ETA PRIME has demoed the ROG ALLY X in desktop mode at 1440P. The ALLY X ended up running at approximately 30 watts power draw, and wasn’t able to sustain the max 53 watts it’s supposed to offer. Even with the power limitation, performance was decent for gaming in older or less graphically intense games. As an example, Forza Horizon 5 at 1440P, with no upscaling and mostly medium settings, ran between 65 to 80 FPS.
The ROG ALLY X is an updated version of the ALLY. Compared to the original, there are improvements in build quality, battery life, and reliability, but it uses the same AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme Processor consisting of 8 Zen 4 cores, 16 threads, and 12 Cu RDNA 3 iGPU. AMD claims a maximum of 8.6 teraflops of processing power, which is roughly the same as the claimed performance of the Nvidia GTX 1080 desktop model. However, the simple reality is that measuring performance between different architectures via teraflops is a pointless endeavor, and the actual real world performance is roughly that of the GTX 1060 mobile from 2016. In other words, don’t expect miracles.
That said my wife recently purchased an Ally with a Ryzen Z1 Extreme, and has been enjoying it immensely. The small screen helps nullify a lot of the quality loss by using lower settings as our human eyes just can’t focus that closely. She and I recently decided to abandon our house work to play, of all things, Goblin Cleanup. I used my Thorzone Mjolnir build sporting a AMD Ryzen 5800X3D CPU, Radeon 6900XT, and 77 inch OLED TV. She played on her Ally, and said she didn’t really see much of a graphical difference other than frame rate. I, of course, told her I could clearly see a difference and that my ridiculous gaming SFF PC was a completely justified purchase. Thankfully she didn’t ask me to say what details were difference because the truth of the matter is that I couldn’t tell either.
Anyway, please check out ETA PRIME’s video, and make sure you give him a subscribe.
