The Asus ROG Best friend used to be the primary true Steam Deck challenger; life I’d argue it fell a minute trim, it legitimately advanced the climate of inexpensive Home windows hand held gaming with its plugged-in efficiency boosts and clean variable refresh fee display. Now, Asus is starting to divulge its successor: the ROG Best friend X.
Don’t name it an Best friend 2: when it ships in the second one part of the month, the Home windows-based Best friend X may have the similar AMD Z1 Closing chipset and the similar 48–120Hz VRR display. It’s no longer reasonably just like the Steam Deck OLED, the place Valve were given AMD to revise its chip for higher battery moment and balance and added a bigger, brighter, stunning untouched OLED panel with advanced reaction presen and slimmer bezels.
“We’re not looking at 30 to 40 percent more capacity.”
However the newly black-colored hand held may have a considerable battery moment development, Asus SVP Shawn Yen tells The Verge — as a result of Asus will cram a considerably better battery store into the Best friend X’s revised shell. “We’re not looking at 30 to 40 percent more capacity,” he tells me. “We’re looking at way more than that.”
Asus gained’t communicate explicit specifications these days. In lieu, Yen asks me how a lot battery moment I’d realistically like from a revised hand held. I say I’d need to double the worst-case battery moment to 3 hours since I’m recently visible possibly 1.5 hours in video games. “It won’t disappoint your worst-case scenario,” he tells me.
Yen says battery moment has been the only greatest request since creation; Asus has revealed how the people infrequently straps vast exterior batteries to their handhelds, even supposing the Best friend theoretically had room within for a bigger battery store.
“When we launched [the original Ally], we didn’t have such a clear understanding that the battery might be something people desire more than a lighter-weight device,” he admits.
Battery isn’t the one alternate Asus is speaking about these days; the Best friend X is ready addressing lots of the people’s govern priorities for how one can revise the fresh. “We think about battery and storage, graphics and memory, ports… our goal is to fit as many of those as possible into a device like this,” says Asus senior product supervisor Gabriel Meng.
Once more, disagree specifications these days, however Asus says the Best friend X will have to now have greater than its tide 16GB of RAM as a way to allocate quite a lot of it to the GPU with out impacting the remainder of the machine. It will have to have an extended M.2 2280 SSD slot, so patrons can extra simply to find and buy better SSD upgrades than the tide M.2 2230 permits.
The Best friend X will have to even be much more repairable, with redesigned joystick modules which are extra interchangeable — and upgradable, I believe, if Gulikit steps up? Moment I didn’t get to look it for myself, Asus says the hand-held will probably be relatively heavier because of the bigger battery, with revised grips, and tiny tuning to such things as the D-Habitat, joysticks, and triggers.
Above: a video appearing the interior of the fresh ROG Best friend.
And, life Asus nonetheless gained’t admit that the Best friend’s SD card reader ever had any fault, tells me it’s the similar precise SD card reader it makes use of in its computers, and says it doesn’t consider any problems in truth needed to do with overheating, the Best friend X may have a rearranged motherboard sequence that sounds love it’ll go it clear of the machine’s vents. “We don’t want people to think that’s what we had to do,” Meng says of shifting the SD reader. “We had to move things around the board to make them fit.”
Asus says the Best friend X’s enhancements will come at a price; not like the Steam Deck OLED, which in large part changed Valve’s LCD type on the similar worth issues, the Best friend X will get started at the next worth than the fresh. The fresh 2023 ROG Best friend will even proceed to stay round and might see reductions.
So far as a ROG Best friend 2 is going, Asus is of the same opinion that it has a alike philosophy to Valve: it needs to assemble a real successor when it might do business in a vital efficiency spice up, no longer simply an incremental one.
And life Asus doesn’t plan to promote an o.e.m battery improve for fresh Best friend patrons it has a fat device replace coming for the ones patrons as smartly: Armory Crate SE 1.5 isn’t just an overly unutilized coat of paint and navigation enhancements, it’ll in the end let avid gamers proportion their button mappings for numerous video games with alternative Best friend homeowners.
Asus tells me it nonetheless believes in Home windows. Moment Meng says, “We are very open-minded to looking at other solutions,” and that the corporate does have conversations with Valve, Asus says it has philosophical and logistical causes to stay with Microsoft’s OS, together with a need to have the “inclusiveness of all different game platforms” rather of depending on Steam. I’ll let you know about one of the logistical causes in a date tale.
