The Asus ROG Ally runs Windows, eats battery, and needs time to cook

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Geralt of Rivia looked good, moved smoothly, and responded swiftly to commands. There was just one problem: He was constantly sucker-punching the villagers of White Orchard. Over and over again, he raised his fists against tavern keepers, kids running in the street, and detachments of Nilfgaardian soldiers. That last one begat a brutal death. Sometimes, right after taking an unprovoked swing, the camera would furiously spin around my white-haired avatar, making me feel like I, too, had caught one in the head.

Specs at a glance: Asus ROG Ally
Display	7-inch IPS panel: 1920×1080, 120 Hz, 7 ms, 500 nits, 100% sRGB, FreeSync, Gorilla Glass Victus/DXC
OS	Windows 11 (Home)
CPU	AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme (Zen 4, 8 core, 24M cache, 5.10 Ghz, 9-30 W (as reviewed)
RAM	16 GB LPDDR5 6400 MHz
GPU	AMD Radeon RDNA3, 4 GB RAM (as reviewed)
Storage	M.2 NVME 2230 Gen4x4, 512 GB (as reviewed)
Networking	Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2
Battery	40 Wh
Ports	ROG XG interface, USB-C (3.2 Gen2, DPI 1.4), 3.5 mm audio, Micro SD
Size	11×4.3×0.8 in. (280×111×21 mm)
Weight	1.34 lbs (608 g)
Price as reviewed	$700 (plus mini dock)

I played the latest version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on Asus' new ROG Ally handheld gaming PC ($700, available June 13, preorders start today) as a personal benchmark. Having completed the game three times previously (Xbox/PC/Switch, Yennefer/Triss/neither), I was looking to spot differences on this emerging platform. Asus' new device can run The Witcher 3—and Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, Forza Horizon 5, and Hitman 3—more powerfully than the Steam Deck or almost any other "portable" device around, minus questionably portable gaming laptops. The device runs Windows, so it has fewer game compatibility issues than Valve's Steam Deck (however admirably far that system has advanced). What would make The Witcher or any other playthrough different on the Ally, a Switch-sized device that boasts 7–13 times the power of that platform? "Random violence" wasn't the answer I expected, so I dug in.

My first thought was that the thumb sticks could be the problem, as they seem to have bigger dead zones and feel less sturdy than the ones on the Steam Deck. Or maybe it was pre-release video hardware reacting to a game known for uneven performance. I updated everything I could, recalibrated the sticks, and double-checked my in-game settings. I played the same build of the game on a Steam Deck with Windows loaded, in the same location, but couldn't recreate the problem.

Eventually, I figured it out: It was the touchscreen. The Ally's right stick is too shallow, and it's too close to the right side of a screen with small bezels. Whenever my thumb glanced too close, the overly sensitive touchscreen picked it up as a left click. The default left-click mouse action in The Witcher 3 is an attack. Like some malevolent specter of Polish folklore, the Ally had made Geralt's world richer, but it whispered violent thoughts to him whenever the Thumb Moon cast its shadow over the 1080p sea.

Author holding his thumb against the right joystick, illustrating how close it gets to the Asus ROG Ally's touchscreen. — Apparently, my big thumbs get very active when I'm moving the camera in *The Witcher 3*, enough to trigger a phantom single-click tap on the touchscreen. Credit: Kevin Purdy

You can, of course, disable a touchscreen in Windows 11 through a series of tiny-target Device Manager taps on the Ally's 7-inch screen. Someone could even make a batch script or tiny executable that enables or disables the touchscreen on the fly. Or Asus could add a touchscreen toggle to the Command Center, which pops out roughly 95 percent of the time that you click its left-side button, or it could allow me to set that up in the Ally's confusing per-game profile system.

But when I have time to devote to involved, graphically intensive games, the last thing I want to do is fix up a Windows installation—and an awkwardly scaled one at that. I find it easier to install, launch, and configure games on Valve's Steam Deck, a handheld PC rooted in Arch Linux, than on the Ally's combination of Windows 11 and Asus' own Armoury Crate software. I legitimately forgot my Steam Deck had a touchscreen until I ran Windows 11 on it for side-by-side comparisons. Asus has a lot more work to do before its device reaches that kind of game-focused flow.

When you're inside a game, the Ally performs better than nearly any device its size—you'll see that in the benchmarks. But everything else about my experience with the Ally makes it hard to recommend as a $700 device you can buy from Asus this month. If you want to get 39 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 instead of 33 with the same settings on the Steam Deck or eke out some ray tracing at just over 30 frames per second, the Ally can do that. The same goes if you're desperate to play Windows-only, cheat-detecting PC games like Destiny 2 on your couch (and you've decided against high-end streaming).

But most people should probably wait until Asus, like Valve before it, gets a lot of feedback and hopefully improves its software. Not that some hardware fixes couldn't help, too.

The Asus ROG Ally, in your hands

Size and weight

The Asus "Republic of Gamers" Ally is far less unwieldy than its name, at 1.34 pounds (608 grams), 11 inches (280 mm) across, 4.3 inches (111 mm) vertically, and less than .83 inches (21 mm) deep. It weighs about 1.5 times as much as the full-size Nintendo Switch (with two Joy-Cons attached), and it's just a bit wider and deeper. It's slightly less wide than the Steam Deck, just about as tall, and less than half as deep at its deepest point, the holding handles. And it weighs 60 grams less.

Where those 60 grams are distributed matters, though. When we reviewed the Steam Deck, we said its weight was "distributed evenly enough to be almost unnoticeable," with its deeper grips giving "middle, ring, and pinky fingers room to brace the system without cramping one another." I have larger hands, so when I'm holding the Ally, my pinky fingers are often hanging off the bottom of the device back, sharing maybe one-third of the weight with my palms and ring fingers. As noted above, my thumbs can easily over-reach the thumbsticks, which are vertically offset from one another, so that my left palm grips the device more than the right. After an hour-long session with Hitman III, my right pinky and ring fingers were moderately numb.

Because of shallower grips and hand placement, it feels like the Ally's weight is more distributed toward the middle of the device, whereas the Steam Deck feels like two small weights you're holding with each hand. People with smaller hands might not notice this as much. Given what we know about handheld gaming PC battery life, it's less of an issue than on a Switch, or even an iPad, unless you're going to play plugged in for hours. There's a lot more to designing a good-feeling handheld PC than weight.

Buttons, sticks, and other controls

The Ally has two joysticks, and they're offset from one another, Switch-style, so that the left stick is higher up, and the right is just above center. There are A/B/X/Y buttons, a disc-style directional pad, bumpers and triggers on top of each side, and two grip buttons on the back. The "start" and "select" buttons are tiny little buggers on the sides of the screen, very close to two specialty buttons that trigger Asus' Command Center and Armoury Crate interfaces.

Command Center is a pop-in menu on the left that, while covering the screen, is quick to dismiss if you accidentally trigger it. If you click the Armoury Crate button by accident, the game you're playing is minimized, and you're looking at your Big-Picture-style launcher again. This only happened to me once or twice, and both times the game recovered, but it feels like it's ripe for some grief.

I can't say much about their longevity after less than a week, but I wish the thumbsticks on the Ally felt more reliable. Given my experience with potentiometer-based sticks over the last few years, they feel like they're going to need replacing before the device loses its utility. Given how little I know about Asus' repair options, this could be an issue—more on that later.

As noted earlier, the right joystick is placed too close to the screen for my larger, perhaps over-reaching right thumb. I had trouble getting a small range of movement from them. They're looser than an Xbox controller's sticks, and because they're set deeper into the system, the angle on which you're pulling or pushing them is different. There's a mixed advantage there, in that pressing them down for a click requires less force than is typical, but that also means a click is more likely to accidentally happen during movement. I could use them, certainly, but they don't provide a console controller or Steam Deck experience.

I don't like the A/B/X/Y buttons, mostly because they got stuck a few times. This might be something that works itself out, with the resin on the buttons and the chassis rubbing themselves smoother over time. But more than once during my week of playtime, I found one of the buttons half-depressed and tilted in its socket, requiring an attention-grabbing thumb smack to set it right. Like the joysticks, they feel like they have a shallow space to work in, resulting in less travel and springy pushback than on established controllers.

The rest of the buttons feel fine and functional. The paddle-like grip buttons on the back are an improvement over the Steam Deck's, which are much firmer and depressed into the console. I didn't have a chance to try out any gyro controls.

No trackpads

The Steam Deck's trackpads, which are quite good, give the device the ability to accommodate nearly any kind of PC game, so long as you (or a community tester who uploads a scheme) are willing to fiddle. The Ally has a touchscreen, and it has joysticks, but it does not have trackpads. You can remap your controller in Armoury Crate to nearly any keyboard functions, but a trackpad is never going to emerge from the Ally's narrow sides (nor additional grip buttons to offload a bunch of key presses). If you're a fan of point-and-click strategy, adventure, or other similar titles, the Ally doesn't have any tricks up its sleeve to improve those games' controller function.

Asus ROG Ally screen compared to Steam Deck — Unedited shot of Asus ROG Ally (bottom) compared to a Steam Deck screen. Credit: Kevin Purdy

The screen

It's hard to quibble with the Ally's display, which outshines the Steam Deck and non-OLED Switch by a generation or two. It's a sharp 1080p, 16:9 display with a 30–120 Hz refresh rate, 7 ms response time, FreeSync capability, and a maximum brightness of 500 nits. It feels much closer to the (Gorilla) glass than those systems, with notably less light bleed. So even though it shares a maximum brightness with the Steam Deck, it doesn't look the same, especially under brighter lights (and especially if you don't have the highest-end Deck, with its anti-glare etched screen.

The touchscreen is plenty sensitive and fairly accurate. You will almost never want to use it, though, especially when dealing with the underlying Windows 11 OS that is scaled to a teenager's eyesight and games that are almost never built for it. More on that experience later on.

Speakers, microphones, and rumble

The two front-firing speakers on the Ally are impressive, especially for the mobile gaming field. I rarely felt the need to grab headphones while I was playing, unless my wife was around and giving me looks. Asus claims its "Smart Amp technology" allows the Ally to push louder sounds without distortion and that its Dolby Atmos capabilities create "a surround-like experience." That's a bit rich for two speakers the size of SD cards and shallower than USB sticks. But for situations where you don't need headphones, they sound fine.

I didn't get to try out the Ally's two-way noise cancellation microphones, which are supposedly powered by "AI" (in the broad way we all now conflate "algorithms" with "AI," I'm guessing). It's an interesting feature for a device that seeks to appeal to a wider gaming audience. I have to imagine those who take their online multiplayer sessions seriously will be using a headset (and Ethernet), but I would've been happy to try it out with Deep Rock Galactic, Raft, or similar friendly runs.

Ports, connectivity, and video-out

The Ally offers most of the connectivity I'd want from a handheld gaming system: a micro SD slot, a headphone jack, and USB-C. There's a port that looks like a DisplayPort, but it's too thin to fit a cable. That's a port for Asus' XG Mobile line, an external GPU and dock that would let you use the Ally as a desktop or upgrade its graphics much further. I won't spend much time considering these $1,000–$2,000 devices other than to say that if you already own one, I guess it's nice that you can dock your Ally and work from a weird little Windows machine.

The Wi-Fi 6E built into the Ally and a GeForce Now Ultimate account allowed me to play a couple of streaming games for an hour with no perceptible glitches. I was sitting less than 20 feet from a mesh network node for most of it, but even moving around a couple times on standing breaks, the connectivity kept up. The Bluetooth (5.2) inside connects well enough, though getting it to behave inside the Ally's software is another matter.

Close-up image of ROG mini dock for Asus ROG Ally — The little guy that taught me how bad an idea it is to connect your miniature Windows PC to a TV, then try to connect a Bluetooth controller. Credit: Kevin Purdy

Docking the Ally to a TV and dreading it

My Ally unit shipped with a ROG Gaming Charger Dock that has three ports: USB-C (video in and 65 W power out), HDMI 2.0 (video out), and USB 2.0 (for peripherals). At first, I wondered why Asus made the space for a 2.0 port; surely a Bluetooth controller would be enough for most people. But then, I've never designed and shipped a gamepad computer that runs Windows.

I have an Xbox One wireless controller, a broadly compatible device. I tried to connect it through the Armoury Crate software's Bluetooth interface. This took a few refreshes and tries, but it eventually connected, and I could move around the Crate launcher as if I was using the Ally's own controls. Then I launched The Witcher 3, and the game refused to see the controller. But wait! There's an option in the Command Center to toggle the "Embedded Controller," so I turned that off. Now I had no controller at all.

I used the Ally's touchscreen to minimize the game, then tried disconnecting/forgetting and reconnecting the Xbox controller in Crate. Except Windows' Bluetooth settings still remembered my controller, so Crate didn't see it as a new device. I tapped another dozen tiny Windows icons to undo that. Back in Crate, I tried disabling the embedded controller before connecting the Xbox controller, and this time, it seemed to work.

Later, I made the huge mistake of wanting to go TV-only, disabling the Ally's own screen when connected, so I set this up in Windows' display settings. But there's no way (that I can find) of getting back to Crate from a third-party controller; tapping the Xbox button on my controller only brought up a kind of overlay menu for screenshots, streaming, and volume control. You're better off leaving the Ally running, screen-on, touchscreen enabled, for when something inevitably goes wrong.

Or just plug an old mouse or something into that USB 2.0 port, perhaps, as a necessary backup.

Benchmarks and real game performance

The Ally is a handheld gaming PC that wants to be benchmarked—especially against the Steam Deck. It runs Windows, it has a brand-new AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip inside (codenamed "Phoenix"), and it looks great on a bar chart. (A non-Extreme Z1-based ROG Ally is launching at some point, though Asus hasn't provided details on that model yet.) [Update, 1:30pm 5/11: The Z1 model has shown up on Best Buy for $600.]

The only real point of comparison for the Ally is the Steam Deck. To put them on a reasonably even field, I loaded Windows 11 onto a brand-new Samsung A2/U3 micro SD card, loaded that SD card into the Steam Deck, and ran benchmark suites like Geekbench and PC Mark on both devices. In Windows, you can only really mess with the Steam Deck's basic power profile: "Best Performance," "Balanced," or "Power Efficiency." I set the Steam Deck to "Best Performance" before running its CPU/GPU benchmarks. I was able to load Geekbench's suites on the Steam Deck's Linux desktop and run them there, too; it made a very marginal difference. The Steam Deck was always running at 60 Hz and 60 frames per second in Windows.

The Ally has three basic power modes—"Turbo," "Performance," and "Silent"—which are activated through the Command Center. I tested each of these, keeping the screen at 1080p and 120 Hz for Turbo, switching to 1080p and 60 Hz for Performance, then testing 720p and 60 Hz for Silent, attempting to make what I'd guess are common trade-offs for different battery life levels. (I also should have offered tests where the screen and refresh rate were static, showing more pure differences between each mode; I will add those here soon.) Both devices were plugged into their native power adapters while testing.

What you’re seeing is the jump from four AMD Zen 2 CPU cores to eight Zen 4 cores, and from eight RDNA 2 graphics compute units to 12 RDNA 3 units. Neither of these systems is even close to approaching the graphics power of, say, a GTX 1080ti from 2017. But it’s a big leap forward, in just a little more than a year. How does that translate to actual game frames? Let’s take a look.

Games performance

While the Ally demands to be synthetically benchmarked, it's a bit more reticent about running games' own benchmarks. The Z1 Extreme SoC inside hasn't been seen by most developers, to be fair. But it seems like the Ally's power management schemes, at least at launch, conflict with some games' engines.

In Hitman 3, for example, the Ally could crank out 95 frames per second while running a benchmark on the Dubai level on Turbo mode with everything set to Medium. I turned on ray-tracing features (sun shadows and reflections), and the benchmark would crash. When I lowered to Performance mode, I was able to complete that ray-tracing test, though obviously at a less-impressive spec.

Cyberpunk 2077 similarly crashed when I tried to run ray-tracing-enabled benchmarks while on Silent mode. Few people would try that, of course, but I wanted a number for comparison. We saw similar issues benchmarking games with a pre-release Steam Deck. In places where I was able to run game settings across a variety of Ally settings and the Steam Deck, you can see the differences.

The Ally's best bang for the buck is in ray-tracing modes, where it can deliver 30-ish frames per second while the Steam Deck chugs. On more modest modes, you'll get a marginal performance gain, or you can more easily switch to a lower-battery-drain mode without taking much of a noticeable hit. These kinds of quirks, along with the pain of loading games onto an SD-card-based Windows install on Steam Deck, kept me from benchmarking more games during my review window.

[Update, 1:30pm 5/11: I've relabeled the prior benchmarks below so that it's more clear what resolution and refresh rate they were running under. I'm also adding another set of benchmarks, this time with a bit more "apples to apples" data: 720p and 60Hz rates on each Cyberpunk 2077 test, on the Ally and Steam Deck running SteamOS. I also ran 720p and 60Hz rates for each Ally profile on Hitman 3, but that game does not want to allow the Deck to go to 720p, perhaps owing to a slightly different aspect ratio.]

Battery life

Time to descend a bit from the lofty heights of synthetic benchmarks. Asus put a 40 Watt-hour battery inside the Ally and says its "temperate stress tests" show that, when it's not plugged in, the Ally draws 30, 15, and 9 watts in Turbo, Performance, and Silent modes, respectively. At a glance, that suggests anywhere from 1.3 to a bit over 4 hours in battery life, depending on your mode.

Chart showing power draw and CPU/GPU temperatures on the Asus ROG Ally — Chart showing Asus' tested power draw, temperature, and clock ratings for each mode of its Ally handheld system. Credit: Asus

With the games I've played over the past week—The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman 3, and Desta—I've been getting much closer to 1.5 or 2 hours in real battery life than 4. One Witcher session lasted 1 hour and 28 minutes on Performance mode. A Hitman session cranked up to High graphics on Turbo mode went 1 hour and 8 minutes. The only time I've seen more than 2.5 hours of battery life on the Ally is when I ran PCMark's "Modern Office" battery test, which showed 3 hours and 57 minutes of document editing and fake video calls.

Battery life charts for Ally and Steam Deck — PCMark 10 battery benchmarks for the Asus ROG Ally and Steam Deck (running Windows).

If you're paying $700 for the Ally, I presume you don't need it for Stardew Valley or Shovel Knight. You'll probably want to push it, or at a minimum, coast along in Performance mode. If you take the device out of your house, you'll need to bring a charger or a beefy power pack. That's not a dealbreaker for everybody, but given what we saw in our battery benchmarks, the Ally is not that different from the Steam Deck. Many Deck owners, having the same 40 Wh battery, compensate by lowering their refresh rate and/or frames per second to 40 or 45, or using a handful of other tools offered in a pop-in sidebar. The Ally offers a frame rate limiter in its Command Center, though I had intermittent success at getting it to work.

Armoury Crate and the Command Center

When you boot up the Ally, you see a Windows icon, a Windows login screen, and then, after a moment, Armoury Crate. Gamers with Asus hardware likely know that name as a utility for managing performance, lights, and other options. On the Ally, it's intended to be the only thing you need to launch all your games. It comes preloaded with links to the major gaming libraries: Steam, Xbox, Epic, GOG, Ubisoft Connect, and EA. There's a dedicated button for Armoury Crate just below the Start/menu button.

Asus wants the Ally experience to be more like that of a Switch, or Steam's own Big Picture mode, than Windows 11 shrunk down to a 7-inch screen. Unfortunately, the company has a lot more work to do on that front.

It's probably not a roadblock for anybody who would pay $700 for a portable gaming PC, but clicking to "add" a library to Crate simply opens up an Edge browser to a download page. You'll run through a Windows setup process like any other, using your joysticks or fingers to click gray buttons. You'll have to navigate those kinds of menus whenever you install something, especially if the software installs side-tools or runtime libraries or the like.

Once you're logged in, games you install from each library generally add themselves to the Crate menu. When you launch a game, it might have its own launcher window. Crate switches itself from "Desktop" mode to "Control" mode when you launch a game, which makes your joystick-controlled cursor disappear. You'll need to either tap or switch it back to "Desktop" to get your joystick cursors back. Once you do that, will you switch over to the game or remain in Windows, having to either mouse or tap near the bottom to pull up the auto-hiding taskbar? It's a dice roll.

*The Witcher 3*, launching from the GOG launcher, inside the Armoury Crate launcher, leaving the user to have to pull up from the bottom and tap the icon to actually *play* the game. Credit: Kevin Purdy

If you've read this far, you've heard me complain numerous times about using a finger to hit tiny targets. As an experienced Windows user, you might ask, "Why don't you simply right-click on the desktop, click 'Display settings,' and change the scale to something bigger?" You can do this, but it cuts Armoury Crate off inside its window, and it refuses to resize, even after restarting it—or restarting the system itself.

There are lots of little things like this, all of them reminding you of exactly what Asus does not want you to think this is: Windows, Switch-style.

Armoury Crate itself also needs more work. I've already mentioned requests like more Command Center options for touchscreens and better external controller integration and guidance. There are lots of settings if you want to change how the RGB rings around each joystick function—unless you want them to stop randomly flashing at you while the device is asleep. I managed to get them to stop flashing (twice short, once long) while plugged in (EET in Morse code?).

But they still just light up every so often while the device is unplugged and asleep. I see you, Ally. You are very colorful and slightly edgy. Please, go to sleep.

Command Center opened on top of a Hitman 3 screen — The Ally's Command Center, which pops in from the left side whenever you click its dedicated button. Credit: Ars Technica

The Ally's Command Center is more of a success. Most of the time, if not every time, it flings out from the left side of the screen, giving you access to power modes, control toggles, brightness, an FPS and CPU MHz count, and other tools. Notably, the toggles for 1080p/720p and the FPS limiter won't always work, and you'll still have to change these in games (Asus said it is considering altering or removing the resolution toggle).

So did the Asus ROG Ally kill my Steam Deck?

Asus ROG Ally

$700 at Best Buy $600 at Best Buy

I wrote a couple weeks ago about how, despite having only recently purchased a Steam Deck, I wasn't too concerned that the ROG Ally would "kill" it. Now that I've had some hands-on time with the Ally, most of what I wrote holds up.

Yes, the ROG Ally is faster than the Steam Deck, and it has a better screen. It can pull off a minimum viable ray-tracing game where the Deck can't, and it pushes more frames on the same settings. If that's the most important thing for you—frames per second, pixels per inch, in purely handheld form—then you can likely make the mental leap from a $400–$650 Steam Deck to the $700 Ally with the Extreme chip.

But you definitely don't have to buy it now. You could wait to see how game makers, Asus, and maybe Microsoft itself work to smooth out the Ally's rough edges. You might hold off until people share the most optimal settings for popular games, as they've done with the Steam Deck. You should see if Asus gets less cagey about offering parts and repair services for a $750 device you hold in your hands. And you're all but guaranteed to see some neat mods and alternate OS options crop up.

In the meantime, I'll keep exploring The Witcher's continent from my Steam Deck. It's not as smooth, but it's far more predictable.

Listing image: Kevin Purdy

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Kevin Purdy Senior Technology Reporter

Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch.

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