the Prototype inside this box was flown
and hand delivered to me by ASUS and I can tell you with certainty that while
I'm not allowed to tell you the exact specs this is not just another steam
deck clone because it's more like two
steam deck clones they are claiming literally double the performance twice
the refresh rate more than double the resolution and I am one of only two
people outside of ASUS who gets to show off the Rog Ally prototype today and I'm
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it would be pretty easy to assume that ASUS simply saw the steam deck thought
yeah we could do that and then sharted out the RNG Ally but their team has
actually spent the last 10 years working on various handheld console Concepts
just waiting for an opening in a difficult Market that is chewed up and
spit out numerous experienced players over the years and the biggest thing
that proves this isn't just another copycat design is what I'm doing right
now ASUS obsessed over how people actually use these handheld devices
finding that they don't want them to be too big they also don't want them to be
too small and they want them to be genuinely comfortable to hold now when
you first pick up the Rog Ally it isn't
very comfortable to be perfectly honest with you I have a hard time reaching the
shoulder buttons and these bottom
corners here just like kind of dig into my head but then watch this
and it's perfect these little Contours here at the bottom
right and left are designed for the device to be held at an angle with the
screen actually facing your face and in many cases resting either on the desk in
front of you or on your lap in terms of buttons it's a pretty bog standard Xbox
layout we've got our start and select here and here or whatever Microsoft
calls those buttons I actually don't know what these other buttons do oh I
guess we're gonna oh okay so that switches between Windows
and your game quick switcher and oh that brings up
their Command Center oh I really like this quick switcher between uh Mouse
mode is this is this to make it like a keyboard jointed mouse or whatever
cool okay quick toggle between 16 120 hertz
refresh rate oh man I have been waiting for someone to do 120 hertz I know it's
worse for battery life okay I know it's more expensive but there are a lot of
games particularly emulated games enthusiasts that you totally could run
at 120 frames per second and would totally run on this Hardware especially
this Hardware I am loving these RGB joysticks in terms of buttons the good
thing about the joysticks is they're full size so you'll get the same level of control that you would get with a
steam deck the bad news is you'll get the same level of control as you will
with the steam deck they're not hall effect which means that even though you
can calibrate the zero point so you shouldn't suffer from drift
not Cottonwood uh you can't fully eliminate dead zones and they might not
have the same level of durability deep pad feels
solidly okay it's far from the best I felt but it's not nearly the worst
and while I'm not a huge fan of long travel abxy buttons these aren't bad I
mean I'd say they're about like you'd get on like an Xbox controller though it
should be noted that this is a prototype device and I would love for that to
improve assistant
now that I'm in position the shoulder and Trigger buttons are very easy to
access these seem like analog triggers though they haven't confirmed that for
me yet and like the steam deck and
unlike many other competing Windows handhelds on the market they've got additional buttons on the back of the
device though not as many as the steam deck this
looks flipping awesome I'm not allowed to show
you guys FPS but ASUS says that at 15 watts they are
up to 50 percent faster than the steam deck and at 35 Watts they are double the
performance at seven inches 1080p looks
crazy Sharp okay if this is running variable refresh
rate it makes sense that it was so hard for me to nail down what FPS it's
running at because if it dips below the panel's variable refresh rate range then
it'll really start to chug and as long as it's within that range it's going to
look shockingly smooth so if I had to guess I'd say we're seeing anywhere from
45 FPS down to it's probably dipping to
about 20 and that's where I'm really seeing those stutters no matter how you
slice it though this is incredibly impressive we're not even in game yet I
am loving this display okay not only does it run at a higher resolution than
the steam deck it also hits a peak of 500 nits which is more than
I think that's higher than any of the handhelds we've tested recently and it's
rated at just seven milliseconds for the pixel response times now that doesn't
sound that impressive compared to some of the latest gaming monitors that
boasting sub 1 millisecond response times but you got to understand that
even on something like a gaming laptop the native pixel response time is going
to be pretty similar to this they're just overdriving those pixels so this is
going to be at least a clean seven milliseconds which at 60 hertz is going
to look great and 120 hertz should be okay while this is running really smooth
I wasn't even thinking about it which is the mark of good
okay we're only at 720p though uh you guys need to change it so that I can
toggle to manual mode as well once I configure my manual mode I should be
able to just toggle the manual mode dude though this is so smooth
if you play lighter games Indie Games emulated games oh
120 hertz makes so much sense I'm all the way back down
to 15 watts performance mode and this is still an outstanding experience it's
everything it's just it's the responsiveness it's being able to nail
the timing it's the smoothness of the animations if you're playing lighter
games you know retro games emulated games there's just no comparison here
really at 15 watts you guys are rating this at 20 decibels I mean
yeah I believe it and we've got some
insights to share with you guys on how they're getting it so quiet even though we're not allowed to open it today first
though let's see if we're even getting the main benefit of these fans being so
quiet can we play something like a rhythm game on this and actually enjoy
it unlike on the steam dark
foreign but
um these speakers sound great though I've
only got this at about 30 percent right now what
that is a very full sound considering
the size of this device
all right it's not like I don't have any
complaints right no hall effect joysticks for example but ASUS pointed
out that they are very replaceable so it wouldn't be a surprise if third-party
options did show up I didn't notice the weight but they
wanted me to mention that it's exactly 608 grams which is apparently a lucky
number or something like that the triggers and shoulders no longer
bothered me at all once I was actually playing games but I do want to see the
stabilization of these improve okay let's change gears though and talk about
cooling the way that they achieve this level of quiet aside from just putting
in a quality thermal solution instead of like weird janky fans that make a lot of
noise is by using a heat pipe with a two
element heatsink so that's why it's got two exhausts over here and two separate
intakes they managed to pack two fans into this thing in addition to this
Hardware that is double the performance of the steam deck under ideal conditions
now seems like a good time to talk about i o there's a headphone jack up here
we've got a Micro SD slot uhs2 pretty
cool a really funky looking USBC Port
we'll talk more about that later volume buttons as well as a fingerprint sensor
that includes a single sign on I think is what that's called or whatever basically it caches your fingerprint
when you turn on the device and then logs all the way into your Windows
profile so if you have multiple profiles because you share your device with your kids or your so or whatever you just
turn it on and it'll drop you right in your profile they're not letting me show
the motherboard and the internals to you guys but I did see them and there's a
couple of things that I'm allowed to share with you first that the SSD is a
2230 sized SSD so likely it'll ship with
one terabyte Max storage and the second is that the battery capacity should be
pretty competitive with the steam deck what I want to know though is does it
fit in the little handheld storage spot on our backpack
lttstore.com oh this is not the standard
backpack this is a prototype one don't worry too much about that but it's the
same size and the answer is okay remember how I was going to talk
about that funky USBC connector that was like three times as wide
the Ally has no Thunderbolt or usb4 and
that's because of that connector it's ASUS XG mobile connection and it allows
you to plug in an external GPU like this one
there is a part of me that wishes it was Thunderbolt because that would make it
compatible with third-party GPU docs rather than just this one but there is
an advantage to this approach it's PCIe by eight rather than PCIe by four with a
whole bunch of Thunderbolt protocol overhead so what that means is a unlike
Thunderbolt there's actually a point in connecting an RTX 4090 mobile to this
thing it shouldn't be nearly as bottlenecks I absolutely love the XG
mobile on my flow x13 when it works it can be a little bit flaky but the
difference is that ASUS sent me mine I didn't have to pay for it and at the
price that this thing costs it is pretty tough to justify to be clear it's not
ASUS that I blame for this they won't confirm the real reason but I have no
doubt in my mind that it's because of NVIDIA NVIDIA is extremely fussy about
the products that their gpus are built into and they have arbitrary rules like
well if it's connected to a laptop it has to be a mobile chip even though
we're talking about the XD mobile which isn't really mobile it's a product that
will only ever run plugged into the wall
so in my mind Jesus got to work with AMD
then to use desktop class gpus in I mean
maybe a slightly larger enclosure or build compatibility with the XG mobile
interface into their egpu Thunderbolt enclosures for regular graphics cards
that would make the XG mobile affordable and upgradeable because right now it's
neither which is a shame because
with it you can easily turn this thing into the switch Pro that the market is
so hungry for by the way ASUS asked us to show you a couple of the new products
uh this isn't one of them but
this is how the hell do I pronounce this right Curie Pro
this is their new rikiri Pro it has a screen on it it's almost exactly the
same layout as an Xbox controller but it's slightly smaller because some
people find it to be a little bit big and it's got four buttons on the back as
well as these adjustable uh whether you want the trigger to work as a trigger or
as just a another shoulder button little switches I forget what these are called
but they also wanted me to show off this thing this is actually a super cool
companion for the Ally it allows you to charge the Ally via USBC you also get an
extra USB port and an HDMI output for the Ally just plugged into the wall it's
really compact I would use the right Geary but it's apparently an engineering
unit and does not work yet okay I mean if this is a Zen for mobile CPU based on
what I've seen from Zen 4 so far and its efficiency
I'm going ultimate 4K with this mobile 4090 I mean it should work right
you know it's funny the ASUS wraps were like yeah we were surprised at how
little bottlenecking there is but mobile 49 is not as fast as a real 40 90. so
yeah it's only PCIe gen 3x8 but that's
lots of bandwidth and because it's not Thunderbolt there's no bi-directional
communication really like it's not outputting over the laptop's display or
anything like that it's just the outputting to your monitor over HDMI
or over a DisplayPort it's a plenty fast chip and this CPU
this CPU is clearly fast enough this is
well over 60 frames per second
I love it when the camera is like this
this is really great all right come on either way
this is running amazing
I mean it should once you've spent probably about twenty five hundred
dollars but still over the past year
we've had several other devices hit the market looking to scratch that next-gen
itch that some of the more Enthusiast level handheld gamers are looking for
and truthfully I am one of them because as much as I love the steam deck I don't
daily drive it this is partly because of the loud fan but the size the more
limited game compatibility and the performance are also factors now
obviously the price of the steam deck is a major selling point all other things
being equal but all other things are not
equal anymore we won't know the exact price of this device until it shows up
on Best Buy shelves and around the world in the next few months but being this
much faster all of a sudden it could make sense and
if you were hoping that valve would simply refresh the steam deck to match
the Allies performance but at their existing price think again recently
valve has gone on the record stating that while they are working on the steam
deck 2 it's not coming for a long time which in valve time is I mean I don't
know let's put it this way we just got Counter-Strike two valve's custom SOC
strategy then was a big Advantage for them at launch but it's starting to look
like a liability much like the cycle we see with the traditional console players
where they launch new console it's absolutely killer compared to a custom
PC and then it becomes long in the tooth and a custom PC starts to look like the
obvious choice until they refresh and so on and so forth so while the seam deck
did a great job of getting people back into handheld gaming especially playing
PC games and the low barrier to entry is amazing at 400 dollars
some of you have more money that you'd like to spend and this is starting to
look like it could offer enough to justify whatever that higher price is
there's going to be a lot more for us to cover in the full review the faster UHS
2 micro SD slot for example does it affect loading times I don't know we
might be able to objectively measure device speakers in our lab by then how
does it compare to the competition and how does all of this performance
translate to power savings I mean what
if steam deck performance is Lots but I'd rather just run it sub 15 watts to
get an extra hour or two of battery you're gonna have to stay tuned to find
out and stay tuned for this message from our
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