Asus swears it’s completely fixed the ROG Ally’s battery life

When Asus handed out the first units of its handheld ROG Alley gaming PC to reviewers in May, it’s fair to say that the results…were not overwhelmingly positive. Some reviewers liked the product, while others were largely unhappy. But across the gamut, there was one thing nearly everyone agreed on: Battery life sucked.

ledgeK’s Sean Hollister clocked a maximum of four hours from the device, while his ceiling on the competing Steam Deck (which has a similarly sized battery) is closer to seven.

A wave of criticism raged in the online sphere. About 10 percent of the original buyers, according to the recollection of Gallip Fu, Asus’ global marketing director, returned shortly after the initial wave of reviews.

“We think okay,” Fu says. “We know we need to focus on the important things we need to fix.”

After the first wave of reviews, Fu and his team had “some very serious meetings”. Fu recalls, “We spent a lot of time really looking at the issue and trying to figure out a solution.”

The issue, the team eventually determined, was misplaced priorities. Asus spent a lot of time and energy fine-tuning the Ally’s performance in 50W and 30W scenarios (an area where it outperformed the Steam Deck, in our testing) at the expense of optimizing power consumption at lower wattages Was. The latter, it turned out, was something both reviewers and potential buyers cared a great deal about.

“Where Steam Deck did a really good job was optimizing overall power consumption at super, super low wattage, even down to 9W, down to 7W,” says Fu. “That’s their strength. We know that’s something we definitely need to improve on.” Youtuber Dave2D has Already tried some new software updates and reports that performance in some sports has also improved by up to 20 percent while the Ally was running at 9W or 15W.

Fu promises that Asus has been working hard on the battery life issue since those fateful meetings. He estimates that those who receive the device in June will see a 10 to 20 percent improvement in battery life compared to what they’ll see in May due to various software tweaks made by his team.

All told that’s a somewhat modest increase in power that could well leave an ally dying very well before the steam deck. (Fu acknowledges this—”we don’t want to promise much,” he clarifies.) Still, given the disaster that many reviewers saw in the Ally’s battery life, any move toward greater efficiency is in the right direction. is a step in – and the Steam deck has certainly shown just how much software updates can do to improve our impressions.

As far as what specific changes were made? Fu’s name is one: As long as users get the Associate in hand, they’ll have the ability to shut down some of the AMD Z1 Extreme processor’s eight cores during gameplay. This feature wasn’t available to early reviewers, and it’s easy to see how it would reduce CPU power consumption. Still, the benefit of such a feature seems to depend heavily on the implementation – if it requires booting into the bios, for example, it will make it less attractive and less likely to save power than if it Maybe done from the menu when the device is on. We’ll of course continue testing the device as soon as the software update rolls out.

Still, the mechanics aren’t as interesting to Foo as the message. First and foremost, he wants Ellie’s doubters to know that their criticisms have been heard and that he is working on them.

“The whole team, they’re all in different subreddits, all the important forums, all the community discussions in Facebook groups, Discords, WhatsApp groups. We’re trying to find out what end users and fans think,” says Fu . On widespread battery life concerns: “They’re fair.” And though it may take a while, he’s determined to release a product that rivals Steam Deck. “We are all big fans of Valve and Steam Deck because they are the centerpiece of the PC gaming industry,” he says. “We are striving for all supporters of ROG Companion. We will not let them down.”

Ah, but what about sticking a bigger battery in the thing? (It certainly looks like there’s enough room for one inside). No. That’s off the table. “We need to keep it as small and compact as possible,” Fu says decisively. “Adding a slightly larger battery will improve battery life by 10 or 15 percent, but you’ll drastically increase the overall weight of the device.” So is that.