What additional features from community projects should Valve make native to Steam/OS to make the overall experience even better? How do developers who pour hours and hours into these passion projects (like Kyle) feel when their idea/work is incorporated natively?
Honeslty, I have both the Steam deck and the Ally. I can honestly say that given that im used to Windows gaming everything works as intended with the Ally above and beyond my expectations. Could it be better with drivers? Sure. Otherwise I also think that the Steam Deck community/Valve is crushing it with squeezing everything out of the SD which im loving it as well.
About 70% of my steam games come from all you guys during these chit chats and I love it. Thank you for always providing me with endless entertainment❤️
I love my ally and thus far have had zero problems with it that weren’t self inflicted (messing with settings i didn’t fully understand so i did a cloud wipe/restore).
No update can fix the location of the sd card slot on the motherboard.Another monumental mistake made by the engineers and the designers.The videos on RUclips have been ripping this to shreds for six weeks straight.
My main issue with the ROG Ally is that it's NOT a mobile device in the sense that you can carry it with you like a Gameboy and get 3+ hours out of it. It's a "play it close to a plug" device - 18W is the best performance per watt by fair but if you go to say 10W, your device will barely use less power yet drop massively in performance. It doesn't scale anywhere near as well as the Steam Deck meaning you can't play low power games for hours on end. Even at the absolute lowest setting you will only get 2 hours out of it.
@@nomaschalupas2453 That's a bad analogy. The device was marketed as having multiple power modes - only one power mode makes sense. That's like buying a sports car and only being able to drive in 3rd gear.
Actually,you can...It's pretty well knowned that the Ally tends to overspend, and there is two solutions for that : - create a manual setting for the game you want to play. - you use x86 tuning utility. The Deck is still the best at low TDP as it's good at squeezing performances out of low power profiles but the Ally is no slouch at all anymore. And at the same time, playing recent demanding games at 720p60fps from medium to ultra settings is a thing on the Ally while the Deck struggles to handle 720p40fps at low/mid settings even at 15 watts tdp(Control, Cyberpunk, Re4 Remake, SF6 World Tour, etc.)
@@redavatar sports cars have multiple modes too bro. They still don’t get the same gas mileage as a Camry, close but no. You act like the deck is running 6 hours when running demanding games. You got a extra 20 mins over me, so what? We have plugs everywhere available to us. Every store or place you travel will have outlets for charging nowadays. Also my analogy was perfect. Your reply was perfect too, similar to the camry guys replies at carshows. Also that extra 20 mins you have, I can recharge past 50% already while you gotta wait a few hours or stay plugged.
@@nomaschalupas2453it's definitely more than 20mins... 😂 I've seen about an hour difference, for elden ring alone, I can play it at 7-8 Watts for about 3.5hrs 💀 runs flawless at a locked 30fps, already completed 2 playthroughs on deck.
So, I'm a 37 yr old military dad, love gaming. I have a series x (barely play it), ps5 my goto for the couch, and a very nice pc with a 4070 ti, and now the ally. I love it, I think it's great and I haven't had any issues and it's awesome for road trips, deployments and TDYs.
The small issues I had were easily sorted out or fixed by updates. I think peoples expectations are not realistic. It is a first generation product and will have a few hiccups along the way. I knew this going in and new it would require a little patience at times.
After getting my ally on Saturday. Played many many games, awesome performance but end up returning it today. I’m probably going to wait for gen 2 till they iron out any kinks in the first gen.
Using both the Ally and the Steam Deck has been really interesting and now all I want is some funky amalgamation of the Ally’s hardware and screen and the Steam Deck’s form factor and buttons. Till then I’m keeping both devices.
Yep same here, give us a Valve based version of the APU with Valves support and Steam OS, with the Steamdeck button layout and touchpads, just add the Ally dual fans, and Screen, and fast charge. Battery issue is a non issue with people bringing it down to 15watts with Valves ability to optimize the APU to their liking but having an unlocked wattage to 35+ when plugged in is a must have option. I do reckon MOST users of handhelds ill have access to either a 5amp USB, a power socket or battery pack. So the boost in necessary.
Haven't bought the ROG Ally yet because: 1. Spending $700+ plus on a game console means reading as many reviews as possible. 2. As much as I love the possibility of playing titles from GTA IV to Forspoken in my hands, I'm hearing that the Ally doesn't do everything the best. 3. I'm reading about ASUS releasing an update to prevent "SD card frying". Imagine, spending $60 for a 1TB SD card to find that it no longer works or possibly melts inside the ROG Ally SD card slot due to heat? I also would like the ROG Ally to at least come in black. I'll know whether I want this thing by Christmas.
I agree. My plan is to hold onto my steam deck. Wait for the ally’s software to mature. Wait even longer to see if the other 7840u handhelds are worth the money. By this winter I think we will know if the ally is worth picking up. Might go on sale too.
I don't get the logic of you guys 😅 ssd is ssd . You upgraded to 2 tb . Yes But sd card is sd card. They are two different things . And because of the sd card have issues . Now I am losing potential 1 TB extra storage on the sd . But some of you guys just would like to ignore the issue like it didn't exist. For me I can't do that . Not getting another one until I see a new revision that fix the hardware issue 😅
I did have the micro sd card popping out of the ROG Ally once. I had the machine on while I was waiting in line to get into my company's summer BBQ. I put the Ally in my tomtoc bag while putting it to sleep and pulled the Ally out a few minutes later to see my SD card had popped out. It was one of the hottest days of the year so far, but the machine itself didn't seem to have overheated, nor did I have any issues with the SD card, but it's possible that it was because my 1TB SD card is reserved purely for emulation and loading up a 128kb rom isn't likely to stress out an SD card like running a large game from Steam will. I've been using the card with a dock afterwards with no issues yet.
I would love to be on a podcast like this, I love the comments, the different takes and It feels like this could grow into something great! I like that I get everyone and don't see eye to eye at the same time haha. You guys are awesome!
@@NerdNest thank you 🙏🏼 I was just so frustrated with the bugginess and the sd card issue. I’m monitoring the issue closely and can’t wait to jump back in.
I returned mine yesterday. I have the Steam deck and the Ally but it think my biggest problem with the Ally was the windows operating system. I only download Steam on the Ally and it constantly kept downloading Driver updates. The last straw was when it went through an update my games were skipping and not going beyond 20 FPS. I kept turning it on and off them i decide to do a factory reset and start again and the Ally worked great but I was thinking that if I only had this thing for 10 days and i already had to do a factory rest on it how many times I would have to go through this while I own this product.
Judging from your post, I agree that this device definitely isn’t made for you. I mean that without any crassness - I just really think the Steam Deck helpfully dumbed the configuration (or need for much of it at all) for the PC curious and beyond, and thats a good thing. For the rest of us, running smoothly and solving our own problems on the Ally. The reward imo is SO worth it.
I just ran that Cyberpunk Benchmark. 1080p - Medium Setting Presets - FSR Auto - Averaged 44 fps. Way better than I was expecting. I wonder why there is so much variation. The only tweaks I made was turning off the memory integrity & core isolation. Note: I'm on my third unit. Not using the SD Card.
I returned mine. Buggy and gyro is not officially supported (handheld companion is cool but will take time to get better). I'm happy with steam deck :)
@@JOSHUALEVII no one said it doesn't have, it's not officially enabled and you need to install 3rd party drivers in order to activate it and doesn't work well as Steamdeck because of windows X input translation gimmicks
Apparently there wasnt enough devices for pre orders in Australia, so im stuck waiting for the next batch to ship. Hopefully it'll be refreshed by asus to address the sd issue or maybe even a hardware/QOL upgrade.
@matt-yh4ho Exactly. I also checked on their site and it had the green tick for availability. Hopefully we get a revised version that fixes all the thing ppl are complaining about, like bad sd reader and wobbly/sticky buttons.
@@matt-yh4ho Just an update, I just got the notification from JB that mine has shipped from their Melbourne warehouse so they definitely just got a fresh batch from ASUS. I'll apparently be receiving it tomorrow as I paid for express shipping. Hopefully you get yours too.
@@Infinite_Ouroboros thanks appreciate it, just got an update aswell mine said monday also got express shipping but complained and got my 10 bucks back lol
I updated to 322 and the armory crate se update dropped and I'm hitting 39fps now. I ran it before the update this morning and it's was hitting 36ish fps. I noticed when it boosts at the beginning of changing to turbo I do hit that elevated 41fps, but clearly these are boosted initial test results. I'm keeping mine, but it's mostly because I need 2 handhelds, one for me, one for my wife, and the windows tools it has seem more intuitive then the windows tools I've used on the Deck.
Im wondering if the SD card failure is possibly user error. I mean this in coming from the steam deck, you can pop them in and out alot easier. I have had it often where I go to eject my sd cards and they are still writing. If people are ripping their cards out without ejecting (because thats basically how you can do it on the deck) then that could cause the corruption people are seeing. Just a theory not a fact. I havent had any issues with my ally yet. 🤷♂️ hopefully it stays that way
In the uk and had my ally since release day and had no issues with my sandisk 1tb micro sd card & its been in there from day 1 !!! Done all updates and no problems
Update on my Rog ally it now has the sd card fault !! Removed the 1TB before the ally fry’s it,this should have been tested properly before they released this handheld to the public and future software updates are not going to fix this hardware fault ! These should all be recalled
Overall, as someone who opted to not change from the Deck to the Ally, I do feel the product was rushed to market. They saw the market open up thanks to Deck, and wanted to leap in. And if they’d spent more time with R&D, with a test sample, etc… this wouldn’t be happening. So for this generation specifically, the Deck is currently the safer option. And as for comparisons of product, I feel the discussion of similarity between 15W modes speaks volumes, and that using 25W makes the battery option surely obsolete and becomes a plugged in laptop of sorts.
I love what Valve and the SD has done for Linux gaming as a whole. Linux gaming was up and coming before the SD but support has exploded since the deck and even though I don't own an SD and actually own an Ally, I'm thankful because my desktop is on Linux.
Just finished filling out a 1tb card over the weekend and it stopped working, of course. Here's an interesting data point on that, though: This is a brand new, high end, 1tb Sandisk card. Just copied files to it and read from it occasionally, so not ran hard at all. The ally SD card reader will not see it's contents AT ALL, but will read other cards just fine. Also, if I put the cooked card in another laptop, it will see the contents as if it's fine, BUT, if I try to copy large amounts of data the SD card is definitely broken. It will copy some data, then slow down to 0kbs for a while, then copy a little more, then eventually the copy will fail. Once it fails, it will continue to fail after a few seconds of data copying over and over until I give it a long break. This is a card that worked fine for like 2 weeks, and all it's done is sit in the ally it's entire life.
It's funny you're bringing up double dragon. Just 3 days ago I was told to go up to the roof of the 21st floor because theirs a thief running around. I pulled out my butterfly knife and my boss handed me a loggers chain with a key on it and said good luck. I kept thinking clown world just entered double dragon territory.
@@chadsmith7075 Nintendo is still selling more Switches than all PC handhelds combined. It's a lot more likely you can't accept some people are having issues with the Ally.
I think it's a quality control issue. I was very excited for the Ally and had nonstop issues and eventually returned mine. But it sounds like alot of people are not having the issues I was having.
@@Chilltechvibes It'd be par for the course for ASUS. The ROG Strix Advantage Edition and the Flow X13 lineups were both plagued with QC issues early on, and it eventually being ironed out. Similar to the Ally, those that didn't have issues did try to downplay the issues, either not understanding that when it comes to QC issues not every machine will have problems and they got lucky, or deliberately ignoring the issues outright due to fanboyism, or to convince themselves that they didn't buy a lemon. But with the Ally, Windows is also a major source of contention. The OS just sucks on handhelds in general, with 11 being particularly finicky, and there being damn near a lottery on whether someone will have issues or not with it.
I’m at a point in my life that I’ve wanted to play my backlog of old school rpgs like ff6 and star ocean second story. I decided the only way I’ll get through them is using cheats. Just cheat your way through battles with one shot kill cheats. Then when you get to a boss turn the cheats off. I still get a sense of achievement while not spending 3x as long to get through the game.
Keeping mine, it’s been a great gaming device and mediocre windows experience. Windows experience has been on par with my Microsoft Surface devices…sometimes brilliant other times not responsive or bugging out completely. I’ve had to really only restart the device once though, other than that task manager closing the troubled program and relaunching it has fixed everything.
My Ally rocks, but cap it at 25W. Always my plan on such a small device. Plays PC and emulation better than my Deck (especially PS3), but still prefer the Deck for when using on battery.
Love the podcast and no hate, but i really think you guys should end with what videos you guys have out now and what’s coming up in your channels. It feels weird to start an hour long podcast with, “here some stuff you can guys can watch instead”. Also I cant remember what videos y’all mention by the time the podcast is over. Can’t imagine that helps the algorithm for this podcast or those videos y’all mention.
@@NerdNestit's cool how it is. To me, what someone is working on is like a greeting. "Hey, how you been? What you been working on?" You wouldn't ask that at the end of a conversation. It's an intro that you have to get out of the way. Most of us watch all of these guys so we know what they are all putting out. The show is like an all star game. We know what teams they play for, but right now, they're playing together so they're focused on the all star game that they're playing. How you're doing it makes sense.
The main issues for me have been heating management, i dont know if its either just current tech limitations or their design but the device can get very hot on turbo ~90-95C. Fan speeds havent made much of a difference for me. Aside from the performance mode is great but limitations obviously on what games you can play
Asus has a bad habit of defaulting processors in their devices to aggressive boost, which keeps it up in those temps frequently, even idle sometimes. "Filterless" on youtube has a video about how to disable this. You will go from 3.8ghz to more like 3.3ghz ceiling on your cpu but it actually just frees up a bit more performance for the GPU side of things. Also keeps temps lower and they actually vary based on load like they should.
@ovrczbeats4372 good to know! Yea I really dont know too much about the more involved PC stuff so its good to have some resources that can help better manage these issues. Thanks!
Russ, if Nintendo went so far to include the Switch cartridge slot in the new console why wouldn't they just include backwards compatibility with physical games? Why go so far only to stop right before the finish line? Seems like a really odd thing to do. Also, just including backwards compatibility for _all_ Switch games would be the vastly superior pro-consumer move. The way I see it, Nintendo will likely do with their next console what they did with the Wii and DS. Include compatibility with their previous gen console but strip it away in future iterations. For instance the original Wii had GameCube compatibility and the DS had Gameboy compatibility.
Absolutely. Nintendo bent over backwards for compatibility across multiple generations, going as far as adding additional cartridge slots and even additional SoCs with prior gen processors like they did on the DS for GB/GBA and Wii U for Wii. Nintendo staying on ARM would be even less of an issue than what happened with DS to 3DS since that had to boot into a compatibility mode, and even that managed it with compatible cartridge slots. With a next-gen Switch it would be more comparable to how it works on PCs, x86 consoles, or ARM based phones/tablets. Whoever on the podcast said that the next-gen Switch would have to add additional hardware for Switch compatibility is genuinely ignorant. How does he think compatibility works on x86 PCs/consoles or iPhones? All the next console would need is a pin compatible cartridge slot like the 3DS had and the ARM foundation would take care of the rest.
Returned my ROG Ally today...The steam deck is just better at battery life. For me, this is more important in my life currently. Diver Dave gets 4 hours on SD.
"There is no logical reason to believe that Nintendo will have backwards compatibility". What is this based on? There is no logic in this argument. Most Nintendo systems have gone out of their way to have BC, going so far as to add additional cartridge slots or additional chips for hardware emulation (DS had a GBA/GB chip as well as cartridge slot, the Wii U had a dedicated Wii chip, etc). The 3DS used higher capacity cartridges but the slot was still compatible with DS games. The reason why the Switch didn't have BC is because it moved from PowerPC to ARM while the media went from optical discs to solid state. Wii U to Switch was a bigger compatibility break than the move from the PS3 to PS4. Its really obvious that Nintendo would maintain BC now that an ARM processor with solid state storage is the platform, just like x86 is the norm for Xbox and Playstation. "They would probably need another Android chip in there for emulation" Is this how you believe iPhones and Android phones work with newer chips? Do you believe this is how it works with x86? Really? I thought this was supposed to be a tech channel.
Chrono Trigger is much easier to get into than FF6. It's a lot shorter, like 25 hours instead of 35+, no random battles, you never need to grind either. Might be worth pushing an hour or two further into it. Still not for everyone of course.
Why do so many people early adept stuff when they know they dont like it.. my deck was a mess in the beginning and i knew it would be.. look at it now.. its amazing! Give it some time
I am just (today) ordered the lowest VSD (64GB), because I don’t need a color case an for screen there are many alternative solution. And a 512GB costs me just 50EUR or 1TB 120EUR … I am from Germany and I like your channel and videos (okay okay Russ’s more ^^) …
I hope they keep the Joycons tbh, I love putting my switch down on the the bed undocking the joycons and laying down, its genuinely the most comfortable way for me to play 🙏
I have completed chrono trigger… BUT I was only ever able to finish it on the DS using a flash cart and using game cheats to modestly up the xp multiplier rate and getting boosts in money and etc.. if anyone would want to give chrono trigger another go, I would suggest playing it on a flash cart on the DSI XL and giving yourself just enough XFP multiplying and money to make the grinding easy. But don’t go crazy and over max your multipliers….
The Ayaneo S2.This is definitely the one to get.But what I want you guys to talk about the customer service after spending $1,500.The company is on the other side of the world.The internet says they are very “spotty” when it comes to customer service.Guys,nothing is perfect,but this is the best on the market right now.Another topic is Ayaneo putting out too much product.Thanks guys.I am new to all of this.
Returning something after buying it isn’t really something we do in Australia. Unless it’s got a fault. It seems strange seeing people just talk about using something for months and then returning it. It seems so hurtful to business.
@NerdNest he's talking about we spent months in preparation for this device because the ROG ally was announced back in April so technically, yes, it has been months even though it's only been released for a few weeks.
Since the 322 Bios update, I'm getting the best performance since launch day on Cyberpunk -- 51.50 FPS 1080p, HIGH textures, QUALITY FSR (best fidelity), low for the rest (plugged turbo). And 68fps 1080p LOW textures, Ultra Performance FSR, low rest (plugged turbo) My device is bone stock, no tinkering or CPU boost removal or any non-stock apps. Try it out! Also running AEW Fight Forever maxed out ultra settings 15w 1080p buttery smooth over 60fps+ This is by far the most stable and consistent it's run since launch. It's only a couple weeks old! ROG Ally is absolutely incredible for what you get for $699. Highly recommend
I haven't had sd card issues with the ally so I'm not returning it. The steam deck had issues at launch so I think it's unfair to shit on Asus at this time but they should be more transparent with us telling us things
Well.... to be fair, steam decks issues were never hardware, like the ally's, which is huge, they would have to do a recall to fix this (they definitely wont do that 😂), that's a big deal man no matter how you look at it... can't defend everything man, no matter how much you like the device.
You can still play together on PS5. Everything I buy my brother can play, we're playing FFXVI at the same time and use to play Elden Ring together. We live in different countries as well, both using PS5s. Still double value, big stonks.
The Bard’s Tale on the C-64. I had dozens of pages of graph paper where I mapped out all three versions of the game. The game got better and better with each version. 30 years later, I still remember the music from the last fight of The Bard’s Tale 3: Destiny Knight.
I ended up returning my Ally. I just couldn’t justify the device and price with the current issues it’s having. Hopefully the SD card issue isn’t hardware related. I decided to capitalize on the Summer Sale and order a Steam Deck 😎
@@Futura2500 Key difference between the Deck and the Ally was that the Deck's software was botching the format, both the card and the reader were still usable. Whereas the Ally overheating the SD card reader can leave the card, the reader, or both truly unusable from damage due to that overheating.
@@Futura2500 The keyword here to note is "HAD". We live in the current time so let's compare the Deck now vs the Ally now. If Ally improves a year for now then great I'll buy one.
I haven't had the SD card issue with mine. I am coming up on the end of my return window, so I have been running Deathloop and Death Stranding from my SD Card trying to make it fail if it's going to, and so far, I haven't had it happen. People say if it hasn't happened yet, it will. The Facebook community chats seem pretty jaded because you mostly hear from the people who are having problems....so the optics are that everyone is having the problems.
My two most played games on Steam Deck recently have been: Puppet Master: The Game. (Free to play Early Access) Single/Multiplayer game. Play as the human and try to steal Toulon's secrets, or play as the puppets and try to stop them! It's really fun. Halls of Torment. It's a swarm survival that has a similar look to Diablo. Another great cast, thanks everyone.
I know I’m late but you guys answer your own problem with the rog ally sd card lol, the ally works perfect with 512gb sd card but can not handle the speed of a 1tb sd card unless you use a 1tb from micro center works because read and write is slower then a sandisk 1tb.
The question should be why would I ? Unless you have a hardware defect that detracts from your experience or Windows on a hand held is not good for what you want for gaming then go for it. For me I haven’t had any hardware or software related issues that detract from my experience so loving it. I had more issues with My Xbox 360 and OG Xbox One than my Ally.
As far as AMD drivers go, AMD does say on its sight OEM drivers with vender specific features are only available from the manufacturer. So Ally drives are on the Asus support sight, including Adrenaline.
Shell swapping can be a pain I remember when I did my Nintendo switch (launch model) i said screw it on the front plate and just did the back, but in that case the switch has alot less real estate space on the front because of the joy cons so it really didnt feel like it would make a deference.
@@skycloud4802 nice, what one did you get and how you finding it, I have a series X but I’m bored off that and switch is starting to get dry after Zelda
@@joshholland9020 I got the cheapest storage one, then upgraded to a 2TB SSD using the ifixit guide (still leaves room for a SD card expansion). It runs most of my Steam library so I didn't even need to buy many games at first, as it helped tackle my backlog. Then I installed EmuDeck and imported all my retro roms like PS2, PS1, Gameboy and so on... Eventually I got a dock (essential for setting up emulators unless you are using a Bluetooth mouse + keyboard). Although I play almost exclusively in handheld mode. At the moment it's a beast of a device for me due to its sheer versatility. I even dabbled in software like Space Engine and music creation/video studio software on the Steam Deck. And proprietary devices seem to...just work weirdly enough. It's a little crazy what it can do. I have not attempted hooking up a steering wheel and peddle setup, but I'll have to try it at some point. The fan can be a little roary on games that require high graphics performance, so I do drop the settings down quite a bit. I surprised myself by playing more of the older games and indie titles more than the AAA games. So 2D sidescrollers or games that are older than ten years.
@@skycloud4802 sounds like you are enjoying it mate 👍🏻 I am in no way tech savvy so would be a pain to try and upgrade SSD for me lol. But would definitely like to look at emulation to play old god of war type games. Didn’t know you needed the dock to run emulation though. I’ve seen a few fans that you can attach to it that look good. Just hard to find that money nowadays with mortgage and kid, to throw at it for casual gaming
@@joshholland9020 you don't need the dock but it's just much easier to set emulators up first time. If you already have a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard then the dock isn't needed. You could even use the Steam Deck inbuilt touch pad as a mouse, and the pop in touch keyboard. But keyboard and mouse makes everything smoother and easier (plus useful for some pc games).
I can confirm that PS5 and XBOX Series both have the ability to game share where you sign in on a friends console, and make it your home console and both people have access to the games. You can both play at the same time, together or separate with no problems just like on the PS4.
Got mine 3 days ago as a complete noob to PC gaming. Frustrating setup no doubt, but I’m playing CyberPunk and it looks and plays great to me! Please note I’m a screen snob so I had to figure out a playable way on 1080p. Amazed by my experience so far!
I’m completely new to pc gaming I thought the ROG Ally was just what I wanted to play some PC games that will take years or never go to console. I am a bit concerned with some of the issues. Though, had the steam deck gone to Best Buy for some trade ins towards it. I would have gotten that especially with the sale today mainly because of the parallel analog sticks as a PlayStation first player. On paper to have steam, PS+ Game Pass & emulators to run on Windows seemed like a dream, but I hope isn’t a $700 nightmare. Did you happen to have any suggestions for the set up after your experience after your not so friendly experience? Thanks for the feedback.
@@Mitchropolitan it takes probably 2 hours (including downloading 3 big AAA titles but I didn’t encounter any errors. If you think about it, it’s not like consoles don’t need a similar amount of software updates etc out of the box so don’t read into setup Beijing anything too crazy. If you’re like me and can’t stand looking at a horrible screen, the Ally is the only choice. Side by side this thing annihilates the Steam Deck.
Returned it before the 14 Day was up at Best Buy. Buyers should not have to deal with fan curves, sd card reader frying your microSD cards and game freezes and general Windows 11 headaches. I understand it's a small handheld Windows PC but when I bought my Asus ROG M16 laptop in 2022, there were no issues when updating BIOS, Armoury Crate or it's Window OS. Asus stepped up to the plate tried to hit a homerun but instead gave us a foul ball. Users should NOT have to deal with such issues when their engineers should've done more testing and software debugging before prematurely releasing this to market. It's a wonderful little gaming device with its display and sound, but I'll come back next year when Ally Version 2 or Alienware or Razer comes out with their own system, heck maybe Valve will surprise us with an OLED Steam Deck 2.0.
i dont want to get rid of mine but if best buy cant fix my left joystick that i barely used i will be returning it sadly. the left joystick only goes up and down and i barely have used it.
I love the ally no issues but I’m not updating to the new bios and will consider selling it if they keep those ridiculous fan curves required for manual mode it should have been for auto modes only
New bios is good in my experience. They just released a new one on July 4th. It’s 3.22 if I remember correctly don’t quote me on that. I saw a performance increase and I think they tweaked the fan curves to keep it cooler probably in response to the sd card overheating stuff.
No SD card problem here (which is where I play all my games from). I don’t have Cyberpunk to test unfortunately. Right now I have been enjoying modding Mass Effect Legendary Edition. I just finish ME1 and getting a fairly stable 60 at 15watt. I can realistically switch to silent without noticing much. Pretty great. I just wish modding were simpler (not that’s it’s too bad right now.)
When Asus does the test at 1080p with FSR, what's the point of the FSR? Or do they mean the Ally is at 1080p but the game is running at a lower res? Or am I just mixing things up here.
Yes. fsr upscale the image from a lower resolution. It often looks better to use dlss and fsr than simply upscaling the image. The setting from performance to quality demands how much the image is being upscaled. With fsr and dlss you are not running a game at full resolution of 1080p. When you running a game or movie at a different resolution than the native resolution of the display the image becomes "muddy" looking. fsr and dlss purpose is to bring back into the image some sharpness.
Im not sure what happened with my sd card. It no longer works in my Ally no matter what i try but re-formats and works in other devices. It's just that sd card, all other sd cards work in the Ally and I'm now controlling the temp with custom profile not letting it get above 75° and the other sd card has been working fine. I really don't want to send this unit back because all the buttons and everything work great. We'll see what happens. All in all I'm loving this device not sending it back... YET
Running a custom fan/tdp profile for plugged and unplugged. Did a windows debloat too and I’ve never owned any kind of pc gaming device before. Running Cyber punk at 720p on high and FSR to Performance. Got 53fps unplugged and 59 plugged. I have one more week before my return window closes with Best Buy so I’m not hoping for problems as I like the Ally allot but if I do hopefully it’s in the next 7 days
I know it's easy to dunk on the rog ally at this point, it just came out and it's going to have issues. I wasn't actively watching the launch of the Steam Deck and didn't really consider getting one until I learned enough about it to know it would fit most of my wants and needs for gaming, so I'm not really aware of any of the day one launch issues it might have had. That said, it seems like they didn't consider possible hardware issues like overheating with the ally, there's also the issue that except for one or two past exceptions (maybe?) windows comes as is with every install, meaning it's not built for a handheld. windows is a notorious resource hog, which is often why you need to max out hardware just to run games properly. So even if asus takes the issues seriously, I doubt microsoft will do anything to optimize win 11 for it. And unlike Valve, neither asus or microsoft have long term consideration for gaming in mind. The xbox ceo basically stated as much with the xbox 🤣 This just seems like an attempted cash grab by both companies, and I doubt the longevity of the rog ally. Before I got my Steam Deck, I was looking to see if there were any good handheld options for what I wanted, finding a youtube channel were someone reviews such units. They ultimately said that if they had to choose just one of all the handhelds they had used all year, the Steam Deck was it. They have reviewed the ally also and given their praises for it, but it still does not sound like a long-term viable option, given microsoft's and asus's histories.
Thanks guys, awesome podcast, I agree that playing dungeons and dragons in a comic book store is on the wrong side of the too nerdy line. Also, just wanted to say that my Ally has been 100% awesome since launch. Playing it every day. I did install a 2TB on day one and haven't used an SD card. My Ally is 100% stock settings, windows bloat and all, fully updated, and I usually play on turbo and mostly plugged in. I got around 43FPS with Asus settings (1080p, medium, FSR Auto, turbo, unplugged, on BIOS 319) in that Cyberpunk test, so not sure what is happening with other people.
I did the same test medium cyberpunk 1080p etc nothing else running no special settings changed, on turbo, my test showed 41fps 3 times, i'm either lucky as hell or you guys are unlucky on your rigs.
I’ve had mine for about a week and am about to return it unless I discover some magic fix or setting that Will fix the Bluetooth issue. I can’t get it to pair with Xbox controllers. Tried 3 it paired with one, but the controller won’t work with all, except one, games. I spent 4 hours yesterday futzing with this thing and am beyond frustrated/disappointed.
![Kodak Black - Sharp Vibes [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/oEV0OoLJeIs/mqdefault.jpg)
What are some topics you want us to cover next week? Let us know in the comments!
How about what each of your current favorite consoles are? I know you aren’t all steam deck obsessed lol
What are three games that really touched your heart in a personal way, and why? Thanks Bill.
The problem with steam games that are verified for the Deck but don't run on the Steam Deck... Like Ark.
What additional features from community projects should Valve make native to Steam/OS to make the overall experience even better? How do developers who pour hours and hours into these passion projects (like Kyle) feel when their idea/work is incorporated natively?
Talk about the more interesting handhelds being released:
ANBERNIC Win701
Trimui Smart Pro
Trimui Smart Brick
PowKiddy X55
Trimui Model M?
Honeslty, I have both the Steam deck and the Ally. I can honestly say that given that im used to Windows gaming everything works as intended with the Ally above and beyond my expectations. Could it be better with drivers? Sure. Otherwise I also think that the Steam Deck community/Valve is crushing it with squeezing everything out of the SD which im loving it as well.
About 70% of my steam games come from all you guys during these chit chats and I love it. Thank you for always providing me with endless entertainment❤️
I love my ally and thus far have had zero problems with it that weren’t self inflicted (messing with settings i didn’t fully understand so i did a cloud wipe/restore).
I'm not returning mine
Hi not returning mine
I'm dad
@@mechanicalmonk2020 hi I'm Dad. I'm a robot 🤡
Same.
No update can fix the location of the sd card slot on the motherboard.Another monumental mistake made by the engineers and the designers.The videos on RUclips have been ripping this to shreds for six weeks straight.
@@uclapac10 do you own one?
My main issue with the ROG Ally is that it's NOT a mobile device in the sense that you can carry it with you like a Gameboy and get 3+ hours out of it. It's a "play it close to a plug" device - 18W is the best performance per watt by fair but if you go to say 10W, your device will barely use less power yet drop massively in performance. It doesn't scale anywhere near as well as the Steam Deck meaning you can't play low power games for hours on end. Even at the absolute lowest setting you will only get 2 hours out of it.
People think they can buy a sports car and still get the best mileage…..when will people learn, you can’t have it all..
@@nomaschalupas2453 That's a bad analogy. The device was marketed as having multiple power modes - only one power mode makes sense. That's like buying a sports car and only being able to drive in 3rd gear.
Actually,you can...It's pretty well knowned that the Ally tends to overspend, and there is two solutions for that :
- create a manual setting for the game you want to play.
- you use x86 tuning utility.
The Deck is still the best at low TDP as it's good at squeezing performances out of low power profiles but the Ally is no slouch at all anymore.
And at the same time, playing recent demanding games at 720p60fps from medium to ultra settings is a thing on the Ally while the Deck struggles to handle 720p40fps at low/mid settings even at 15 watts tdp(Control, Cyberpunk, Re4 Remake, SF6 World Tour, etc.)
@@redavatar sports cars have multiple modes too bro. They still don’t get the same gas mileage as a Camry, close but no. You act like the deck is running 6 hours when running demanding games. You got a extra 20 mins over me, so what? We have plugs everywhere available to us. Every store or place you travel will have outlets for charging nowadays.
Also my analogy was perfect. Your reply was perfect too, similar to the camry guys replies at carshows.
Also that extra 20 mins you have, I can recharge past 50% already while you gotta wait a few hours or stay plugged.
@@nomaschalupas2453it's definitely more than 20mins... 😂 I've seen about an hour difference, for elden ring alone, I can play it at 7-8 Watts for about 3.5hrs 💀 runs flawless at a locked 30fps, already completed 2 playthroughs on deck.
So, I'm a 37 yr old military dad, love gaming. I have a series x (barely play it), ps5 my goto for the couch, and a very nice pc with a 4070 ti, and now the ally. I love it, I think it's great and I haven't had any issues and it's awesome for road trips, deployments and TDYs.
The small issues I had were easily sorted out or fixed by updates. I think peoples expectations are not realistic. It is a first generation product and will have a few hiccups along the way. I knew this going in and new it would require a little patience at times.
After getting my ally on Saturday. Played many many games, awesome performance but end up returning it today. I’m probably going to wait for gen 2 till they iron out any kinks in the first gen.
same!
Same. I returned mine after it destroyed my sd card
Using both the Ally and the Steam Deck has been really interesting and now all I want is some funky amalgamation of the Ally’s hardware and screen and the Steam Deck’s form factor and buttons. Till then I’m keeping both devices.
Yep same here, give us a Valve based version of the APU with Valves support and Steam OS, with the Steamdeck button layout and touchpads, just add the Ally dual fans, and Screen, and fast charge.
Battery issue is a non issue with people bringing it down to 15watts with Valves ability to optimize the APU to their liking but having an unlocked wattage to 35+ when plugged in is a must have option.
I do reckon MOST users of handhelds ill have access to either a 5amp USB, a power socket or battery pack. So the boost in necessary.
@@scenenuf give it 5 years, it takes a while to make a custom chip.
I’m keeping mine, i have a Steam Deck but i really love the Rog Ally .
Haven't bought the ROG Ally yet because:
1. Spending $700+ plus on a game console means reading as many reviews as possible.
2. As much as I love the possibility of playing titles from GTA IV to Forspoken in my hands, I'm hearing that the Ally doesn't do everything the best.
3. I'm reading about ASUS releasing an update to prevent "SD card frying". Imagine, spending $60 for a 1TB SD card to find that it no longer works or possibly melts inside the ROG Ally SD card slot due to heat?
I also would like the ROG Ally to at least come in black.
I'll know whether I want this thing by Christmas.
I agree. My plan is to hold onto my steam deck. Wait for the ally’s software to mature. Wait even longer to see if the other 7840u handhelds are worth the money. By this winter I think we will know if the ally is worth picking up. Might go on sale too.
Not returning mine, love this thing. I have the SD card reader problem, but I upgraded my SSD to 2tb. So the SD problem isn’t deterring me.
I don't get the logic of you guys 😅 ssd is ssd . You upgraded to 2 tb . Yes
But sd card is sd card. They are two different things . And because of the sd card have issues . Now I am losing potential 1 TB extra storage on the sd . But some of you guys just would like to ignore the issue like it didn't exist. For me I can't do that . Not getting another one until I see a new revision that fix the hardware issue 😅
I did have the micro sd card popping out of the ROG Ally once. I had the machine on while I was waiting in line to get into my company's summer BBQ. I put the Ally in my tomtoc bag while putting it to sleep and pulled the Ally out a few minutes later to see my SD card had popped out. It was one of the hottest days of the year so far, but the machine itself didn't seem to have overheated, nor did I have any issues with the SD card, but it's possible that it was because my 1TB SD card is reserved purely for emulation and loading up a 128kb rom isn't likely to stress out an SD card like running a large game from Steam will. I've been using the card with a dock afterwards with no issues yet.
I would love to be on a podcast like this, I love the comments, the different takes and It feels like this could grow into something great! I like that I get everyone and don't see eye to eye at the same time haha. You guys are awesome!
I returned. But waiting to rebuy when the bios are updated.
Not a bad plan, let us beta-test for you.
@@NerdNest thank you 🙏🏼 I was just so frustrated with the bugginess and the sd card issue. I’m monitoring the issue closely and can’t wait to jump back in.
I returned mine yesterday. I have the Steam deck and the Ally but it think my biggest problem with the Ally was the windows operating system. I only download Steam on the Ally and it constantly kept downloading Driver updates. The last straw was when it went through an update my games were skipping and not going beyond 20 FPS. I kept turning it on and off them i decide to do a factory reset and start again and the Ally worked great but I was thinking that if I only had this thing for 10 days and i already had to do a factory rest on it how many times I would have to go through this while I own this product.
Judging from your post, I agree that this device definitely isn’t made for you. I mean that without any crassness - I just really think the Steam Deck helpfully dumbed the configuration (or need for much of it at all) for the PC curious and beyond, and thats a good thing. For the rest of us, running smoothly and solving our own problems on the Ally. The reward imo is SO worth it.
You CRAZY the ROG ally is absolutely amazing 🎉
I just ran that Cyberpunk Benchmark. 1080p - Medium Setting Presets - FSR Auto - Averaged 44 fps. Way better than I was expecting. I wonder why there is so much variation. The only tweaks I made was turning off the memory integrity & core isolation. Note: I'm on my third unit. Not using the SD Card.
8:22 I literally have been saying the same thing. I have been trying to wrap up Zelda to get back to my Steam Deck.
I am very happy with this Device. It fits perfectly next to my Ps5 and Switch. Its my Device for Gamepass, geforce now and Pc Stuff.
I returned mine. Buggy and gyro is not officially supported (handheld companion is cool but will take time to get better). I'm happy with steam deck :)
It drives me CRAZY that it doesn't have gyro support.
.. the rog has gyro support....
I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to use it, it should just work out of the box.
It has Gyro but it seems Asus is clueless in terms of getting it activated
@@JOSHUALEVII no one said it doesn't have, it's not officially enabled and you need to install 3rd party drivers in order to activate it and doesn't work well as Steamdeck because of windows X input translation gimmicks
Bill just heard your podcast this morning. Thanks for making it a little longer I thought it was perfect!! Your the best man keep up the good work.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Apparently there wasnt enough devices for pre orders in Australia, so im stuck waiting for the next batch to ship. Hopefully it'll be refreshed by asus to address the sd issue or maybe even a hardware/QOL upgrade.
Same jb didnt even tell me until i called for the 3rd time. Was expecting same day delivery
@matt-yh4ho Exactly. I also checked on their site and it had the green tick for availability. Hopefully we get a revised version that fixes all the thing ppl are complaining about, like bad sd reader and wobbly/sticky buttons.
@@Infinite_Ouroboros i think will get it mid next week, it will be the same product as everyone else but thats why i bought it from jb
@@matt-yh4ho Just an update, I just got the notification from JB that mine has shipped from their Melbourne warehouse so they definitely just got a fresh batch from ASUS. I'll apparently be receiving it tomorrow as I paid for express shipping. Hopefully you get yours too.
@@Infinite_Ouroboros thanks appreciate it, just got an update aswell mine said monday also got express shipping but complained and got my 10 bucks back lol
I updated to 322 and the armory crate se update dropped and I'm hitting 39fps now. I ran it before the update this morning and it's was hitting 36ish fps. I noticed when it boosts at the beginning of changing to turbo I do hit that elevated 41fps, but clearly these are boosted initial test results. I'm keeping mine, but it's mostly because I need 2 handhelds, one for me, one for my wife, and the windows tools it has seem more intuitive then the windows tools I've used on the Deck.
Im wondering if the SD card failure is possibly user error. I mean this in coming from the steam deck, you can pop them in and out alot easier. I have had it often where I go to eject my sd cards and they are still writing. If people are ripping their cards out without ejecting (because thats basically how you can do it on the deck) then that could cause the corruption people are seeing. Just a theory not a fact. I havent had any issues with my ally yet. 🤷♂️ hopefully it stays that way
In the uk and had my ally since release day and had no issues with my sandisk 1tb micro sd card & its been in there from day 1 !!! Done all updates and no problems
Update on my Rog ally it now has the sd card fault !! Removed the 1TB before the ally fry’s it,this should have been tested properly before they released this handheld to the public and future software updates are not going to fix this hardware fault ! These should all be recalled
Overall, as someone who opted to not change from the Deck to the Ally, I do feel the product was rushed to market. They saw the market open up thanks to Deck, and wanted to leap in. And if they’d spent more time with R&D, with a test sample, etc… this wouldn’t be happening. So for this generation specifically, the Deck is currently the safer option.
And as for comparisons of product, I feel the discussion of similarity between 15W modes speaks volumes, and that using 25W makes the battery option surely obsolete and becomes a plugged in laptop of sorts.
I love what Valve and the SD has done for Linux gaming as a whole. Linux gaming was up and coming before the SD but support has exploded since the deck and even though I don't own an SD and actually own an Ally, I'm thankful because my desktop is on Linux.
If you want to support Linux gaming, spending your money on the competition to the one standout Linux gaming device is a confusing move.
Just finished filling out a 1tb card over the weekend and it stopped working, of course. Here's an interesting data point on that, though:
This is a brand new, high end, 1tb Sandisk card. Just copied files to it and read from it occasionally, so not ran hard at all. The ally SD card reader will not see it's contents AT ALL, but will read other cards just fine. Also, if I put the cooked card in another laptop, it will see the contents as if it's fine, BUT, if I try to copy large amounts of data the SD card is definitely broken. It will copy some data, then slow down to 0kbs for a while, then copy a little more, then eventually the copy will fail. Once it fails, it will continue to fail after a few seconds of data copying over and over until I give it a long break.
This is a card that worked fine for like 2 weeks, and all it's done is sit in the ally it's entire life.
It's funny you're bringing up double dragon. Just 3 days ago I was told to go up to the roof of the 21st floor because theirs a thief running around. I pulled out my butterfly knife and my boss handed me a loggers chain with a key on it and said good luck. I kept thinking clown world just entered double dragon territory.
My ROG Ally has been perfectly fine. I'm starting to think people are making some issues bigger than the "issues" really are.
Nintendo is paying them to say this probably
@@chadsmith7075 Nintendo is still selling more Switches than all PC handhelds combined. It's a lot more likely you can't accept some people are having issues with the Ally.
Thanks. Somebody said it.
I think it's a quality control issue. I was very excited for the Ally and had nonstop issues and eventually returned mine. But it sounds like alot of people are not having the issues I was having.
@@Chilltechvibes It'd be par for the course for ASUS.
The ROG Strix Advantage Edition and the Flow X13 lineups were both plagued with QC issues early on, and it eventually being ironed out. Similar to the Ally, those that didn't have issues did try to downplay the issues, either not understanding that when it comes to QC issues not every machine will have problems and they got lucky, or deliberately ignoring the issues outright due to fanboyism, or to convince themselves that they didn't buy a lemon.
But with the Ally, Windows is also a major source of contention. The OS just sucks on handhelds in general, with 11 being particularly finicky, and there being damn near a lottery on whether someone will have issues or not with it.
The ally is my first asus device I like it just too afraid to use a micro sd now
I’m at a point in my life that I’ve wanted to play my backlog of old school rpgs like ff6 and star ocean second story. I decided the only way I’ll get through them is using cheats. Just cheat your way through battles with one shot kill cheats. Then when you get to a boss turn the cheats off. I still get a sense of achievement while not spending 3x as long to get through the game.
Keeping mine, it’s been a great gaming device and mediocre windows experience. Windows experience has been on par with my Microsoft Surface devices…sometimes brilliant other times not responsive or bugging out completely. I’ve had to really only restart the device once though, other than that task manager closing the troubled program and relaunching it has fixed everything.
My Ally rocks, but cap it at 25W. Always my plan on such a small device. Plays PC and emulation better than my Deck (especially PS3), but still prefer the Deck for when using on battery.
How long does it last, less than 1 hour?
@Jaxv3r at 1080. In modern and even some older games yes, it dies quite fast
@@Jaxv3rDepends on the game. Anywhere from 50 minutes to four hours. Average seems two hours, but I set at 720p.
Love my ROG Ally. Thing is great.
Love the podcast and no hate, but i really think you guys should end with what videos you guys have out now and what’s coming up in your channels. It feels weird to start an hour long podcast with, “here some stuff you can guys can watch instead”.
Also I cant remember what videos y’all mention by the time the podcast is over.
Can’t imagine that helps the algorithm for this podcast or those videos y’all mention.
Not a bad call. I'll consider it. Thanks for the constructive criticism.
Cool beans - again - I love what you guys are doing 😀
@@NerdNestit's cool how it is. To me, what someone is working on is like a greeting. "Hey, how you been? What you been working on?" You wouldn't ask that at the end of a conversation. It's an intro that you have to get out of the way. Most of us watch all of these guys so we know what they are all putting out. The show is like an all star game. We know what teams they play for, but right now, they're playing together so they're focused on the all star game that they're playing. How you're doing it makes sense.
The main issues for me have been heating management, i dont know if its either just current tech limitations or their design but the device can get very hot on turbo ~90-95C. Fan speeds havent made much of a difference for me. Aside from the performance mode is great but limitations obviously on what games you can play
Asus has a bad habit of defaulting processors in their devices to aggressive boost, which keeps it up in those temps frequently, even idle sometimes. "Filterless" on youtube has a video about how to disable this. You will go from 3.8ghz to more like 3.3ghz ceiling on your cpu but it actually just frees up a bit more performance for the GPU side of things. Also keeps temps lower and they actually vary based on load like they should.
Those temperatures should be fine, I'd be more worried about voltages given the recent disaster with AMD CPUs dying on Asus boards.
@ovrczbeats4372 good to know! Yea I really dont know too much about the more involved PC stuff so its good to have some resources that can help better manage these issues. Thanks!
Russ, if Nintendo went so far to include the Switch cartridge slot in the new console why wouldn't they just include backwards compatibility with physical games? Why go so far only to stop right before the finish line? Seems like a really odd thing to do. Also, just including backwards compatibility for _all_ Switch games would be the vastly superior pro-consumer move.
The way I see it, Nintendo will likely do with their next console what they did with the Wii and DS. Include compatibility with their previous gen console but strip it away in future iterations. For instance the original Wii had GameCube compatibility and the DS had Gameboy compatibility.
Absolutely. Nintendo bent over backwards for compatibility across multiple generations, going as far as adding additional cartridge slots and even additional SoCs with prior gen processors like they did on the DS for GB/GBA and Wii U for Wii.
Nintendo staying on ARM would be even less of an issue than what happened with DS to 3DS since that had to boot into a compatibility mode, and even that managed it with compatible cartridge slots. With a next-gen Switch it would be more comparable to how it works on PCs, x86 consoles, or ARM based phones/tablets.
Whoever on the podcast said that the next-gen Switch would have to add additional hardware for Switch compatibility is genuinely ignorant. How does he think compatibility works on x86 PCs/consoles or iPhones? All the next console would need is a pin compatible cartridge slot like the 3DS had and the ARM foundation would take care of the rest.
I really like my ROG Ally. I haven’t tried using an SD Card, but I’m hoping to use one sometime in the future.
Looking doubtful...
I've seen a redit post saying that the drivers on Asus website for the SD card reader were for a USB reader, not the PCIe reader that's in the Ally.
Returned my ROG Ally today...The steam deck is just better at battery life. For me, this is more important in my life currently. Diver Dave gets 4 hours on SD.
"There is no logical reason to believe that Nintendo will have backwards compatibility".
What is this based on? There is no logic in this argument. Most Nintendo systems have gone out of their way to have BC, going so far as to add additional cartridge slots or additional chips for hardware emulation (DS had a GBA/GB chip as well as cartridge slot, the Wii U had a dedicated Wii chip, etc). The 3DS used higher capacity cartridges but the slot was still compatible with DS games.
The reason why the Switch didn't have BC is because it moved from PowerPC to ARM while the media went from optical discs to solid state. Wii U to Switch was a bigger compatibility break than the move from the PS3 to PS4. Its really obvious that Nintendo would maintain BC now that an ARM processor with solid state storage is the platform, just like x86 is the norm for Xbox and Playstation.
"They would probably need another Android chip in there for emulation"
Is this how you believe iPhones and Android phones work with newer chips? Do you believe this is how it works with x86?
Really? I thought this was supposed to be a tech channel.
My joystick stopped working yesterday. It only loves up and down.
Chrono Trigger is much easier to get into than FF6. It's a lot shorter, like 25 hours instead of 35+, no random battles, you never need to grind either. Might be worth pushing an hour or two further into it. Still not for everyone of course.
Great stuff like always. That steam deck sale is insane!
I'm downloading Gylt thanks to Bill recommendation, hope it works on the Deck!
Hope you enjoy it!
Why do so many people early adept stuff when they know they dont like it.. my deck was a mess in the beginning and i knew it would be.. look at it now.. its amazing! Give it some time
I love chronic trigger, secret of mana, ff3(6) and all the trigger/Chrono iterations upto the present xeno series
I am just (today) ordered the lowest VSD (64GB), because I don’t need a color case an for screen there are many alternative solution. And a 512GB costs me just 50EUR or 1TB 120EUR … I am from Germany and I like your channel and videos (okay okay Russ’s more ^^) …
Exchanged mine for a LG C2 oled for about 80 bucks more 😅
I hope they keep the Joycons tbh, I love putting my switch down on the the bed undocking the joycons and laying down, its genuinely the most comfortable way for me to play 🙏
I have completed chrono trigger… BUT I was only ever able to finish it on the DS using a flash cart and using game cheats to modestly up the xp multiplier rate and getting boosts in money and etc.. if anyone would want to give chrono trigger another go, I would suggest playing it on a flash cart on the DSI XL and giving yourself just enough XFP multiplying and money to make the grinding easy. But don’t go crazy and over max your multipliers….
This is the way
The Ayaneo S2.This is definitely the one to get.But what I want you guys to talk about the customer service after spending $1,500.The company is on the other side of the world.The internet says they are very “spotty” when it comes to customer service.Guys,nothing is perfect,but this is the best on the market right now.Another topic is Ayaneo putting out too much product.Thanks guys.I am new to all of this.
When they had the graphics hotfix that fixed a lot of the issues, I was seeing on 3.19. Most current update to the BIOS seems good.
battery life appears to be better on 322
Returning something after buying it isn’t really something we do in Australia. Unless it’s got a fault. It seems strange seeing people just talk about using something for months and then returning it. It seems so hurtful to business.
Well there are issues that people have had with the ROG Ally, and it hasn't been months., its been less than one month so far.
@NerdNest he's talking about we spent months in preparation for this device because the ROG ally was announced back in April so technically, yes, it has been months even though it's only been released for a few weeks.
I disagree, he's literally saying use the device for months, then return it, which isn't something that I was suggesting.
Since the 322 Bios update, I'm getting the best performance since launch day on Cyberpunk -- 51.50 FPS 1080p, HIGH textures, QUALITY FSR (best fidelity), low for the rest (plugged turbo). And 68fps 1080p LOW textures, Ultra Performance FSR, low rest (plugged turbo)
My device is bone stock, no tinkering or CPU boost removal or any non-stock apps. Try it out!
Also running AEW Fight Forever maxed out ultra settings 15w 1080p buttery smooth over 60fps+
This is by far the most stable and consistent it's run since launch. It's only a couple weeks old!
ROG Ally is absolutely incredible for what you get for $699. Highly recommend
I haven't had sd card issues with the ally so I'm not returning it. The steam deck had issues at launch so I think it's unfair to shit on Asus at this time but they should be more transparent with us telling us things
Well.... to be fair, steam decks issues were never hardware, like the ally's, which is huge, they would have to do a recall to fix this (they definitely wont do that 😂), that's a big deal man no matter how you look at it... can't defend everything man, no matter how much you like the device.
Got mine 4/23 mfg unit here at launch and working great. No returns here.
You can still play together on PS5. Everything I buy my brother can play, we're playing FFXVI at the same time and use to play Elden Ring together. We live in different countries as well, both using PS5s. Still double value, big stonks.
My ROG won't read my SD cards period. I putit in my steam deck and switch and it's fine but the ROG won't read it.
I returned my yesterday to Best Buy and they had 8 in total of open boxes on the shelve.
I’m waiting for it to go on sale.
Yes, I’ll consider it then not at $700
The Bard’s Tale on the C-64. I had dozens of pages of graph paper where I mapped out all three versions of the game. The game got better and better with each version. 30 years later, I still remember the music from the last fight of The Bard’s Tale 3: Destiny Knight.
I ended up returning my Ally. I just couldn’t justify the device and price with the current issues it’s having. Hopefully the SD card issue isn’t hardware related. I decided to capitalize on the Summer Sale and order a Steam Deck 😎
The SD card issue is suspected to be an overheating issue, and can theoretically be alleviated with a higher fan curve.
some people had issues with the steamdeck and SD card as well at the beginning
@@Futura2500 Key difference between the Deck and the Ally was that the Deck's software was botching the format, both the card and the reader were still usable.
Whereas the Ally overheating the SD card reader can leave the card, the reader, or both truly unusable from damage due to that overheating.
@@Futura2500 The keyword here to note is "HAD". We live in the current time so let's compare the Deck now vs the Ally now. If Ally improves a year for now then great I'll buy one.
I really do hope Asus gets the issues ironed out. It is an amazing piece of tech and I really enjoyed it (minus the Windows UI).
Im keeping mine, I play on it about an hour a day and have already sold my 512gb Steam Deck. The ROG Ally is the xbox handheld ive always wanted.
Same. Portable Series S+ 🎉🎉🎉
I love mine.
Love the podcast as always thanks for the great gaming news! All my favs on today!
I'm loving the podcast you guys. Keep up the great work.
Thanks for listening
I haven't had the SD card issue with mine. I am coming up on the end of my return window, so I have been running Deathloop and Death Stranding from my SD Card trying to make it fail if it's going to, and so far, I haven't had it happen. People say if it hasn't happened yet, it will. The Facebook community chats seem pretty jaded because you mostly hear from the people who are having problems....so the optics are that everyone is having the problems.
just discovered this podcast, i love it. great roundup of hosts
My two most played games on Steam Deck recently have been:
Puppet Master: The Game. (Free to play Early Access) Single/Multiplayer game. Play as the human and try to steal Toulon's secrets, or play as the puppets and try to stop them! It's really fun.
Halls of Torment. It's a swarm survival that has a similar look to Diablo.
Another great cast, thanks everyone.
I know I’m late but you guys answer your own problem with the rog ally sd card lol, the ally works perfect with 512gb sd card but can not handle the speed of a 1tb sd card unless you use a 1tb from micro center works because read and write is slower then a sandisk 1tb.
I got a better framerate when I'm hanging upside down
The question should be why would I ? Unless you have a hardware defect that detracts from your experience or Windows on a hand held is not good for what you want for gaming then go for it. For me I haven’t had any hardware or software related issues that detract from my experience so loving it. I had more issues with My Xbox 360 and OG Xbox One than my Ally.
As far as AMD drivers go, AMD does say on its sight OEM drivers with vender specific features are only available from the manufacturer. So Ally drives are on the Asus support sight, including Adrenaline.
I have to get a New Ally. Mine just killed the SD card reader. 😢…
Shell swapping can be a pain I remember when I did my Nintendo switch (launch model) i said screw it on the front plate and just did the back, but in that case the switch has alot less real estate space on the front because of the joy cons so it really didnt feel like it would make a deference.
Yeah I’d love to buy the steam deck on sale but it’s sold out in UK, didn’t even know about it until your podcast the other day
I'm glad I got it on the first anniversary sale.
@@skycloud4802 nice, what one did you get and how you finding it, I have a series X but I’m bored off that and switch is starting to get dry after Zelda
@@joshholland9020 I got the cheapest storage one, then upgraded to a 2TB SSD using the ifixit guide (still leaves room for a SD card expansion). It runs most of my Steam library so I didn't even need to buy many games at first, as it helped tackle my backlog. Then I installed EmuDeck and imported all my retro roms like PS2, PS1, Gameboy and so on...
Eventually I got a dock (essential for setting up emulators unless you are using a Bluetooth mouse + keyboard). Although I play almost exclusively in handheld mode.
At the moment it's a beast of a device for me due to its sheer versatility. I even dabbled in software like Space Engine and music creation/video studio software on the Steam Deck. And proprietary devices seem to...just work weirdly enough. It's a little crazy what it can do. I have not attempted hooking up a steering wheel and peddle setup, but I'll have to try it at some point.
The fan can be a little roary on games that require high graphics performance, so I do drop the settings down quite a bit. I surprised myself by playing more of the older games and indie titles more than the AAA games. So 2D sidescrollers or games that are older than ten years.
@@skycloud4802 sounds like you are enjoying it mate 👍🏻 I am in no way tech savvy so would be a pain to try and upgrade SSD for me lol. But would definitely like to look at emulation to play old god of war type games. Didn’t know you needed the dock to run emulation though.
I’ve seen a few fans that you can attach to it that look good. Just hard to find that money nowadays with mortgage and kid, to throw at it for casual gaming
@@joshholland9020 you don't need the dock but it's just much easier to set emulators up first time. If you already have a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard then the dock isn't needed. You could even use the Steam Deck inbuilt touch pad as a mouse, and the pop in touch keyboard. But keyboard and mouse makes everything smoother and easier (plus useful for some pc games).
I can confirm that PS5 and XBOX Series both have the ability to game share where you sign in on a friends console, and make it your home console and both people have access to the games. You can both play at the same time, together or separate with no problems just like on the PS4.
Got mine 3 days ago as a complete noob to PC gaming. Frustrating setup no doubt, but I’m playing CyberPunk and it looks and plays great to me! Please note I’m a screen snob so I had to figure out a playable way on 1080p. Amazed by my experience so far!
I’m completely new to pc gaming I thought the ROG Ally was just what I wanted to play some PC games that will take years or never go to console. I am a bit concerned with some of the issues. Though, had the steam deck gone to Best Buy for some trade ins towards it. I would have gotten that especially with the sale today mainly because of the parallel analog sticks as a PlayStation first player. On paper to have steam, PS+ Game Pass & emulators to run on Windows seemed like a dream, but I hope isn’t a $700 nightmare. Did you happen to have any suggestions for the set up after your experience after your not so friendly experience? Thanks for the feedback.
@@Mitchropolitan it takes probably 2 hours (including downloading 3 big AAA titles but I didn’t encounter any errors.
If you think about it, it’s not like consoles don’t need a similar amount of software updates etc out of the box so don’t read into setup Beijing anything too crazy. If you’re like me and can’t stand looking at a horrible screen, the Ally is the only choice. Side by side this thing annihilates the Steam Deck.
Being able to experience legend of Zelda, super Mario Brothers in a virtual reality prospective.
Returned it before the 14 Day was up at Best Buy. Buyers should not have to deal with fan curves, sd card reader frying your microSD cards and game freezes and general Windows 11 headaches. I understand it's a small handheld Windows PC but when I bought my Asus ROG M16 laptop in 2022, there were no issues when updating BIOS, Armoury Crate or it's Window OS. Asus stepped up to the plate tried to hit a homerun but instead gave us a foul ball. Users should NOT have to deal with such issues when their engineers should've done more testing and software debugging before prematurely releasing this to market. It's a wonderful little gaming device with its display and sound, but I'll come back next year when Ally Version 2 or Alienware or Razer comes out with their own system, heck maybe Valve will surprise us with an OLED Steam Deck 2.0.
i dont want to get rid of mine but if best buy cant fix my left joystick that i barely used i will be returning it sadly. the left joystick only goes up and down and i barely have used it.
The Steam Deck is more CPU constrained than GPU constrained when it comes to emulation, or at least that used to be the case with yuzu until recently.
I love the ally no issues but I’m not updating to the new bios and will consider selling it if they keep those ridiculous fan curves required for manual mode it should have been for auto modes only
i will downgrade the bios, the fancurves set for manual mode are a no go.
New bios is good in my experience. They just released a new one on July 4th. It’s 3.22 if I remember correctly don’t quote me on that. I saw a performance increase and I think they tweaked the fan curves to keep it cooler probably in response to the sd card overheating stuff.
Is the Ally comfortable for long gaming - considering getting one, but curious as to whether the angular frame is good.
I do think the Steam Deck is more comfortable, but the Ally is fine for comfort.
No SD card problem here (which is where I play all my games from). I don’t have Cyberpunk to test unfortunately. Right now I have been enjoying modding Mass Effect Legendary Edition. I just finish ME1 and getting a fairly stable 60 at 15watt. I can realistically switch to silent without noticing much. Pretty great. I just wish modding were simpler (not that’s it’s too bad right now.)
Returned my ally day two. Left thumbstick was defective. It's completely disheartening. Ordered a steam deck instead.
Already returned mine. It killed 2 SD cards
When Asus does the test at 1080p with FSR, what's the point of the FSR? Or do they mean the Ally is at 1080p but the game is running at a lower res? Or am I just mixing things up here.
Yes. fsr upscale the image from a lower resolution. It often looks better to use dlss and fsr than simply upscaling the image. The setting from performance to quality demands how much the image is being upscaled. With fsr and dlss you are not running a game at full resolution of 1080p.
When you running a game or movie at a different resolution than the native resolution of the display the image becomes "muddy" looking. fsr and dlss purpose is to bring back into the image some sharpness.
A lot of cope coming from Ally buyers. They must have passed their 7 day best-buy grace period.
The card that stopped reading on my first rog ally was a sandisk ultra 1tb and a 400gb both cards work just had to re format it
Im not sure what happened with my sd card. It no longer works in my Ally no matter what i try but re-formats and works in other devices. It's just that sd card, all other sd cards work in the Ally and I'm now controlling the temp with custom profile not letting it get above 75° and the other sd card has been working fine.
I really don't want to send this unit back because all the buttons and everything work great. We'll see what happens.
All in all I'm loving this device not sending it back... YET
Running a custom fan/tdp profile for plugged and unplugged. Did a windows debloat too and I’ve never owned any kind of pc gaming device before. Running Cyber punk at 720p on high and FSR to Performance. Got 53fps unplugged and 59 plugged.
I have one more week before my return window closes with Best Buy so I’m not hoping for problems as I like the Ally allot but if I do hopefully it’s in the next 7 days
Checking to see if you had any update on issues? I have like 2 weeks
@@philipandfriends mine has been running perfectly
I know it's easy to dunk on the rog ally at this point, it just came out and it's going to have issues. I wasn't actively watching the launch of the Steam Deck and didn't really consider getting one until I learned enough about it to know it would fit most of my wants and needs for gaming, so I'm not really aware of any of the day one launch issues it might have had.
That said, it seems like they didn't consider possible hardware issues like overheating with the ally, there's also the issue that except for one or two past exceptions (maybe?) windows comes as is with every install, meaning it's not built for a handheld. windows is a notorious resource hog, which is often why you need to max out hardware just to run games properly. So even if asus takes the issues seriously, I doubt microsoft will do anything to optimize win 11 for it. And unlike Valve, neither asus or microsoft have long term consideration for gaming in mind. The xbox ceo basically stated as much with the xbox 🤣
This just seems like an attempted cash grab by both companies, and I doubt the longevity of the rog ally. Before I got my Steam Deck, I was looking to see if there were any good handheld options for what I wanted, finding a youtube channel were someone reviews such units. They ultimately said that if they had to choose just one of all the handhelds they had used all year, the Steam Deck was it. They have reviewed the ally also and given their praises for it, but it still does not sound like a long-term viable option, given microsoft's and asus's histories.
Thanks guys, awesome podcast, I agree that playing dungeons and dragons in a comic book store is on the wrong side of the too nerdy line. Also, just wanted to say that my Ally has been 100% awesome since launch. Playing it every day. I did install a 2TB on day one and haven't used an SD card. My Ally is 100% stock settings, windows bloat and all, fully updated, and I usually play on turbo and mostly plugged in. I got around 43FPS with Asus settings (1080p, medium, FSR Auto, turbo, unplugged, on BIOS 319) in that Cyberpunk test, so not sure what is happening with other people.
If you collect physical switch games, "Best buy plus" costs $50 annually but unlocks unlimited b2g1 free on switch games.
I did the same test medium cyberpunk 1080p etc nothing else running no special settings changed, on turbo, my test showed 41fps 3 times, i'm either lucky as hell or you guys are unlucky on your rigs.
I’ve had mine for about a week and am about to return it unless I discover some magic fix or setting that Will fix the Bluetooth issue. I can’t get it to pair with Xbox controllers. Tried 3 it paired with one, but the controller won’t work with all, except one, games. I spent 4 hours yesterday futzing with this thing and am beyond frustrated/disappointed.
Actually returned mine after being so excited! 😢Used that money towards the 65 LGC2! Which is on sale!!