I don’t like the ROG Ally…

Look, I know I’m gonna get a fair bit of hate in the comments for this opinion regardless of what I say, but it’d be great if you could give me a few minutes to explain myself. As a further disclaimer I want to make it abundantly clear that if you like the ROG Ally, you find it the perfect machine for you, I have absolutely no problem with that. I don’t want this to disappear off the face of the earth, I have what I feel are a series of valid criticisms that I hope Asus can address to improve the product. Ok, I think that’s enough appeasing the unappeasable, let’s get to it.

As a brief overview, the ROG Ally is a rather hyped entry into the handheld PC games console market. Despite the hype – and plenty of other reviewers who are enamoured with the Ally – I’m left feeling a little disappointed by it. The two big claim-to-fame’s are the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip that powers the Ally, and the fact that the Ally runs Windows as its operating system of choice – specifically Windows 11.

“Windows Sucks”

Asus opting to use Windows on the Ally is a bit of a mixed bag. Windows has been the gaming OS of choice for going on two decades, so all games released on PC as a platform are released on Windows. That means there are no limitations on what you can play on this – including games that require invasive anticheat systems. There’s no emulation or interpreters here, this is playing games just the same as you would on a Windows desktop, but of course on a lower powered handheld system instead.

That also means that it’s just plain old Windows. There’s no native game mode to load into, perhaps save from Steam’s Big Picture mode. You are met with the default Windows desktop UI, with little in the way of touch screen accommodations. For all intents and purposes the Ally is really a Windows tablet PC with an Xbox controller built in. If you’ve ever used Windows on a tablet without a keyboard and mouse, you’ll know how annoying of an experience that is.

As an example, on Windows there is no easy and native way to exit games if the game doesn’t have one built in. GTA V is a great example of that – to close GTA V you need to swipe up from the bottom of the screen, then again to bring up the taskbar, then long press the GTA V icon on the taskbar, then click the tiny “Close window” button, then open GTA V again and hit “A” to confirm you want to close it. Seamless!

Another quirk of Windows on a handheld console is the inability to turn the screen off when a game is still open. Again using GTA V as an example, if I have GTA open and tap the power button on the Ally, the screen turns off for a second, then turns back on and sits on the lock screen (and burns through the battery in the background). Even with a charger connected the screen will literally never turn off while GTA is open. By contrast the Steam Deck is more than happy to suspend any game that’s running and instantly resume whenever you want.

In fact, it’s actually worse than that, because while the Steam Deck’s self-discharge rate with a game open is pretty good – in my experience you can leave it for a day or two before it won’t instantly resume – on the Ally it only takes a few hours of screen-off time for it to fully hibernate the device, meaning it takes a minute or two for it to wake back up, then you can launch a game. While you can tweak those settings, the Ally would regularly be either dead or on low battery when I came back to it, which made it a frustrating experience.

There’s also other little power management tweaks that the Steam Deck has by default, that are absent on the Ally. I ran a battery life test that you’ll be hearing more about later, and on the Steam Deck it would actually dim the screen, then put the device to sleep after 10 or so minutes of inactivity – even while in GTA V. On the Ally it happily ran it’s battery to fully empty without any fuss. For a handheld console, the Steam Deck’s approach makes so much more sense. If you accidentally leave it on while you go cook dinner or something, isn’t it better to come back to a still charged machine with your game still running than a dead-as-a-brick unit that you need to plug in for a while before you can game on it again? While I’m sure I’ll get a comment or two saying “but you can change this and this and this setting in Windows and it’ll do that”, it wasn’t enabled by default. It’s not a one click button to set that. The Steam Deck does it by default.

“Asus’ Software is a Bad Bandaid”

At lot of those issues I mentioned are problems that Asus and their Armory Crate software have tried, in some capacity, to address. For example, closing games. You can manually add the “End Task” hotkey to the Control Center window which just presses ALT and F4. This is a bit more of a bodge than I’d like, and the fact you have to map it manually is annoying, but at least it exists. Interestingly, the “Show Desktop” button doesn’t work in most of the games I tried. That’s quite a useful feature on what is often heralded as the easier to multitask OS – ie change channels on Discord that’s running in the background.

Asus’ attempt at a performance monitor is just… painful. At first glance it looks fine, maybe a little big, but fine. Until you try and tap something below it and realise it is an always on top window that you can’t click through. Want to close a menu or a window? You’ll have to drag it to somewhere else on the screen, then try again. You might also notice that it’s there 24/7 for as long as it is enabled. It doesn’t just show up in games, no it’s there full time. Like I don’t understand how we’ve had in game performance overlays like Rivatuner for years and Asus can’t get that right for their own device. Of course being a Windows system, you can just use something like Rivatuner, FrameView or OCAT, but you’d likely be missing some of the information like battery wattage, and again this should be better straight from Asus.

There’s also the controller mapping functions. On SteamOS that can be done without actively leaving the game and it’s pretty easy. It uses Steam’s cloud controller configurations too so you can use other people’s setups, or sync what you use across various controllers and systems. The ROG Ally has the basic mapping functionality built into the Armory Crate software, although it’s definitely more tedious. Mapping the rear buttons is inverted which is rather unintuitive, and trying to select what they do is a little clunky especially when complicated by the “Secondary Functions” that I can’t work out how you’d actually use.

The more regularly frustration with the built in controller is the auto switching between desktop and controller modes. If you don’t select the controller mode for every single game you play, there’s a good chance you’ll need to open the action center and manually cycle between the modes until it kicks in. Same for returning to the desktop if you want the right stick to act as a cursor. It’s just kinda buggy for me, and that level of polish – or lack thereof – is what frustrates me about Asus’ software in particular.

“It’s not custom designed”

What I’m getting at here is that, Windows is Windows. It’s not made for touchscreens, let alone handheld games consoles. Asus’ software is a bodge, a plaster, a bit of lipstick on a pig. And not a great application either. It attempts to make the user experience better – the control center panel is a good start, but it feels like that’s about all they did. The Armory Crate app does technically let you launch the games it detects, but it’s not exactly useful or a place I found myself using. It’s pretty much just their standard Armory Crate program, with a couple of specific pages for Ally settings, and that’s about it.

That’s a stark contrast to the Steam Deck where in gaming mode you get a complete UI for launching your games – Steam games or not – a control center type window on the right with endless customisation including plugins like PowerTools, and a full menu system that lets you exit games easily, remap your controls easily, and switch games easily. It’s a custom designed experience, and it shows.

“The Hardware too…”

The chip at the centre of the Ally is AMD’s new Ryzen Z1 Extreme. It is without a shadow of a doubt more powerful and performant than the custom Van Gough chip in the Steam Deck. Just on specs alone, the Z1 Extreme has 8 cores and 16 threads compared to just 4 cores and 8 threads on the Deck. It’s a much newer Zen 4 architecture, compared to now ancient Zen 2. The GPU is using the newer RDNA 3 architecture instead of RDNA 2, and has 12 compute units instead of 8. In fact, the overall TDP of the Z1 Extreme goes up to 30W on the Ally when plugged in, or 25W when on battery power.

I’d describe the performance as “plenty”, although if I’m being totally honest, it’s very rare I find the Steam Deck’s performance to be inadequate. I often run the Steam Deck at 40Hz and 40FPS to extend the battery life, so it’s rare to find a game that won’t run at 40FPS at least. Actually most of my time with the Deck is spent on emulators – which do work fine on the Ally although the beautifully simple EmuDeck setup tool isn’t yet publically available for Windows just yet so you’ll have to set up each emulator manually. Of course, more power on tap is great, although since this isn’t a custom chip that shows in the efficiency department. Asus has been working on that in firmware updates, but Valve’s work with AMD making a custom chip has meant that even with half the cores, two generations older architecture and 33% fewer GPU compute units, the Steam Deck can often match the performance of the Ally at the lowest power mode.

Interestingly, the battery in both handhelds are the same size – around 40 Whrs. If you consider that the Ally uses 25W for its APU in the turbo performance mode, and has a 120Hz 500 nit display, you’d expect the battery life to be worse. And you’d be right! In that battery life test I mentioned earlier, running GTA V at 50% screen brightness for the Ally and a comparable brightness 75% for the Steam Deck, at 25W for the APU the Ally lasted just 55 minutes before conking out thanks to drawing around 40 to 45 W from the battery. The Steam Deck was almost double that as it drew between 20 and 25W from the battery during the same test. Of course you can turn the Ally’s power mode down to match the 15W the Deck draws, but you can optimise the Deck plenty more too, and you’d be giving up a decent chunk of the performance you’re paying extra for – and not making use of the 120Hz display either.

Speaking of the display, that’s arguably one of the biggest improvements over the Steam Deck. It covers more like 95% of the sRGB spectrum instead of more like 68% on the Steam Deck, and offers 463 nits at full brightness in my testing, over the 400 or so on the Deck. Accuracy is good too with a DeltaE of just 1.3 – in fact the only downside is the response times, and even then it isn’t all that bad. The falling times were pretty slow averaging 10ms, although rising was pretty good at 3.8ms, for a combined average of 7ms. Considering the refresh rate window is 8.3ms at 120Hz, an average of 7ms isn’t too bad. The lack of overshoot means Asus could definitely drive the panel harder, and while it wouldn’t match an OLED, it would be smoother and more responsive.

Sticking with the hardware, we should talk about the controls since that’s the thing you spend the entire time touching and using. This is arguably the most subjective part, so it’s worth noting that I have reasonably large hands. That means the Steam Deck fits me perfectly, but the smaller Ally really doesn’t. It’s actively uncomfortable for me, especially on the back side as my pinkie and ring fingers have to use their tips to hold on, whereas on the Deck I can use my whole hand on the bulbous grips. The joysticks are my least favourite part of the Ally. They are weirdly light to move, and the concave soft-touch tips don’t feel right to me either. To top it all off, the ABXY buttons feel a bit cheap and I’ve had especially the A button mis-click or just not register a press more than once. It’s a nit-pick, but for this price I’d really expect a premium feel. While I’m here, I actively hate the RGB rings around the joystick. It’s distracting, and when you leave it charging or just on sleep they flash blue non-stop. It drove me crazy, especially since you don’t get a case to hide this thing in while not in use.

Something I am yet to see anyone else talk about is how bad the latency is on the controller inputs. I ran a bunch of tests comparing the Ally and the Steam Deck for input latency, and I found that the Ally took between 10 and 20 ms longer to respond to both joystick and button inputs. That’s a pretty big deal, as adding 20ms of delay to an input majorly changes your gaming experience. I’m normally pretty good at Rocket League, and on the Steam Deck I can play just fine. On the Ally I can barely hit the ball. Seriously, it’s a completely different gaming experience. It’s not enjoyable to play that on the Ally. That’s a major deal breaker for any games that require any level of precise timing.

Now one thing that is objectively better is the cooling system – while it isn’t much quieter, it is much better at keeping the heat away from your hands especially while holding the controller grips. The APU never throttles even at the 30W TDP, so that’s definitely a good job from Asus.

“Repairable and Customisable*”

The Ally is remarkably easy to get into – it’s even easier than the Steam Deck. It’s 6 screws and a couple of really easy clips. That’s it. The M.2 SSD is equally easy to get at, with no protective covers to remove first or EMI shields in the way, although it is still a 2230 sized drive. Hell, even the battery is easier to remove as it just unscrews. I’m not sure why they left so much extra space empty on the battery – I assume for weight – but it would have been nice to have a 50 or 60Whr battery instead of the same 40WHr rating.

Another win is the joystick assembly – they are actually just screwed onto their PCBs so you just unscrew them and pop the ribbon cable off that that’s it, ready to replace. The only problem is that Asus doesn’t have an iFixit partnership, and I can’t find anywhere to buy replacement joysticks right now. I found one store claiming to be an “official partner”, but the site looked rather dodgy, and all the parts were on backorder anyway. By contrast, you can buy replacement hall effect joysticks for the Steam Deck on Amazon for £30, or buy the original ones from iFixit for £20 each. You can’t do that for the Ally.

In theory there are some hall effect joysticks you might be able to swap in for the Ally, but the third party modding community is much smaller so support is limited. You can buy replacement shells, custom buttons, joysticks, and I think someone is making an improved display for the Steam Deck. I can’t imagine Asus would be open enough to support that sort of third party kit.

“A Less Cohesive Experience”

Steam OS is a custom designed operating system Valve made for the Steam Deck to make it a well-rounded and complete gaming experience. They designed it to work perfectly on a handheld. You can’t say Windows was. Especially with the inclusion of the touch pads on the Steam Deck, it’s pretty rare that I reach for a keyboard. On the Ally I had a keyboard connected for the full setup process, and quite regularly to do little things like close windows, move windows to resize them to fit the screen, or just use a mouse cursor to click on something too small to hit with my fat fingers. That’s not a cohesive experience.

And there’s only so much that Asus can do with their software. Short of making a full game mode that launches as a fullscreen app, similar to the Steam Deck’s game mode, that can then incorporate a number of special UI features, I can’t imagine the Ally will ever be as well rounded of an experience as the Deck.

Yes you can play any game you want and never have to worry about Proton compatibility, and you’ll do so with more performance, but you have to put up with Windows being a fairly unfit OS for the job, the battery dying constantly, and an endless stream of “aarrrgghhhhh wwwwhhhyyyyyy” type frustrations. The Steam Deck has plenty of problems, it’s far from perfect for sure, but you can tell that Valve put a lot of though and work into making the Deck a well rounded experience. The Ally feels like Asus slapped some parts together and said “that’ll do”.

The controller latency is likely the biggest problem I have with the Ally, perhaps save for Windows being an awful mobile platform, and while I’m hopeful that Asus can address that with firmware updates, for the time being that’s a deal breaker for me.

“Pricing Itself Out”

The final point I want to touch on is the price tag. The ROG Ally is £700. That is £130 more than the highest trim of the Steam Deck, and for that you don’t even get a carrying case which would help protect the joysticks. I mean you could buy the 512GB Steam Deck, a decent sized MicroSD card, and a dock like this Sabrent one and still have a few quid to spare on some Great On Deck games for the same price. Sure, the Ally has more horsepower, less compatibility woes, and a better display, but that’s a hard sell when the actual gaming and usage experience is undoubtedly worse.

To reiterate my disclaimer at the start, if you like the ROG Ally – if you have one in particular or are dead set on picking one up – that’s fantastic. Please enjoy it! If you don’t find it uncomfortable and don’t mind putting up with Windows, that’s great. Personally there’s enough frustrations and things I find worse that I wouldn’t put my own money down for one, but I did for the Steam Deck. Of course those are all my thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours in the comments down below. I’d ask you to be respectful, but I’ve been on YouTube for over a decade and I know there will be plenty of vitriol regardless of what I say. Still, I’d love to hear your thoughts.