I have the ally and I am gonna get the steam deck oled.

After having tried the regular deck of a friend I much prefer it in most ways, battery life, software, ergonomics, controls.

Only thing that kept me on the ally were better screen, less fan noise and better speakers - all which the oled sd heavily improved on.

Elden Ring unironically ran better on the Steam Deck for me than my desktop with a gtx1080 and 6c/12t CPU lmao

With protons optimizations, and everything else performance really isn’t an issue most of the time. I’m willing to sacrifice settings anyways. First game I played was God of War to really test its limits and nothing else I’ve played has been as intense.

Valve addressed this in an interview as to why they aren’t also using the Z1 extreme. The performance gain is minimal and the battery life reduction is major. They set out to make a handheld with the best balance of performance, battery life, and thermals and that is exactly what you get - and cheaper to boot.

Don’t have an Ally.

But my friend has had a Steamdeck for a year.

He recently bought an ally

Had it a week and has returned it to go back to his og Steamdeck. He’s now picking up the Oled.

His comments were better made, better software, better battery more efficient and much nicer to hold.

Also his ally got a touch of stick drift not sure if this is common.

Look I have both & I’ll personally tell you… it’s not worth it. Yes the screen is “better” & the battery is definitely better compared to the Ally. The hardware isn’t close to the Ally either.

Now if you have the money for both then yeah go ahead & get it if that’s what you’re looking for

it sounds like the deck has a lot of what you’d like. If you can, you should try getting one while you have the Ally then see which one you keep after a month or two. Just sell the other. It just sounds like something you should have your own opinion about (since you care about mobile gaming) and I don’t see a better way of doing that than trying both at the same time.

You’ll be leaving performance on the table but if you’re not taking advantage of the higher watt modes on the Ally then not much and in some instances the SD will actually beat the Ally in the same power mode. SD also wipes the floor with the Ally at lower wattages because the Z1 in the Ally isn’t really meant to run that low. You’ll also be giving up your compatibility by leaving Windows, yes you can install Windows on the SD but it’s not a particularly great experience and Valve can take awhile to update drivers for Windows. That being said as someone who has owned a SD for awhile purchased an Ally because the potential performance gains seemed like a big win and then ended up returning the Ally I’d say it can’t hurt to try. Battery life was a big deciding factor in why I returned it before the device went totally defective on me. You have a 14 day return policy so take it for a spin and if you don’t like it you can always return it. Personally I’m 100% ordering a SD OLED the screen has been the biggest drawback to the SD in my opinion and now that it’s fixed I’m perfectly fine to use the SD until a SD2 is released.

I have both Deck and Ally and debating the same but I think I’ll just stick with what I have because just as I regretted buying the Ally when the Legion Go was announced I’ll probably regret the OLED Deck purchase later when new devices come out, just gonna wait some time, Valve set up some new standards with the OLED Deck and maybe some companies will try to compete with releasing OLED handhelds with better hardware now because of it

have both deck and ally, if you wanna play something deck verified it’s nice going for deck but my reason for it is backwards, im using steam games with deck and non steam with ally, considering its just plug and play, and don’t talk to me about heroic etc, i can’t setup easily kh on it so no thank you

Magic 8 Ball says “Yes”

Use a custom TDP at 12 Watts and limit to just 12 Watts, you should get close to 2h, and performance won’t get recked

Old Deck also get 2h at 12 Watts but the beauty is below that, still efficient so performance does not suffer and is so easy to optimize games by forcing GPU clocks and limit CPU threads for even more efficiency, a lot of heavy games still run at ,8 Watts very well in the Deck

Steam Deck’s battery still isn’t great, but OLED should bring some improvements. I would say even with the improvements, you will still get low battery life if you are playing any AAA titles.

If I were you and wanted to save money, I’d just get a quality portable battery bank and just wait for Steam Deck 2.

That said, the trackpads on the Steam Deck are pretty great, I use them all the time and couldn’t imagine using the ROG Ally.

If you want slower, prettier but with a non-fried microSD & cheapest option go Deck. If you want faster, biggest screen, 2 x USB, fps mouse mode & a working microSD then I’d go the Legion Go - but on the UK I’d advise waiting for the 1tb as the base standard for a Win 11 machine