Soooo yeah, I sold my Steam Deck (which I love) in preparation to get an OLED but I was very curious about the ROG Ally, mostly for the performance and VRR, so I bought one.

Here’s a quick rundown of my experience:

  • Took 2h or 3h just to get set up. Between Windows setup, windows updates, etc. it was very frustrating not being able to use the machine right away.
  • After I thought I was mostly ready to install games, the machine was incredibly slow. Like, opening Explorer or Steam would take 30s+. Activity Monitor didn’t really show any high cpu processes. Just intermittent blips of 20% or 30% on some tasks but would go back down. Machine was unusable though.
  • Googled for a bit and found there were lots of updates on MyASUS and Armory Crate. Two distinct pieces of software I had never used. Why two???
  • After I updated everything and did a firmware update everything was speedy again, so I installed a few games.
  • Started Sekiro as my first game since I had trouble hitting decent FPS on the Deck. The game would not respond to button inputs. And yes, I was in “game controller mode”. Quit out of the game and start it again: same thing.
  • Decided to reboot Windows and voila, now it received button inputs. (sigh)
  • The performance is indeed incredible. I was very impressed with VRR in particular.
  • I then tried Guardians of the Galaxy. Crashed on the first run with no error.
  • When I was finally in the game I was playing around with the power profiles / game modes / keyboard shortcuts using the Armory overlay or whatever it’s called. After changing a few settings the overlay froze. I was able to toggle it on/off but tapping the buttons did nothing.
  • Force quitting Armory crate didn’t seem to work. Had to reboot. Maybe I had to force quit some other dependent service?

Anyway, I could go on but it was just frustration after frustration. I never thought I’d see the day Linux would be simpler and friendlier than Windows but here we are.

I returned it even though I liked the form factor, performance, screen, VRR, the quiet fans, etc. The hardware is great. Windows is a non-starter for a handheld console.

Let’s go OLED STEAM DECK!!!

  • Greenjulius86@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I like Asus, I really do. I’ve purchased a used Zephyrus G15 back in 2021 that’s still going strong, and a used RTX 4080. Both were registered by their previous owners, and Asus support quickly helped to de-register the product (Once I provided the order details) so I could register for the warranty. Both have served me well.

    That said, I can’t bring myself to buy an ROG Ally simply because they atrocious quality control problems. Just check the ROG Ally sub. Best Buy is inundated with returns too.

    On paper, the ROG Ally is excellent. In reality, it’s a first generation model that has a critical design deficiency (SD card next to heatsink, causing it to fail or kill cards) and several components have a nasty tendency to fail (Screens, triggers) which leads me to think Asus simply didn’t test the handheld long enough before bringing it to market.

    I’ll stick with my Steam Deck.