Customer Ratings & Reviews

I picked up the ASUS ROG Ally with the Z1 Extreme processor, and let me tell you, this thing is a beast. It handled everything I threw at it—AAA games, indie titles, and even a little bit of streaming. The 120Hz screen is buttery smooth, and the performance is insane for something I can carry in one hand. The controls feel great, the build quality is solid, and it’s so sleek that I felt like I was gaming on the future. Traveling with it was a dream—perfect for killing time on flights or pretending to be productive at the coffee shop while actually playing Elden Ring. So why did I return it? Well, right after I bought it, the higher-end version went on sale. And, you know how it is—FOMO is real. I figured if I was already spending this much, I might as well go all out. That said, I’d still highly recommend this model. It’s an incredible device that punches well above its weight for gaming and portability. But if you have the extra cash, spring for the top-tier version if it’s within reach. Either way, you’re getting an amazing handheld that can handle just about anything. TL;DR: This is an incredible handheld, but if the better model is on sale and you can swing it, go for the upgrade. Either way, you won’t be disappointed.

It gives you the mobility away from your PC for gaming. Great little device that packs a punch. Battery life isn’t the greatest on demanding games but its nothing a power bank can’t solve.

The system does it all. You can play Gamepass, Steam games, GOG, Epic launcher, PlayStation remote play. This is a much more robust system than the Steadeck. The audio and screen are fantastic. There are a few odd design choices, the microsd slot is by the exhaust fan and that can cause those cards to overheat or worse warp in the drive. Windows 11 is not ready for a smaller form PC but that will be good with updates. 512 on board memory is small with modern games. Most of the games I have played run well and it helps plane rides fly by.

 The ROG Ally does a really good job of playing all my video games from my Steam library to play in a very high-quality. There is some tinkering to be done internally before you get started, but it is definitely replacing my steam deck when it comes to portability and accessibility. Battery life has been one of the main issues that everyone is encountering but this is only when you’re playing very heavy demanding games there is a way to tinker this and change your settings so battery life int consumed so much but I haven’t found this to be a issue since I’m always near a plug while playing the Ally. Really look into this device via YouTube reviews and doing your own research about messing with the settings of this device. If this is your first time using a PC, this will be a new venture for you.

The ASUS ROG Ally 7" Gaming Handheld is an epic gaming companion! With its AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme Processor, it's like having a turbocharged engine for your games. The 120Hz FHD 1080p screen brings your favorite titles to life with dazzling colors and super-smooth action. Plus, it's compact enough to take anywhere, making it perfect for gaming on the fly. Whether you're into RPGs, shooters, or strategy games, the ROG Ally delivers the kind of gaming experience that will have you grinning from ear to ear. It's a game-changer you won't want to miss!

Was excited to see more handled PC's being launched and with gaming centric companies taking the helm at the latest chipsets and improved screens? Sign me up. On paper the ROG Ally has a good set of internals going for it, a more advanced AMD Chipset than that of the Steam Deck (at least this version) 512GB of storage by default, and a more vibrant faster refresh display that supports FreeSync. From my limited testing the audio also was pretty good from an indoor test; In Red Dead Redemption 2 it seemed to take advantage of that Dolby Atmos virtual surround and I was impressed since I don’t expect it much. To add to that; If the Steam Deck’s positioning on your palms felt too bulky, the Ally has a more sleek profile and it’s a smidge lighter (without feeling cheap) so extended play sessions wont cramp your hands and tire your arms. On Windows; Yes, Windows isn’t there yet for handheld computing at least in a way to get everything set up seamlessly. You’ll definitely want to get this set up in a docked mode or at least get a BT keyboard and mouse synced up when you’re logging into your accounts and getting everything downloaded. Its not so much the cursor controls with the right joystick was an issue (but a tutorial through armoury crate would have been appreciated on what functions in desktop mode) but more so the software keyboard is awkward to use at times and you can’t tell if you’re typing in a text box that you need to. Only to click on it to make that keyboard go away and… then try to awkwardly swipe up to bring it back and hope you still have your entry open in the other window. Aside from that, armoury crate does a good job of grabbing your games when you install those and adding custom control profiles is intuitive enough. I just wish that the software would work when it needs to concerning going back to the desktop (there’s a dedicated hotkey but it works 25% of the time if it does at all) so there’s suqicks here and there but its not terrible especially for a first gen product. However, there’s a glaring issue at least in my unit; The left joystick suddenly stopped working on the X-Axis. I wasn’t sure if this was due to a firmware update or BIOS update, but I noticed this while testing out some games and thought it might just be because they were older ports (was trying out non-native games the Deck could not run) – After testing it out in calibration tools, its just the joystick is bad. No combination of BIOS & Firmware rollbacks or wipes fixed it. I’ve yet to hear back from ASUS after 48 hours so I’m assuming that I need to return this and swap, and as of June 2023 I see there’s a lot of other people with similar issues that ended up returning. Overall? Good showing from ASUS on getting Windows wrangled to a usable option especially with Gamepass – Once you initially get everything set up it’s a cinch to get into your games. Plus you have the added bonus of having a ultra portable PC if you need to drop into your NAS or get your media all under one unit for travel. However I’m going to be keeping my Steam Deck for a while, the hardware issues leave a bad taste. If you’ve already got something similar I’d wait out for Gen 2 – Otherwise if this is your first handheld gaming PC you can’t go wrong with this, just keep in mind you might have an issue down the line, or right when you unbox it.

With one exception I am absolutely happy with my purchase of the ASUS ROG Ally. It is a very powerful machine that plays almost anything you throw at it with ease. The display is a great size for a handheld and has very accurate color with great contrast. Color saturation is superb. The one area of contention is that there is a high incidence of SD Card Reader failure. ASUS is still trying to identify the issue and deliver a fix. The user forums, Reddit and Discord are filled with users who report the issue. I am using a USB SD Card Reader in the mean time and it works very well. Hopefully ASUS delivers a fix soon.

Have been amazed by this gaming hand held! It plays pretty much most games, except for a few AAA games currently in development which have open alpha or beta play testing. Being able to play games like Red Dead Redemption 2 anywhere has been a blast. My only complaint is the battery life which is pretty low when playing more graphically demanding games: less than 2 hours. Which is easily extendable via 65w+ battery banks over USB C.

I have faith that it’ll eventually be finished baking but if you buy one, temper your expectations as this is a first generation product in a new form factor from a company who has never made one of these before. As of 6/16/23, there ARE bugs, there ARE driver issues, there ARE bios issues, etc. So far it’s been getting updates pretty regularly pre launch to post launch to help with these issues and I think ASUS will eventually work all these kinks out. Biggest issue for me is the minimum stick deadzones in Armoury Crate are atrocious. For now a good workaround is to set the deadzones in Steam to override them (Steam deadzones have to be at least one tick up from 0 or this won’t do anything). Sticks also have very little tension but I’ve gotten used to that aspect so that’s not really a big deal to me. If you’re trying to use a third party cable for charging, pay attention to the rating of the cable, it needs to be rated for 65w minimum for the Ally to allow full turbo. Third party charging bricks are even more of a mixed bag, research on google and Reddit before buying. Overall I’m pretty happy with the Ally. It blows my mind that you can have this much power in a handheld, for that reason temper your expectations on battery life, expect only an hour or less for more demanding games. Luckily the charger that comes with it is plenty long so it’s not difficult to just keep it plugged in when playing at home. Gaming laptop owners will understand lol. The screen and speakers are spectacular. Just don’t expect to hit the full 120hz in most games. You can hit 120 at good settings on older titles but most modern games I’m getting between 40-80 at 1080p low-medium, sometimes higher if it’s set to 720p low-medium with RSR turned on. Games I’ve tested and gotten acceptable performance from are Death Stranding, DOOM 2016 (great), Bioshock Remastered (great), Destiny 2 (acceptable), Farcry 5 (not great but playable), Cyberpunk 2077 (acceptable), Loop Hero (2D so duh lol) and Cult of the Lamb (not as good performance as I expected but still good). Also if buying an SD card, don’t cheap out on one. Get at least a U3 card. After getting burned by a cheap but large Sandisk drive on Amazon I picked up a 512GB Samsung Pro Plus from Best Buy and it works soooooo much better, night and day difference. If you’re already a PC gamer you shouldn’t have a lot of issues getting the Ally up and running. If you’re not already a PC gamer expect to have to figure stuff out. This is DEFINITELY a Windows gaming experience with all the good and the bad that that entails. Keep updated in Armoury Crate, My Asus app as well as in Windows update. Expect to be updating this thing for a good long while immediately after getting it out of the box, as some updates are needed to unlock even further updates. With all that in mind, I absolutely love this thing. Never thought that I’m my lifetime we’d have this much performance in a handheld at a reasonable price, this thing is has more power than the first mid-range gaming PC I built in late 2015 and it just blows my mind

Granted this will mainly be used for gaming, the rog ally delivers high performance from games to in general computer use. The only 2 things that can get to you would be the battery life on the go and the storage if your a user that downloads big games. If you need bigger storage, I would recommend grabbing a decent size uhs-ii micro sd card considering it will read what on the card faster(300mb) for some models. Due to how accessible they are though if all else fails you can grab the good old uhs-i micro sd. It will be a little slower in terms of memory reading but you'll have a much bigger variety in terms of storage size selection.

Overall, the ROG Ally is a very good first effort. Setup was fairly painless, though it did take a little while to complete. Nothing really worse than any other Windows computer, but still. I think it would be much better served with faster RAM and 32 GB instead of 16 GB, but I can see how that may have been needed to hit the price point. It runs older titles really well, and newer titles with lower fidelity settings and/or a lower resolution. Battery life can be a real drain (pun intended), but again, at lower settings, you should be able to get at least a couple of hours out of it. It's more of a travel gaming system than a mobile system (in other words, you can take with with you on a trip and plug it in). I'd say 4.5/5 overall, but since there aren't half stars, 5 it is.

While Windows on a handheld may not he for everyone, for me it is the ideal format for mobile gaming. As someone who has a large library of games from multiple sources, the convenience of having a windows based platform is great. Now that isn't to say it's perfect. Windows is still windows, so there are the expected, and unexpected, quirks that come along with it. But I have enough experience, confidence, and patience with windows that im not too bothered by any of these things. Battery life could of course be better, but its in liek with what i expected. I mostly use the device while on a plane or in hotel rooms, and the form factor is perfect. Performance wise it does everything I ask of it. Other than a few crashes, due to windows, there havent been any real issues with performance for me.

TL;DR -- Low battery life, great controls and screen, feels sturdy, and since it's Windows 11, it runs pretty much everything. "Long" version -- When I purchased this it came in dead. I expected at least 50% battery, but nope, dead. No issue, just a little QoL thing that I expected better from ASUS. Anyway, plugged it in, went through the Windows setup pretty quickly, and was done. Controls are super nice, analog triggers feel good, and the joysticks are pretty nice too. They do make a "click" every so often, though, and I've seen online that's pretty common with these devices. Some people exchange them, some deal with it. I haven't had any issues, but it's something to note. I'm just going to deal with it. The screen is also gorgeous. It's 120 Hz and 1080p, so it's really high def and buttery smooth. However, the biggest pain here is the battery life and the time it took to update everything. There are three places to update this device: Windows Update, Asus AmouryCrate, and MyASUS. This took a combined total of nearly 6 HOURS to do all these updates, it was absolutely absurd. Once that was done, I had to download games. Luckily I have gigabit fiber, so that didn't take too long, but it may for you. Also, this doesn't (seem) to have WiFi 6, and if it does it wasn't working (It could be my network as well), so I was being capped at 300 Mbps download speeds even though I get 1000 over the network. You may want to use a USB-C to Ethernet adapter to get it going faster. Once the games were downloaded, I had a lot of fun! For about 2 hours. Then it dies. The battery life is pretty bad in this. The good news is, though, that plugging it in *does* have benefits. When plugged it, it can get up to 30 or 35W, while the max unplugged is 25W. Overall, great device, with compromises to battery. I'm going to really enjoy it!!!!

It is a great alternative to a gaming laptop with the right expectations. If you like older pc games it is great or if you are willing to make sacrifices newer titles will play 720p med low settings with 90 minutes give or take of battery life. With that said if you get a battery bank with 65 watt output it could be limitless. Build quality is good feel is good and as a bonus you can use it just like a laptop because its windows 11. If you want a handheld console i dont know if I would be as keen to recommend it same pitfalls of pc gaming driver issues ect. but the same freedom as well

First and foremost, make sure that your system is fully charged, and once turned on, has the most update system. Treat it like any other computer or laptop, the system needs updating or you will lose functionality. I am super impressed at the feel of the gaming system because I have average size hands but the screen is huge and the joystick and buttons are properly placed. It doesn’t overheat plenty of cooling even when you’ve played for hours. The performance is two thumbs up doesnt glitch or lag. The design makes it fun to use. Plenty of storage for saving games and I really enjoy having a few apps for gaming access wherever I go. You can basically have all of your games in one Place And it fits in your backpack. Helps the time pass when I’m on flights or just bored with no gaming console or TV. But if you do have multiple units, you can have competitive gaming by connecting it to a TV with multiple controllers. Or you can have one unit with multiple users. The system also has 10 points of touch display. Way too much for me but it’s nice to have option. The only con: I can only play or use it for a couple of hours and then I need to give my hands a rest. The system is overall an upgrade to personal gaming systems.

Battery life is limited due to the nature of the device, and it can get a little warm, but overall it is an amazing device. Its been running AAA games for me with no issues and thats really all i could ask for.

So far its working well. I bought a used one but from the looks nothing is wrong with the unit. With some minor tweaking it can run most games I throw at it. Windows is a bit of a pain to navigate since the screen is so small and I have to use the thumbstick but the armory crate app alleviates this once your games are installed. Games are so large you'll need to add storage space to the 512 if you plan on playing many different games.

Swapped from the steamdeck to this because it would let me play more of my steam backlog. Pros, much more powerful than the steam deck, quieter than the steam deck, better speakers than the steam deck, better screen then the steam deck. In every performance metric except battery life the ally is the clear winner. Cons, battery life, steam deck wasn't great either but I felt I got a bit more battery on it. User interface, ROG has custom version of armory crate. It's nice but it's not consistent, if anything it feels like a beta build. Nothing I can't overcome using normal windows desktop but still.

Honestly for a handheld PC it works great. Obviously not that powerful but ran perfectly fine for all the things I was playing, only issue with the device was space, but switching out the SSD was easy enough to do on my own. Overall very satisfied with my purchase would recommend to people who can afford it of course.

Overall I would not recommend this as an upgrade to a steam deck; however, if you're trying to get a handheld PC for the first time this one offers a lot of things that the Deck doesnt. For one, it can play any windows game natively - no need to worry about compatability. The screen is higher resolution and it looks quite a bit better than the Deck's. That said, you do have to deal with Windows and sometimes that can be a bit Janky. For what's its worth, not nearly as janky as I've found it on a full desktop - it's still the same operating system but seems to work smoother. I do recommend the machine is solid, plays anything I throw at it and I personally like it's design better than the Deck. The sticks and buttons could be a little better - but that's aobut it.