this just in the price is 700 and it crushes the steam deck go buy one that's
what I'm gonna be doing dbrand sponsored this video and sucks to be them because
this is all they get a 30 second clip of me telling you to go to Best Buy and buy
an Rog Ally which is especially funny because they
don't even make skins for it yet I'm kidding of course you guys are
getting a full video and it's gonna be a long one that dives into what makes the
Ally great and address the inexcusable
BS that ASUS dished out during the device preview for this thing custom SOC
uh no 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 those are some
big asterisks you guys oh right and you
completely failed to mention that you get beat at 10 watts but hey
you are still walking right you better be because these things are
going to sell out immediately the Z1 extreme SOC at its heart packs eight
then four cores and rdna3 Graphics an
ASUS has paired it with 16 gigs of
high-speed ddr5 memory and a 512 gig Gen
4 NVMe SSD all for just fifty dollars
more than a top spec steam deck
there's just one incy Wincy problem with
our limited time we made the call to test fewer games at more power profiles
and I'm really glad we did because we found some interesting stuff like the
fact that at 10 watts the steam deck mops the floor with the Ally somehow
Metro Exodus Forza Horizon 5 and
returnal all saw basically half the performance in both average FPS and one
percent lows showing that again no matter what kind of Hardware anyone
seems to cook up the steam deck just crushes the rest of the field in the
super low power draw weight class I don't know what kind of Wizardry valve
is employed here but it is unbelievable until we add a bit more juice where
their advantage completely disappears at
15 watts Fort says one percent lows are
now double the other way offering a much
smoother and more responsive gaming experience on the Ally and all three
games saw the Ally take a sizable performance lead here anywhere from
around 15 to 20 on average now that's
not really the up to 50 Improvement that
we were told before but it's still better than a kick in the teeth now it
is possible that at low settings we might see a different story or maybe if
we tested many more games but we felt like these were pretty representative
titles and 720p medium was a fair reference point for both consoles what
isn't fair is how hard the Ally starts dunking on the competition at 25 watts
we saw anywhere between a 40 and nearly 70 percent Advantage across our test
Suite which to be fair isn't quite Apples to Apples the steam deck runs at
800 P rather than 720p but in the real
world I would much rather have the smoother gaming experience than the
extra little bit of vertical height it's not small like it's the difference
between playing on medium and playing on Ultra it's the difference between
playing at 30ish FPS and playing at
almost 60 FPS and it gets even better
you can take this thing with you anywhere but if you happen to be plugged
in ASUS offers a 30 watt turbo mode that widened the Gap substantially in at
least one of our test cases look at this this is Metro Exodus a
visually impressive AAA title released just a few years ago and it's running on
medium settings at 100 FPS on average on
a handheld I guess Jesus finally did find incredible now one similarity
between the two devices is the battery both are packing 40 watt hours and at 15
watts which is a good Power Balance for both of them and matched screen
brightness at 60 hertz we found that the steam deck's performance was a little
bit longer however it's worth noting that the steam decks included charger is
only 45 Watts Max versus the Allies 65
watt charger so the Ally crushes the deck when it comes to charging time
unless of course you upgrade to a third-party charger but by the time you
do that well you might as well have paid the extra money and gotten one of these
because here's something the steam deck can't upgrade to 1080p baby and not only
is the Ally is display higher resolution it it also 120 hertz and while many I
dare say even most of the games that you'll wind up playing on these devices
won't reach such high frame rates whether it's due to Performance or due
to frame rate limiters some of them will and even for those that won't it also
supports variable refresh rate to reduce screen tearing leading to a much
smoother and more enjoyable experience in everything from games to Steam Big
Picture Mode ASUS Armory crate or even plain old Windows 11. more on Armory
created Windows later though because I'm not done talking about how great this
display is ASUS advertises seven millisecond pixel response times but we
measured an average of 4.4 with virtually no overshoot I just can't get
over how smooth this thing is or how beautiful the colors are we didn't quite
reach the 100 coverage of the srgb color space that they advertise but 95 is not
only not bad it trounces the steam decks
easily 73 percent resulting in a noticeably richer more vibrant picture
that really Pops at least as long as you keep it protected with the tempered
glass screen protector from dbrand there I mentioned you guys alright this is
especially true if you crank the brightness to 500 nits which makes it
genuinely playable Outdoors on a sunny day at least for a little while it's
worth noting that like the steam deck if you crank everything especially the 120
hertz refresh rate you're not going to be gaming for very long under the shade
of that tree the display is surprisingly color accurate too though managing an
average Delta e of just 3.6 but it's
worth noting that both of our devices skewed a little bit cooler in color
temperature and adjusting the color temp on the Ally Only seems to bump up the
Reds a bit so we'd recommend leaving it on default now since Cal man isn't
supported on Linux right now we have limited means of measuring the deck's
color accuracy but I can tell you that with its much worse color gamut it it is
certain to be worse one thing we were able to compare though is brightness the
steam deck is advertised as 400 nits typical but we've actually measured over
550 nits on two separate decks which
clearly beats even the impressive 500 nits that we measured on the Ally Why
valve is advertising it solo we have no idea but side by side the steam deck is
visibly brighter if only by a bit the
deck also gets dimmer than the Ally 2 though something that I care about a lot
as someone who games in bed late at night we measured just 4.6 nits minimum
on the steam deck and 14 on the Rog Ally
to be clear both are really good but once again valve is cooking up a secret
sauce that I wish the competition could match fortunately for ASUS they have
their own secret sauce there's zero gravity thermal system as stupid as that
sounds it works while both devices stay
cool inside and out the Ally stays cooler where it matters the most under
your hands and this is largely thanks to the addition of a second heatsink under
the hood that gets its own dedicated vent at the top now don't get me wrong
the exhaust on the Ally gets hot especially if you're gaming in turbo
mode where the whole device can drop to 48 watts
feels like a hair dryer but what's great
is that the vents are positioned in such a way that it shouldn't ever bother you
and I'm much happier with all the heat venting away from the device instead of
spreading through the Plastics into my hands it's almost as comfortable as our
new Northern Lights t-shirt check it out lttstore.com
now most impressively the Ally does all of this while staying shockingly quiet
and I can't express how big of a difference this makes I mean I can show
you these graphs where you can see this bump at around 800 Hertz that represents
the wine of the steam deck fan Apologies by the way for our high noise floor here
we're still waiting on our acoustic testing chamber but the bump doesn't
tell the experiential story and it's
huge like it's the difference between me recommending that you play with
headphones on and telling you to put your headphones away and just listen to
these awesome speakers that was another pleasant surprise it doesn't get talked
about much but valve is really good at audio and somehow the Ally manages to be
even better the steam deck gets a touch louder but the Allies frequency response
is more balanced and it doesn't need that extra punch to drown out its stupid
fan it kind of feels like the deck is the beta and the Ally is the final
release here at least on the hardware
side another area where the deck still wins handily is ease of use admittedly
to those of you who are new to steamos or handhelds in general there is still a
learning curve here it's just a lot smoother than Armory crate SC ASUS's
proprietary software that's used to quickly change settings and access all
of your games in one place I think the best thing I could say about Armory
crate SE is it's not nearly as awful as
I expected the leading games from the game library though doesn't also
uninstall them and if you uninstall something it doesn't get automatically
deleted from the game Library opening Armory crate also doesn't pause your
game which could lead to some mistakes since the button for it is right below
the start button if you use the game Library rather than just Steam Big
Picture for some reason the background behind your game tiles will change as
you select each game which I guess is a cool enough idea yeah but in practice
it's a blurry mess and super distracting it ends up feeling more like a bug than
a feature another small but Annoying
issue is the contents of the content menu why are things like update center
help center and system specs in content rather than in settings I mean it's not
the end of the world it's just weird and if we use ASUS's other button
on the left side of the screen it opens Command Center where you can quickly
change things like your operating in control modes your refresh rate your FPS
limiter Etc really cool it even lets you
customize the tiles but then when you use a tile it opens a new window it
doesn't automatically select that window so you open a keyboard or your game
profiles you gotta hit a button or tap the screen first before you start using
that window on the subject of Windows in spite of Microsoft's 10 years of effort
the touchscreen experience is not great to overcome this the Ally
comes with joy to mouse support but it's a little bit finicky not only did the
auto control mode not always swap elegantly when we switched over to the
desktop but manually changing to desktop mode would sometimes take tapping on the
screen to get it to register that pressing the thumbstick means that I
want a cursor then if you swap back to Gamepad mode after you have a cursor
sometimes it'll just stay there except now you can't control
the pointer anymore I mean these are minor gripes that I
fully expect to improve over time the deck had all kinds of Gremlins in the
software at launch too but you're not buying this for what it will be you're
buying it for what it is and valve's put
in a lot of work that ASUS simply hasn't yet that doesn't mean this is a clear
win for valve though the Ally enjoys some big advantages like the ability to
use any game launcher or anti-cheap that you want or rather are forced to use and
the ability to install apps the same way that you would on a regular desktop
computer you want Discord simple want to
do some video editing on the go sure thing just I hope you plan to plug in
your own peripherals there are rumors that Microsoft is working on some kind
of handheld gaming mode for Windows but for now in most applications you can
have fun clicking on a text box opening Command Center to open the keyboard
closing Command Center typing without being able to see the text box so
hopefully you didn't make a mistake closing your keyboard and and then
pressing enter to add your username
awesome in all seriousness you can speed up this
process a bit by mapping actions to any of the buttons for both Gamepad and
desktop mode which is great personally when I want to access the keyboard I
swipe up a couple times from the bottom and then press it in the system tray it's just that no matter what your ugly
workaround is the current implementation can be annoying to the point where you
just want to take the device and throw it at the wall
and then you take a few deep breaths you go hey
at least I'm not on proton DB right now checking to see if my game is supported
at all now we already talked about this in our
preview video but if the steam deck feels too big and unwieldy for you the
Ally wins again it's 61 grams lighter which isn't which is a ton but it's
enough to feel significant and we had a few people who daily Drive the steam
deck hold it in their hands and it's unanimous the Rog Ally is more
comfortable there are drawbacks no touch pads no 16x10 display and the face
buttons are not great I managed to get
the x button jammed on mine at least a dozen times on my playthrough of stray
on the Ally and I hoped that the production version would be a bit better
but the bad news is it's not
well maybe a little better oh it's jammed
yeah maybe a little bit of lube would help but I told them when they came in I
was like you guys need to fix this in the final tooling and it's pretty clear
based on how similar this is to our prototype it was already pretty much
mass production for General use both offer desktop modes and hooking up to a
dock is just one cable which is sick but
the Ally once again takes the game to a whole different level its interface is
proprietary that's bad but their XG mobile external gpus get twice the
bandwidth of usb4 or Thunderbolt that's good they're only available with
expensive Mobile gpus in them that's bad but they allowed nearly desktop like
performance on the sort of go that's
really cool and it could be even better
if Jesus would pull their heads out of their Collective butts and make a
desktop GPU compatible enclosure that can use this XG mobile interface
the Ally isn't perfect the onboard Wi-Fi 6E is ripping fast but it's soldered to
the board so dead Wi-Fi equals dead motherboard and so far ASUS hasn't
announced any kind of iFixit partnership like valve has and can I just say I
really don't understand why they couldn't do a full-length m.2 SSD in
here there seems to be ample space but it's a big Improvement in some of the
most important ways while coming in at a price that could best be described as
disruptive most consoles are initially
sold at a loss and the hope is that you'll make the money back selling games
and subscriptions on the platform in valve's case the math is pretty simple
steam rakes in butt loads of money through both games and microtransactions
so it makes perfect sense that they sell the steam deck for as low as 400 dollars
but most people aren't buying that one
for most people they want a substantial sized SSD and that's where the Ally gets
price competitive which is surprising I mean to be clear I'm sure ASUS is making
money from the Ally fundamentally it's what is it it's a Chromebook with a
decent SOC in it but I'm willing to bet they're not making much which might
explain why they begged us to show their XBox controller clone in the preview
video even though it wasn't even a working sample by the way we have a
working one now and it's pretty cool I guess
ASUS's big Advantage seems to be their
volume I mean compared to valve I think they're moving a lot of steam decks but
we can tell from the crowdfunding campaigns of competitors like Aya Neo
and GPD that those guys are expecting to
sell thousands of units of a given system and those thousands of units have
to cover tooling costs marketing and r d for the Next Generation product
to undercut them by literally four hundred dollars at the same spec ASUS
needs to move a lot more than thousands of units they need to move hundreds of
thousands of units the good news phrase is though is that
they will eventually because I strongly recommend
this thing at least I do until more competition shows up but because of that
recommendation the fact that this thing is so competitive
bad news is I suspect it's going to be out of stock everywhere for weeks or
even for months the bright side of that is that hey for
the time being the steam deck is a much more okay option still than ASUS made it
out to be its software is more mature it manages better battery life in low power
mode and it's got a much more robust accessory ecosystem including
third-party hall effect joysticks and a whole lineup of cool stuff from dbrand
including their skins screen protectors stick grips and of course their kill
switch case which is back in stock now we're going to have all that linked down
below there I mentioned you guys again do I get my check now if you like this
video be sure to check out the preview to see how the Ally handles gaming with
an RTX 49d mobile GPU I mean No One's
Gonna spend that kind of money so we kind of ignored it for the review but send for us fast and this thing can rip
at least this version of it can you might have noticed we ignored the lower
end version of the Ally that uses a Z1 non-xtreme processor that's because we
don't have one yet and also because we kind of agree with ASUS most people are
probably going to go for this one based on the price and performance difference
at least on paper I guess we'll see