Customer Ratings & Reviews

Completely blown away by how amazing the Ally is. I expected it to be great for light titles but Cyberpunk, Witcher 3, FF14, Diablo 4 and Elden Ring are by no means light games to run. 1080p with medium-high settings at 60-100 fps is crazy on a handheld and what I would expect from a full laptop with a discrete GPU. I wish the battery was bigger but honestly can’t say I’ve felt limited by it. Also be sure to grab a larger NVME, 512GB is enough to realize you want more space for your game library.

The build quality is excellent! I cant believe they packed this much performance into adevice this small and for only $699. Just understand it is dealing with week 1 software and that you will have to wait for updates to download and install. I enjoy that I can plug 2 moniters, a keyboard, and mouse into it and use it as a full fledged pc. I dont have to choose between game systems, it can play xbox, steam, Playstation network gams, and emulators! Really great job asus!

So the thing is I was welcoming to the thought of having a Steam Deck and trying out their OS because it’d be new and unfamiliar. However owning both seemed absurd to me, but I ended up buying the Ally. The ROG Ally is really nice to an extent of compatability. The Ally claims to be able to play all your games, but it’s weird as I can’t play my huge backlog whether it be in handheld mode or “docked”. Granted I am able to emulate which is a nice avenue to go down, but I also understand that it’s not the most accesible especially if you don’t know whay you’re doing. Being able to up the tdp helps when i’m trying to emulate my PS3 games it’s nice. Steam deck can barely handle some of the games i’ve tried to emulate, but it can handle enough at the same time. The deck is also pretty nice with it’s UI and using Steam OS which took me a while to understand when I’d go into desktop mode, but after I learned what to do and how to use it, it just felt like second nature. Of course with the Ally I was able to just boot it up, run updates, and set up with ease. It can be a bit much having to wait for updates and all that, but once you get it through and over with you’re on your way to start downloading games. Playing the Ally with Steam alongside Epic Games, Ubisoft Connect, and Battle.net worked with ease compared to the Deck. This is able to run the more recent and current games with some ease. Best to tweak a thing or twon on the Ally’s settings and game settings, but once you do you’re on your way. Both of the systems have their quirks and advantages Maybe even one over the other at times, but that’s all I can really say for now about the two. If you’re willing to expiriment with a new/familiar OS go with Steam Deck, but if you’re more comfortable with sticking to the usual the ROG Ally is your best bet.

I love my Ally! The only downside for me is the battery life if you want to play graphics intensive games. High wattage and high frame rates will drain your battery in less than 1 hour. I recommend a 65w portable battery, or do the battery upgrade by Jsaux to 65w battery.

I had this oroduct for about a month before returning. I wanted it for emulation and had seen videos of emulation being super easy, only for them to vague when it came to actual setup. Thats not the fault of the handheld however. My gripe is battery life. I ran a couple games via steam, those being Resident Evil 4 and GTA 5. While those are graphics instense games, the point of being able to game on the go is lost on this device as the battery was cooked in just over an hour. Its fine for at home where you can stay near an outlet, but that again defeats the purpose since I can play on my desktop or a console. Owning it just became redundant and the price tag cant really be justified. Along with the poor battery life, it also apparently has a heat issue that causes the SD card slot to become inoperable. In addition, the heat can get pretty intense if you’re not expecting heat in an area. No doubt it would heat up, but I underestimated the degree it would. Hopefully down the line there is an update or a new model, because this thing could be pretty cool with the trial and error.

The ROG plays game much better than i honestly thought. I mostly play Elden Ring on it. At max (in game) settings, i get a consistent 30fps. With some system tweaks, I can regularly get 90min of game time on battery. with some mods, i can even play World of Warcraft. The only downside is the same with all these handhelds, and that's battery life.

It's really good for the fact it's a handheld gaming computer. 4 stars for the proprietary egpu connection other than that I love the way you can customize settings to suit what game your playing

Im honeslty inpressed by the performance. The 120hz screen is beautiful. I run fortnite on medium to low settings and max out at 120FPS. Diablo stays around 45-65 fps. Bladurs gate 3 around 60-80fps. They’ve done updates for the battery but its still not the best. I am one to always have it plugged in thoughso that doesnt really matter to me. Get this over a steam deck please.

As someone who owns and used a Steam Deck i can make a direct comparison with this device. The ROG Ally is a new but strong device that rivals all hand held gaming systems. Performance, audio and video are great. The only thing it lacks is in battery life and UI. But the lack in battery life is the sacrifice we have to make for peak performance, and the UI will get better as time goes on. It takes some getting used to but overall i am pleased with my purchace.

Rating 3.5/5 I had some defects on my first unit. Exchanged it with zero hassles for another one. Thank you Best Buy for returns being extremely easy. As for this gaming device.. It really is pretty powerful. Plays most recent triple A games really well in 720p and various different settings depending on the game. I've been playing Diablo IV with zero issues, over 60fps at 720p. Looks really nice to be honest. Also been playing Spiderman, Horizon 5, and Borderlands Wonderlands. All run great with the right settings. I also love how it runs off windows 11. This means you should be a little tech savvy if you are buying this. There is a lot of things you can mess up and a lot of setting to mess around with depending on the game you want to play just as if you were playing on a PC. I upgraded the SSD and used Asus built in cloud recovery after installing it. Really nice feature. Just make sure you upgrade your bios to the most recent before upgrading the SSD. The whole cloud recovery process will take around 1-2 hours to finish. My biggest pain point is the device just isn't comfortable in your hands for extended periods of time. Your hands will start to get sore if you're playing on the go a lot. Both my first unit that was returned and my second one have issues with the thumb pads. Pressing left squeaks. First unit started squeaking right away. Second one started squeaking about 2 weeks into using it. SD card reader stopped working on my first unit, second one has been fine so far. Surprisingly the sound is extremely good on this. Probably the best audio from any handheld period. I would recommend waiting for some quality control issues to be fixed, but overall I'm still happy with purchasing early. It's been a lot of fun.

Great for mobile use or when your the passenger shorter battery life rhan expected

Never had a hand held before but i seen this one long before i bought it. Im a semi truck driver and i wanted to game without bringing the entire setup this did the trick the most demanding g a me i played was the new red dead redemption. Take some time to get use to the navigation because its literally a small computer and not a steam deck that limits you to only games.

I had been eyeing the steam deck for months but I felt I would want something more powerful. And then this thing was announced! Didn't hesitate to put down my pre-order and I haven't regretted my decision at all. The performance is top notch giving what's available in today's technology for a portable device at this price. Battery life could be better, but understandably I already knew that going into it. Be sure to grab a 65 watt portable charger and you'll be fine. Understaing that this is a full mobile pc running win 11, I'll give it some slack. All that said, try it for yourself!

I was an early adopter of the steam deck. That device was pretty cool but the screen was really bad and 60 Hz no matter how you look at it; just is not a good experience. So I sold it on eBay and bought the Ally and it is literally better in every way than the steam deck. I love portable gaming on older AAA games at 120 frames with a great screen. It is powerful so of course battery is not gonna be great, but that's to be expected until a new battery technology or CPU processor comes out that can handle 120 frames for hours at a time. Absolutely no regrets, this thing is great!

It was fun until the two week mark hit and issues happened. I would get kicked out of games. Device gets too hot. Battery life isn’t spectacular. My SD memory card randomly want readable by the device nor was I able to see my storage information, but even the internal storage. If these issues were fixed, I would have given a 4 or 5 starts.

Battery life a litle short about 4ish hours of run time it work perfect for my trip being able to run steam or xbox not a bad litlte rig the only problems ive run into that some times it powers off for no reason at first i thought i was me accidentally hitting the power button but i was in the middle of a movie when it just turned off after a few up dates ive haven't had that problem so it a nice little rig

Runs games incredibly well while plugged in and games graphics hold up when only on battery as well. I definitely agree with other reviews saying that the SD card slot is not ideal as it does get quite hot in that area. I would recommend buying an SSD upgrade but has space for plenty of games without. It is basically a tiny fully functioning windows PC

Really nice hand held better than a certain other hand held and uses windows so its not just a game machine. Fast beautiful display . great control comfortable to us. I put in a 1TB sd card for addition storage. only one thing could be improved BATTERY LIFE is not greay 2-5 hours the charger however can recharge in 1.5 hours. I reccomend you get an 8000 mah one and when you use you have to use the C port output or the Ally will not charge..barely maitain....

Holding this and playing AAA PC games on such a small device feels like you are using technology from the future. However, the compromises you have to make as a user to get a good experience cancels out any of the wow factor. The only way I got my games to run at a tolerable framerate was setting the resolution to 720p and there is no way the Ally can run a AAA title at 120Hz, regardless of settings. This completely defeats the purpose of featuring a 1080p screen at that framerate imo. The battery burns super quickly and I couldn't get more than 90 minutes out of it off the charger. Windows is not meant to be run on such a small screen and being someone with bigger hands, I really struggled to select options on smaller menus. Steam Big Picture mode works okay, but would really prefer to have a dedicated OS to handle this. 512 GB native storage is insanely limited in 2023 and the SD Card barely works. Windows 11 sucks on a PC but ESPECIALLY on this tiny screen and ASUS software is super janky. This device is certainly an indicator of the direction that PC gaming can go, but it's way too early for me to adopt and take it seriously to replace my gaming PC.

overheating issues 512 gigs is not enough storage for 5-10 games