Asus ROG Ally to receive a revision with more storage and a bigger battery

Daniel Sims

Daniel Sims

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Something to look forward to: The ROG Ally is the top choice for those seeking an alternative to the Steam Deck for portable PC gaming, and Asus intends to mark the device's first anniversary by addressing lingering issues based on user feedback. However, it's worth noting that this won't be the ROG Ally 2 as the handheld maker is opting to wait until the hardware is ready for a true next-generation successor.

Asus recently confirmed to The Verge that it will release a hardware update to its ROG Ally handheld PC this year. The new model, the ROG Ally X, will receive a full unveiling on June 2. Pricing details will likely be revealed then, but the company confirmed that the revision will be more expensive, while the standard model will see price cuts.

Asus will retain the same AMD Z1 Extreme SoC and 7-inch 48-120Hz 1080p VRR screen, so performance will remain mostly unchanged. While the upgrade won't be as extensive as Valve's Steam Deck OLED, Asus is making significant improvements to battery life, memory, storage, and other areas.

Enhancing battery life was the biggest request Asus received regarding the Ally, and the company claims that the Ally X will deliver an increase of "way more" than 40 percent. The original model theoretically had space for a larger battery, but Asus prioritized weight in its initial design. Reversing this decision will make the Ally X heavier.

Additional unified RAM is also coming, but Asus won't disclose how much. As for storage, the Ally X will feature an enlarged M.2 SSD slot to accommodate 2280 drives, which are longer but often cheaper than the 2230 units supported by the current model and the Steam Deck.

The Ally X might also address what some users suspect is a critical flaw in its predecessor's SD card slot. While Asus won't admit that the system could be causing memory cards to overheat, the revision will move the slot away from the vent.

Also read: The Best Handheld Gaming Consoles

Other minor adjustments will impact the D-pad, triggers, and grips. The joysticks will be replaceable and upgradeable, and an update to Asus' Armory Crate software will make booting up games and sharing controller configurations easier.

However, despite criticisms, including from TechSpot, citing the Windows interface as the ROG Ally's biggest weakness, Asus plans to continue using the operating system to access non-Steam gaming platforms more easily. Valve doesn't license the Steam Deck's SteamOS to other hardware vendors, but Ayaneo offers a variant of its handheld that ships with a clone of the operating system.

MSI also recently entered the handheld PC arena with the Claw. Upon its early March launch, the device's Intel chipset struggled with performance compared to the AMD-based competition, but a recent driver update improved framerates by up to 150 percent for some titles.

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Asus ROG Ally to receive a revision with more storage and a bigger battery

 
I sincerely hope they also make it come with 32GB of LPDDR5x. Being able to set the Frame buffer to 8GB and still having enough memory for Windows and the game would be a much better place than the current device. Having to juggle a low frame buffer of 4-6GB, is just a pain.
 
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J95qRP7 said:
I sincerely hope they also make it come with 32GB of LPDDR5x. Being able to set the Frame buffer to 8GB and still having enough memory for Windows and the game would be a much better place than the current device. Having to juggle a low frame buffer of 4-6GB, is just a pain.
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I fully agree with the need for ram expansion from 16GB in current models, having to manage it for both the system and gpu use is simply not enough memory size to cover the system ram and gpu memory with sizes that aren't bottlenecking the games (IMO the 16GB is just fine for system RAM memory capacity when windows is also running since the system alone uses 2-3GB so after alocating 4GB for GPU memory you're left with around 8GB of free memory if you're very carefull with apps running in the background).
My Ally (extreme) model is already forcing me to tweak and monitor apps useage & memory size (I allocate gpu mem size manually, 3gb from default settings was a bit too small for games I play) so I'm also looking forward to a new model with 32GB of RAM memory which would fix this biggest issue (in terms of computer speed), but other than that I have one more required change for them to "bait" me for new unit while I still have current model.
This issue is ... 1 USB PORT that is also used for charging that result in NO USB PORTS at all when you have it plugged in to power grid. I find it insulting on their side to not only put 1 usb-c port for entire computer but also they managed to screw the buyer&user that when charging is needed then you have 0 usb ports...
If this was some project made by 10yo kid for school I'd understand the lack of sense but seriously speaking even myself at ~12yo of age would make a pc with proper slot for plug with charging only capacity (usb-c with no data transfer linee, only power delivery ones) so at least the single usable usb-c port would be ablevto work while charging (I have few usb-c hubs already so I'm fine now with a lot of free usb-a & usb-c slots. This however doesn't change the fact that SINGLE USB-C slot is not enough, especially if geniuses at asus found a new way to make life of a customer a living hell.
 
So like they said above, I think they need to increase the memory from 16 to 32. I feel like they thought 16gigs was "good enough" at the time and they did it to keep costs down on the steam deck but, 16 gigs has been borderline enough ram as it is for awhile and then they mixed an APU into the mix. Keep in mind, the steam deck was $400, hand helds are getting 16gb of ram in the $1000+ category.
 
It would be better to wait and jump to the new SOC instead of wasting time and resources on minor refreshes.

Also, it's amazing how inefficiently RAM is used on PCs even on APUs with shared memory, compared to consoles - you need twice as much to get the same result. @-@
 
32 GB of RAM would be nice, but I’m betting that the new 24 GB option is chosen instead (and frankly would be enough to set VRAM to 8 and forget it).

Double the battery life would be great too, but I wonder how much heavier that will make it.

I’ve already upgraded mine to 2 TB so I will wait for the new SoC in the Ally 2 (hopefully by Q1 2025).
 
Title should have been "Asus ROG Ally to receive a revision with a working SD slot". But I guess that's not guaranteed.
 
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