to the original steam deck and Especial here being able to run at high refresh rate means that in games that support it, you can get a much smoother gaming experience experience it’s just That the new steam deck the OLED one um makes all of those numbers look kind of like Child’s Play, except they refresh rate it’s only 90 versus 120, but 90 Herz on an OLED yeah. I would take that over 120 we’ll have a full video on the new steam deck OLED over on the LTT Channel valve also isn’t dealing with a Micro SD card controversy cards have been dying in the original, Rog Ally and huh. Again, we were hoping that the Z1 version would run much cooler and therefore not have the same issues, but as it turns out, it does suck back power and it does get hot, so any issues that they would have on the Z1 extreme version are probably going To be replicated here now, Asus says that they do have a bios fix coming for this, but um.
I don’t think that has materialized yet credit. We it’s due to Asus their Command Center thing has been shockingly, not buggy like io’s. One used to be really good back in the day and now last time I used it was a piece of garbage uh.
This is what that’s supposed to be. Oh, let’s turn up to 12 HZ like look at that seamless, not bad. Those six cor is Turbo.
Pretty good, if you only play very light games on the go, you want to hook up your egpu whenever you’re docked, except if you can afford one of uh, asus’s XG mobile egpus, then you can afford the extra hundred bucks. I mean it needed to be like $ 250 less expensive, but I also understand why it isn’t I get it. Everyone complaining yeah. It needs to be 250, but you got to understand guys. This is this is exactly the same tooling. This is exactly the same Hardware.
Other than just that chip change so unless AMD is charging $ 200 plus less for that chip, it’s not happening. You know what this is not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. You know if it wasn’t for steam, deck OLED being so good for the price. Maybe I’ve talked myself back into it. I could see people buying this one yeah you’re only saving $ 100 or whatever, but you’re saving $ 100 yeah. It was kind of silly of them to use the exact same Hardware other than the processor, because that makes the cost so high, but the flip side of that is they’re using the exact same Hardware.
It’S really good Hardware. It feels great it’s a great gaming experience. Other than it’s a little slower, a lot slower overall there’s a lot to like, but the truth is I’m only making a video about this right now because it’s still in my queue – and I need to get it done before I move on to more interesting ones. Like the Lenova Legion, go subscribe to Short Circuit, .