The RG Alli X is better than my original Ally in a few key ways. It has much
longer battery life, compatibility with full-size M.2 SSDs, and slightly tuned
performance. Only problem is it costs like $250
more. What if there was a way that I could upgrade my original Ally to get
most of the benefit of the Ally X? That is where the J SAW JSOX battery and
thermal upgrade kit with back plate for ROG Ally comes in along with this random
little adapter I found on AliExpress.
Okay, well that's disappointing. Now, there's nothing I can do about the
additional memory speed or capacity in the LAX, so it will perform a little bit
better than my machine, but the goal is for less than $100 to get most of the
benefit of ASUS's upgraded machine on my
original hardware. Scan QR code before installation. Check accessories and
tools. Watch video tutorial. Read instruction tutorial. Don't mind if I
do. Hey, there we go. Installation tutorial. And woo, whole page of
precautions. You are not going to have a warranty anymore. Cool. Wow. It comes
with all the tools you need. Screwdriver. This manages to feel both
cheap and expensive at the same time.
Oh. Oh, I thought the the bearing for the top was just loose, but it's
actually another bit. I'll probably use
the precision screwdriver set from ltstore.com. What else we got in here? A
little pair of generic side cutters. Look at this. Clear labels with exactly
where every one of these screws goes with little highlighted red dots. Love
to see it. Ooh, new battery. It's not
quite the 80 W hours of the LiX, but 65
W hours is a lot more than the 40 W hours in the original Ally. I can't
necessarily speak to the quality of the battery. Maybe it's good, maybe it's
not. I guess I get to find out. Finally,
there's a replacement back plate. And there's even more. We got gloves and
ooh, nice little heat sink here with
pre-applied thermal pads. Okay, I feel
ready.
Well, first things first, let's get this battery disconnected. There we go. Do
not disassemble. Sorry. They mean the battery itself,
though. We're going to reuse the original rear paddle buttons from the
back plate that the Ally shipped with, as well as our original triggers. Since
we're looking at the original, there are a couple key differences. The fan filter
mesh appears to be a little bit looser on the replacement. We no longer have
the cool little like holographic accent here, and instead of an ROG logo, we've
got a regular old fan intake fan, which honestly is probably better for cooling.
Is this thicker? Could you Can you tell? It appears that it's not. They've just
removed this stuff that would get in the way of having a larger battery here. Ah,
this can come off. See you later, buddy.
There we go. And now, four screws later, we can pull out the original battery.
There's my warranty void sticker. See you later, buddy. I have no idea how
this would impact, say, for example, if I ran into the SD card slot problem on
mine. Mine's an original launch unit, so it wouldn't have any mitigations or
fixes. And whoop, there she is. The
instructions so far have been excellent. And this is a really nice bit here. They
tell you to inspect the battery and make sure that there's no punctures or
bulging before you put it in your device. You never know what's going to
happen in shipping. And I really appreciate them taking user safety
seriously like that. Everything looks pretty good to me. Let's put our buttons
back on here. Nice. I've wanted to do this upgrade for
a while. I've been using my Ally a lot lately to play tape to tape and I found
myself extremely limited by its battery life. You know, it was actually Sam from
editing who kind of got this on my radar. Just like all the upgrades you
can make to the original Ally. >> You're modifying it. >> Oh no. Hey, look at that. I wouldn't
even know the Oh, they don't have as nice uh finish on the back of the
plastic. Okay, I think it's time for us to put the battery in. Oo, no it isn't.
First, we're going to have to trim some protruding supports. This is the first
minor deficiency I've seen in the instructions. They show you kind of
where to clip at it, but they don't show you what the finished good job looks
like. So, I'm not 100% sure how much of this I need to remove.
Let's see if the new battery goes in. Hey, there we go. Okay, this glove does
fit. You cannot acquit. Secure the four
screws for the battery. Now we plug the
battery in. I'm really impressed so far. The instructions and pictures have been
very clear, easy to follow along with, and dude, we're only 20 minutes into
this. Apply the included photosensitive adhesive strip to the photosensitive
sensor. Dude, we're almost there. Now I just got to put on my little additional
heat sink. I got to be honest with you guys, I don't know how much more this is
going to do to cool the ally, but it certainly can Ooh, interesting. It said
that it was Ally compatible, but this is clearly not one of those right angle
things. I didn't stop and look at it that closely. Uh, this is useless. I am
stuck with the original 2230 Ally SSD.
Okay, we're going to have to throw something on screen to show you guys.
Was it also supposed to cut So, you can see it reverses the direction. It makes
it come this way. Was it also supposed to come with a right angle and then I
just didn't get it or lost it? Guess I'm not upgrading my SSD today. And besides,
it seems like you have to kind of choose between upgrading the cooling of your
SSD and also getting a little bit more heat away from this heat pipe and
probably some incidental air flow from these fans over these fins here and
upgrading your SSD. I'm a little surprised that this is just held on with
thermal pad and then the one screw that goes through here, but I guess that's
enough. Okay, back cover on. I can't
believe we didn't make the console thicker. I was really expecting it to be
thicker. I figured out what these are. They're little plugs for the XD mobile
port. There we go. Okay, that's something. Here's a couple
adhesivebacked um like grippy things for the rear buttons. I never really use
them, so I'm not going to bother with that. But I might put on these joystick grip enhancers. Oh, they are not great.
Not very grippy. They're actually less grippy, but larger. I'm probably going
to hold off on those personally. Okay, time to find out if this worked. And
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for yourself just how easy it is. Moment of truth. How does it compare to the
LAX? Let's start with weight. How did we add over 100 g to Okay, that's really
heavy. The heat it didn't feel that heavy, you know. Feel this. Seriously,
it's brick-like in nature. I wonder if part of it is that the density of it is
higher now because it's still, as you can see, it's still skinnier. Wonder
what kind of charge this battery has out of the box. Probably should have made sure it powered on before I closed it
up. Uh-oh. Prototype of our upcoming LT cables. Cater. Well, hey, that's a good
sign. Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention the LAX has Thunderbolt, but that to me is
not a major benefit because I actually have an XG Mobile eGPU. So, the XG
Mobile connector is higher performance. So, I would actually prefer that over
Thunderbolt. >> Is the SM better?
>> Yes, but it almost seems like a byproduct of them having to make it
thicker to fit that bigger battery. So, these bulges come out a little bit more
compared to the original Ally. Um, the triggers are also larger and stuff.
Personally, I have not found that it makes a meaningful difference in my
limited time with the Liix, though for me. Let's set these up the same. Am I
not able to I can't move it down. Are you serious right now? Okay. Well, I
guess it just kind of is what it is on the fan curves, and then we'll just have
to account for that they're slightly different. Okay. Both of them are in a
manual performance profile that puts us at about 25 watts with spikes up to 30
watts. Okay, 60% screen brightness. CPU
is turboing a little bit higher on the OG Alli. GPU's clocks are locked, but
that's what we expect. Temps are identical and at least part of it
probably just comes down to the fan curves, but the Ally is quite a bit
louder. As I recall, ASUS also upgraded the fan geometry on the Alli X to make
it quieter. So, um,
given equal temps, we're going to have to give this to the Alli X's fans.
Battery draw is near identical. That means our power profiles are behaving
the same way. And I figure we'll just use the like the Steam Deck performance
profile here. Already, I'm learning some pretty interesting stuff. My frame rate
is slightly higher on the Liix, which we would expect because it does have
slightly faster memory, which when you're using onboard graphics is very,
very important. So, we're getting about 35 36 FPS ripping around. And over here,
we're getting more like 34 35. What's
interesting though is that my CPU and GPU clock speeds are both higher on my
original Ally, even though the APU wattage is identical at 25 watts. And my
temperatures are also identical at 67 degrees. Performance is just plain
better on the Alli X. And it's noticeably quieter with a nicer tonality
to the sound. So you can really hear the difference here.
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before it's too late. And no, I'm not doing that again. Of course, AAA games
aren't really my jam, so why don't we try something a little lighter? And once
again, the Alli X runs measurably faster in spite of its CPU running at a lower
frequency. And it even manages to be a degree cooler. But again, I don't even
play DA games. I pretty much just play this game. And I usually play it in the
silent or 15 watt profile. So all that really matters to me is how much longer
I can run away from the wall. I guess I also wouldn't mind knowing what the
performance is. Oh man, the performance really is a lot better on the X, isn't
it? 113 versus about 95 FPS.
Realistically, it doesn't matter. Either of them is running fine, but like dang.
really didn't realize it was that big of a deal. Thermals are identical now that
I have both of them in a more reasonable power profile. So, 17 watts on the Alli
X and 15 watts on the Alli. The noise on
both is acceptable. It really doesn't make that much of a difference till you ramp up the fans. And as for battery
life, well, after the Labs had a look at
it, depending on how power- hungry the game is, you can get anywhere from a
massive improvement to a very
significant, albeit more modest one. In conclusion,
makes it quite a bit heavier, limits you from upgrading your SSD if you use the
thermal upgrade module, and doesn't have the texture on the back that I guess I
don't miss that much, but I definitely do miss a little. I could probably put
the old battery back in there if I really needed to, or I could upgrade to the X, but for how much I paid, 80
bucks, man. I'm getting a lot of the benefit of the $250 X upgrade. Plus, I
don't have to deal with the hassle of like selling my old ally and then probably taking a loss on that as well.
You know what? Overall, pretty happy.
Great job, Jel. And great job you for being subscribed
to ShortCircuit.