- This is a TLDR of the ROG Pulse Q&A. This is only part 2, Please note this is a TLDR and not their full responses, Some things may be paraphrased and some things might not have been translated correctly so please keep this in mind. You’ll find their pulse video at the end of this post.
JAKE KULINSKI
Why weren’t Hall Effect sticks used in the Ally X?
WHITSON GORDON
- We knew were going to replace the sticks. People wanted tighter sticks with better durability. We chose to go with high-quality calibrated Alp sticks that are rated for five million Cycles. the particular model that we’re using on the Ally X is really high durability and it’s cost-effective. It means it gives you a good bang for your buck on the device you buy. We want reliable Workhorse cost-effective parts that are going to last a long time that’s what the majority of people want and need.
- The beauty is that many of these are upgradeable parts we built the Ally X so if you are an Enthusiast you can kind of hot rod your ally in multiple ways Third parties see a market for something like Hall Effect sticks on the Rog Ally X they will make them and you can buy them and whatever other parts you care about and then upgrade the device yourself and I’m already aware in this particular example of third party Hall Effect sticks that should be in the works for folks like you. We aren’t offering them stock but you can definitely put them in and make that a part of your total Ally experience and I’m sure some of the danger zone folks in the Ally Community are working on plenty of other mods for this imaginary balls to the wall Ally as well.
Will they(hall effect sticks) be considered for future Ally iterations?
- Nothing is certain nothing is impossible some things are unlikely but I can’t really tell you which things are which.
JAKE KULINSKI
Can the ROG Ally X sticks be swapped into the original Ally how about the battery
WHITSON GORDON
- Most of these parts are not really officially meant to be cross-compatible. The sticks for example use completely different daughterboards. If you look at the insides it’s totally different size and shape and everything so that’s probably not going to work. For things like this, we generally leave it to the modding community to dig into and figure out what’s possible and kind of what lengths they want to go to do those things. You know we want the Ally to be moddable and upgradeable but there are certain things that you know we’re leaving it up to third parties and the modding Community to figure out we’ll make it as kind of easy to dig into as we can and the rest is up to you.
JAKE KULINSKI
Can I pop my original Ally SSD into an Ally X and have it just work? Is the 2230 Drive compatible?
WHITSON GORDON
- Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get answers to everything just yet so we still have some testing that we need to do on our end for some of this what I can say is that in the simplest form. Electrically a 2230 Drive is going to work fine right, it’s the same socket but you may need an adapter to screw it down into the 2280 mount in the Ally X as for if it going to just work I don’t know yet how Windows and Armory crate will respond to that.
JAKE KULINSKI
Is the ram upgradeable?
WHITSON GORDON
- No.
JAKE KULINSKI
How many hours of playtime can we expect from the new battery?
WHITSON GORDON
- This is another one of those questions I don’t have a full answer to. We are still testing this stuff before we can market. Now that said for the battery I’m sure you can probably estimate a ballpark figure if you take the original Ally and extrapolate the fact that we double the size of the battery
JAKE KULINSKI
Does the larger battery allow for more power on the Z1 extreme if the original Ally is a 30 watt maximum can this one do say 45 watt because of the bigger battery?
WHITSON GORDON
- No not really that’s not exactly how it works.
JAKE KULINSKI
Why did you include such a cheap stand in the Box?
WHITSON GORDON
- It would be a cool way to make some of the packing material reusable if we cut a divot in it it could be used as a stand. It was just a cool way to make the Box a bit more eco-friendly while you wait for whatever third-party dock or stand you want to buy if you want to do that now for what it’s worth I’m still using that same cardboard stand that came with my original Ally that I got over a year ago
WHITSON GORDON
Benchmarks wen?
- I don’t know yet, I think a couple of weeks
JAKE KULINSKI
- Definitely closer to launch we’re still about a month out.
WHITSON GORDON
Would you consider a 99.9wh battery since uh that would be the legal limit for TSA?
- Can’t I can’t necessarily speak to future products we consider a lot of things that’s all I can say about products that don’t exist yet
Will there be a special version of Windows 11 customized for your gaming console?
- Nothing to announce on that front at the moment I think the ball is in Microsoft’s Court.
What’s the status of the microSD card reader?
I have now been given the go-ahead to shed a bit more light on the current status so first a little bit of context many of you have noticed that some allies have slightly different motherboards on them than others it’s normal for some products to go through revisions over time right. Sometimes new components can improve efficiency or we you know we need to Source parts from a different supplier and so on and if we Source a different part or a part from a different supplier that goes on and it becomes a new motherboard revision right that’s fairly common so over time we’ll end up with multiple border visions that make their way to a device and in those board divisions we can also address cases like this.
The community has been very active in helping us identify issues surrounding the Allies micro SD card reader and our team has been working on it since the very beginning so here is a timeline of events kind of as they happen right so:
- As soon as the community brought up the issue our team began investigating it right away.
- We had a statement at the time that said that some people thought there may be a correlation with temperature so at the time we released a bios with steeper fan curves as a precaution but after that.
- We started getting RMA units in and we started crunching the numbers now our data from those early units showed a failure rate in the low single digits percentage-wise that coupled with the fact that the issue is quite difficult to reproduce made it hard for us to narrow down the root cause.
- So because we didn’t see a drop in failures with the new fan curves we had to kind of work with our partners and find a different route to finding that root cause right. So what we did was we provided a more consistent supply of power to the SD card reader on one of our board revisions, from there we got those new boards out through our repair centers and then we continued to monitor to see if the failure rates dropped.
- We did see a positive Improvement, the board revision with the more consistent power to the SD reader. It did reduce the SD reader failure rate and while those boards have been in circulation we’ve continued to revise the Allies board even further based on that successful result.
Here’s the current status of things as I’ve been told.
- If you’re experiencing issues with your SD card reader and you RMA’d your ally our team will swap you to the newest board revision to ensure that you’re getting the best experience that we can provide. Those boards will be more widely available for RMA’s in about 6 weeks the most recent Ally units coming out of the factory are also using this later latest Bard division as will the Ally X when it comes to shelves. Right now if your SD card reader is working fine you don’t need to RMA it. A board replacement is only necessary if you’re currently having issues because based on the data we have many people on those older boards we expect aren’t ever going to have issues.
- We know some of you are concerned about what might happen in the future so in addition to that to give you more peace of mind we’ve also extended the Allies warranty in North America to two full years that’s for the entire device not just the SD card reader so if you need to RMA even past that initial one-year period you have that extended warranty backing you up now I know I’ve seen people asking about outside North America if you’re outside North America and you’re already out of your one-year warranty I’m told that you can send a message to https://us.asus.click/supportcase ( [email protected] ) that email address I mentioned earlier and they’ll still take care of you up till the end of this year here so we know that there has been a big lack of transparency over this time.
We’re sorry that we’ve left the community in the dark so long but we hope that this helps provide some insight into kind of how we got here, and where we are now.
JAKE KULINSKI
Can I buy spare parts for the Ally?
WHITSON GORDON
- US is https://www.a-accessories.com/
- Europe it’s https://en.accessoires-asus.com/
JAKE KULINSKI
Will there be a Thunderbolt XG Mobile or XG Station?
WHITSON GORDON
- I don’t have anything
to announce on this yet
JAKE KULINSKI
Is there a difference on the Ally X speakers?
WHITSON GORDON
- The Ally X model uses bigger chambers for the speakers so it allows them to go even louder! sweet cool little bonus
JAKE KULINSKI
How can the cooling be better if the fans are smaller?
WHITSON GORDON
- We made the fans smaller but the fans have thinner blades than they did before so while the unit is smaller they’re still able to push a lot of air.
- The second thing is that we added that new vent along the top with the cutouts in the fan housing so you get a bit more of that directed air that targets the areas you want.
- The heat pipes on the Alli X are also a bit thicker than on the Alli which makes them more efficient at transferring heat.