The ASUS ROG Ally is the latest contender to Valve’s ever-popular Steam Deck,
the undisputed king of PC-based gaming handhelds. Many have tried
to dethrone the Deck, as yet all have failed. So how will the ROG Ally fare?
A quick look at some Creative Electron x-rays offers a glimpse of what’s to
come. With twin fans, this thing clearly runs hot. Drawing 30 W at peak performance,
the Ally pulls twice as much power as the Deck and provides the performance to justify
it. It can even run Half Life: Alyx in VR, a pretty amazing feat in such a compact package.
Let's take a peek under the hood to see what makes this monster so powerful.
The opening process is straightforward enough,
six Phillips screws and a few clips are the only things between me and the innards.
Immediately on opening I’m greeted by a very modular design contrasted by a “Do
not disassemble” sticker on the battery. ASUS has stated that this sticker applies only to
the battery and yet we’ve got two more tamper proof stickers in here. If you live in the US,
your warranty is protected by the Magnuson-Moss act, don’t let things like this intimidate you.
This 40 Wh battery is one of the first things you can remove, held in place by two Phillips screws.
This is in direct contrast to the Steam Deck’s glued-in battery that’s buried deep in the device.
This heat-dissipating foil blocks the markings on the battery so we’re going
to have to peel it away to get a better look. Good luck taking it off in one piece though.
Here’s a win for repairability: an M2 drive—the same form factor as the Steam
Deck’s—can be easily removed and replaced with a larger drive, say a 1 TB or 2 TB.
Links to our store in the description, by the way if you’re looking to upgrade yours.
The thumbstick board contains the thumbstick, rumble motors, and several IC’s. This is a win
for modularity—thankfully a drifting stick doesn’t require the replacement of the whole
assembly. Unlike the Steam Deck’s slightly more complex module with capacitive touch,
two screws and a ribbon cable are all that hold the sticks down.
While the thumbstick package may look identical to the Nintendo Switch,
it is marginally smaller while being taller. The interior is
unfortunately the same resistive film-based potentiometer stick that is prone to drift.
Now these fans will come away individually which makes them easy to replace if they
get noisy but we can also pop out the whole heat management system in one go.
Underneath that modestly sized heatsink is the pint-sized Ryzen Z1 Extreme with
eight Zen4 cores which powers this beast of a device. Directly below
the CPU we have four LPDDR5 DRAM modules totalling 16 GB.
The speakers are next to come away with three screws per side, followed immediately by the
power and fingerprint sensor modules. The LED ring that provides the thumbstick’s
flashing RGB colors also comes away. A bit gimmicky but it’s there if you like your RGB.
Last to come out is the screen. This is perhaps the only component that
isn’t repair friendly with a fair amount of adhesive underneath the edges of the screen.
Not a problem if you’ve broken the screen and you’re looking to replace the whole
module but a tad riskier if you’re looking to transplant a screen to a new plastic cover.
Running at 120 Hz and a resolution of 1920 by 1080, the LCD panel outputs a
peak brightness of around 500 nits beating the Steam Deck by a fair margin on all three counts.
ASUS has clearly learned from Valve’s mistakes and
there’s evidence aplenty for minor but meaningful design improvements over the competition.
The bumper buttons, one example of a failure point on the Steam Deck,
have been reinforced here with both adhesive and a metal bracket.
And while drifting thumbsticks are a painless repair on the Steam Deck,
the Ally takes repairability a step further by making the thumbstick themselves modular,
potentially saving the entire PCB.
Last but by no means least, the biggest repair advantage of the Ally is its easily
accessible battery. This is by far and away the most likely component to fail
and ASUS’ engineers deserve a shoutout for the decision to prioritize access to this component.
Despite the impressive hardware, the ROG Ally is unlikely to dethrone its royal Valvy-ness. For
all its modularity and accessible design, ASUS has yet to commit to spare parts availability.
But, perhaps most importantly, all that hardware is massively let down by the software.
That isn’t necessarily ASUS’s fault. Unfortunately, Windows 11 was never
designed with a handheld gaming device in mind, though that may yet change.
Until ASUS gets its software ducks in a row, $700 plus tax might be a bit much for
the average gamer—especially considering the gigabytes worth of Windows updates
they’d have to sit through. As a portable PC though, this device definitely shows massive
potential and the modding community is bound to come up with some interesting use cases
for the Ally.