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ETA Prime Reviews Asus ROG ALLY Hand-Held PC

Image Credit – Asus

 

ETA Prime has gotten his hands on the new $699 (US) Asus ROG ALLY. This handheld PC is meant to compete directly with the SteamDeck, but has a lot more power. The system uses the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU featuring eight Zen 4 cores with 16 threads, a 12CU RDNA3 Radeon iGPU, and 16GB of LPDDR5 at 6400MT. Storage is handled by a 2230 sized M.2 drive, and the system features a 7-inch 120Hz 1080P IPS display with FreeSync variable refresh rate. It uses Windows 11 as its OS of choice.

Aside from the increased processing power, the major advantage that the ROG ALLY has over the SteamDeck is the FreeSync display. SteamDeck has a fixed refresh rate display. While it’s semi-flexible in its user configurable refresh rate, it’s still fixed. This means that you have a choice of VSYNC stutter or screen tearing when the game can’t match the refresh rate. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of games struggle in this way. With FreeSync, the screen simply adapts to the framerate of the game.

You can check out ETA Prime’s video below. Make sure to like and subscribe to him.

 

Image Credit – Asus
 
ETA Prime has gotten his hands on the new $699 (US) Asus ROG ALLY. This handheld PC is meant to compete directly with the SteamDeck, but has a lot more power. The system uses the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU featuring eight Zen 4 cores with 16 threads, a 12CU RDNA3 Radeon iGPU, and 16GB of LPDDR5 at 6400MT. Storage is handled by a 2230 sized M.2 drive, and the system features a 7-inch 120Hz 1080P IPS display with FreeSync variable refresh rate. It uses Windows 11 as its OS of choice.
Aside from the increased processing power, the major advantage that the ROG ALLY has over the SteamDeck is the FreeSync display. SteamDeck has a fixed refresh rate...

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Elaman

Cable-Tie Ninja
Sep 13, 2020
155
119
I don't have a dog in this fight because I'm mainly a keyboard player.

What I do have, is a freaking Asus laptop, and a lot of playtime in it. Which I don't think would have been possible in the ROG Ally.

From my point of view, in this kind of device, below 2h of battery is not worth it. If the chip is really so performant, we should be able to set it to max. 15W or even below, while still be able to play most games.
 

Revenant

Christopher Moine - Senior Editor SFF.N
Original poster
Revenant Tech
SFFn Staff
Apr 21, 2017
1,670
2,697
I'm not upset about Windows nor would I be upset about Steam OS. System neutral on that one.

@Elaman I think there is a market for it. My wife likes to game on handhelds more than her PC. She likes being able to lie down and relax. She really wants either a SteamDeck or one of these.
 
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Elaman

Cable-Tie Ninja
Sep 13, 2020
155
119
Oh don't get me wrong, there is market indeed: AYA Neo 2, GPD Win Max 2 coming out almost at the same time as the ROG Ally, the various OneXPlayers...
 

Skripka

Cat-Dog Perch Manager
May 18, 2020
443
543
Its biggest drawbacks are Windows and the fact that it looks like it was designed by a 10 year old
It is mind blowing to me exactly how bad Windows touch compatibility still is even after their attempts like w8