a new product is supposed to be exciting right I get to tell you about all the
cool new features like the massively upgraded 80w hour battery the second
USBC Port that does 40 GB per second and
can even work with Thunderbolt external gpus and of course the minor
improvements to everything from buttons to ergonomics to Specs but the Lix is so
flipping expensive and comes so closely on the heels of the original Ally that
if I'm anything like you and I've got a first generation Ally with which I do
I'm looking at this thing going oh my God you want my money again and for a
10% performance Improvement at 1080p oh
the battery life guys that's the standout to us this thing manages 14
hours in our endurance battery life test and 2 hours in our stress test and
somehow it manages to do that while only being about 11% heavier in fact when I
did my initial impressions of this I had a hard hard time picking out whether I
was holding the Ally or the Ally X and a
big part of that is that they haven't changed the ergonomics that much the ABX
y buttons sit a little bit more proud to the face the d-pad has been improved
with more clear delineation between all eight positions and the joysticks have a
little bit more resistance on them although that does come with a benefit
they are now rated for 2 and a half times the number of rotations compared
to the ones on the original Ally we've got Hallett triggers again click here
nicer feeling shoulder buttons and a big Improvement to the back buttons now they
can be actuated really however you want you can kind of slide across them you
can push down on them really like this we've got larger air intakes a thicker
internal heat pipe and a third exhaust grill that together contributed to both
quieter and cooler operation in our testing and up at the top for I/O we've
got a fingerprint sensing Windows hello power button a headphone microphone Jack
ah yes the micro SD card slot that led
to so many challenges with the original Ally although to asus's credit they have
finally addressed that with the community volume rocker and of course
that second USBC Port that I was really happy to see and normally it doesn't
matter but every once in a while I run into a situation where I'm like I wish
the AL had a second USBC Port okay I'm on a plane I got a portable monitor and
I realized I forgot to bring a dongle that supports pass through charging so I
had no way to charge the Ally and also output to my portable monitor no one
seems to feel bad for me okay it's a champagne problem but a problem
nonetheless and one that Aus has addressed got a 65 W charger which is
nice to see included at all but doesn't support the maximum charging speed of
the Alx which is 100 watts and that you're definitely going to want if
you're ever in a hurry when you're charging because an 80w hour battery is
flipping big ah yes warranty information
form awkward there now I'm done with accessories and
I can get back to what matters the Ally oh okay no I'm sorry there is one two
more accessories there's no kickstand on the Alx itself but Asus does include
little cardboard stands and you get two just in case you lose one apparently
these were included with the original I never noticed maybe because they aren't
very good you can't even adjust the angle thanks Asus and thanks our sponsor
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grab a Shar geek 140 using the link in the description you know I was expecting
the display to be the first thing that stood out to me but as I launch Steam
Big Picture it's actually the speakers they've got a much Fuller sound than the
original Ally and as one of those monsters who does the vast majority of
my handheld gaming with speakers rather than headphones I'm sorry sorry sorry
everyone that makes a pretty big difference to me I'm actually going to go crab Rave before I even fire up a
game here operating Windows on a handheld gaming PC is always going to be
awkward that's something that the steam deck just does so much better than any
Windows handheld can do at this time but one of the reasons that I daily drive an
ally instead of a steamjack OLED is that game compati ility is damn near perfect
and that's only going to get better with the improved Hardware in this new
iteration they still don't compare to something like a Macbook but they're
definitely better than the old one okay let's uh maybe we'll go Forza you may
not proceed without being signed into a profile you may not proceed without
being well what am I allowed to do you may not proceed without there's no
option to close the game God modern gaming sucks you may not proceed without
being signed into a profile the device is upgraded it's now available with up
to a 1 TB SSD out of the box and supports longer 80 mm sticks so that you
can put in up to an 8 tbte drive it has
24 gigs of RAM instead of 16 gigs of RAM this time around and it even runs at a
higher 7500 megat transfers per second
which when you're using onboard Graphics which uses your system RAM can make a
significant difference to system performance in fact at 1080p we saw an
approximately 10% uplift in FPS in games
however on a device like this you often times wouldn't be running at 1080p you'd
be running at 720 in order to get the best performance and at 720 we found
that we ran into other system bottlenecks before that increased memory
clock speed really made a difference so just like the original Ally it clocks
down from 30 wats to 25 watts when you're away from the wall even in its
turbo operating mode but to take advantage of the bigger battery in the
lower performance modes it goes up to 13
and 17 rather than 10 and 15 which does
result in a measurable performance Improvement while still maintaining
better battery life than the original Ally there's other quality of life
improvements it's easier to access the SSD for upgrades it runs quieter and the
display now gets dimmer if you're the kind of person who games in the dark and
doesn't want to melt your eyes out of their freaking sockets but none of those
things are big enough to overcome two major obstacles that are facing the Ally
x one is that the original Ally offers a
lot of the same experience and two it
does so at a much lower price the Ally X
is coming into a Marketplace that is absolutely flush with competition from
the liks of valve Zotac iono uh Lenovo
there's so many players in this space now it might still be among if not the
best handheld gaming PCs but
$800 before I even put a decent sized SSD in it good Lord what's a one tby
steam deck OLED $650 and yeah this has advantages but so
does the steam deck OLED I mean that screen so nice and making things even
more Awkward we're already starting to see rumors of what the performance of
rdna 3.5 mobile Graphics are going to be
now the word on the street and I didn't hear this from Asus is that AMD's
upcoming STX Point processors that feature those Graphics are going to be
so expensive that this would have been more like $900 but I've got to wonder
guys with how much more performance it would offer would that be more
justifiable as an upgrade as it is now if I'm looking to buy a handheld gaming
PC and I have a functionally unlimited budget this is going to be a strong if
not the contender but if I'm upgrading from something older I don't know if it
has enough on offer I know the battery life damn it the battery life is
incredible it's so much better than it should be on paper like it's double the
size and yet it manages three times the real world performance that and I have
one of the OG allies that has the dimmer 400 nnit screen as it is now the later
model ones seem to use the same 500 plus knit screen I think only you guys can
judge is this thing worth the increase I mean yeah sure you get rid of the
proprietary XG mobile external GPU connector that cost so much but you add
a Thunderbolt connector that you're going to need an enclosure for for your
GPU that costs so much it's a really complicated story what's not complicated
is subscribing to ShortCircuit make sure you do it