We have some new details about the ASUS ROG Ally, thanks to a new set of previews coming from games media who received preview units.
Tech-Critter has confirmed AnandTech’s previous reveal that the 16 GB SO-DIMM RAM has been soldered onto the Ally, so you won’t be able to replace it at all. This compromise was necessary to make the Ally that much smaller.
On the upside, it’s easy to remove the backplate, and access and replace the battery and NVMe SSD storage. However, ASUS says doing so will void the warranty.
This can be a touchy issue. Of course, there is an ongoing debate about right to repair, with regulators targeting Microsoft rival Apple.
We can guess why ASUS has decided to gatekeep the ROG Ally’s internals with a warranty sticker. Much like ASUS’ laptops, the company assembled particular parts that would guarantee a certain degree of performance, that they can’t guarantee otherwise.
Of course, these issues are also what Apple uses to justify their own gatekeeping. However, many third parties can and do independently reverse engineer these devices so that they can repaid these devices as well or better than the manufacturers themselves. Often they are cheaper too. We should also not disregard the odd end user who is good enough to do their own repairs too.
In this case, ASUS may be swayed to change their policies later. But it can be understood why they did all of this in the first place, since they want to make sure the launch of this product category goes well.
On the side, if they do free up replacement barriers, it’s great that batteries and NVMe SSDs are going to be replaceable.
Moving on, Pokde notes that the joysticks have their own daughterboards and are not tied to the Ally’s main motherboard. These joysticks are also not hall effect joysticks. These are all notable because it sounds like these joysticks can be replaced with hall effect joysticks, such as those sold by Gulikit for the Steam Deck, and Nintendo Switch.
For those who don’t know, hall effect joysticks use magnets to read joystick movements instead of mechanical parts. In theory, these hall effect joysticks will never drift, as current generation console controllers like Joy-Cons have become notorious for.
Finally, GamerBraves saw impressive performance from the ROG Ally for the most challenging of current generation games. It must be noted that GamerBraves did not seem to arrange for a proper performance test, checking several metrics like framerate and settings.
Still, GamerBraves also play games, so their first impressions may be corroborated later. It’s reasonbale to expect that they would know if a game looks like its closer to 60FPS than 30 FPS, even by eye.
They stated that they saw the Ally run Far Cry 6 and Cyberpunk 2077 “very smooth with no lag or stuttering on its mid-level graphics setting. Just by looking at it, both games definitely push 60FPS on average.”
Also impressively, they tried a demo of Street Fighter 6 and found that “the game was fast and responsive as a fighting game should be.” If true, this could be a gamechanger for esports on PC.
If the ROG Ally is an acceptable minimum standard for esports, it could be a standard adopted for game tournaments. From games like F1 2023 to Street Fighter 6 to Call of Duty, it could be truly radical if esports are not forced to choose between Xbox and PlayStation, and gamers all play on Ally units instead. Of course, that all depends on if these previews are corrobotated when the device releases to the public.
We got all these impressions from this Reddit, which also have some more details if you’re interested.
ASUS ROG Ally price and availability details will be revealed on May 11, 2023.
