I Bought the CHEAPEST ROG Ally on eBay!

[snorts] Hey, what's going on everybody? It's ETA Prime back here again. Today we're going to be taking a look at the cheapest ROG Ally with the Z1 Extreme that I could find on eBay. And I did a lot of searching. This does have a few issues. But one of the big reasons I wanted to do this is because PC part prices, laptops, handhelds, mini PCs, and of course, for the past few weeks, it's been hard to get a new Steam Deck from Valve's website. So, I wanted to see if it would be worth picking something like this up. And by the way, when you check out eBay for, let's say, the Steam Deck OLED, it's actually going for a bit more than the ROG Ally with the Z1 Extreme, and for good reason. I mean, it's definitely the handheld that everybody wants, but the ROG Ally with that Z1 Extreme does have something going for it, and that's performance. It will outperform the Steam Deck, hands down. It's got a much more powerful CPU and GPU. So, with this one, they stated that the right analog stick isn't working. They also stated that they weren't able to test the micro SD card slot, which tells me it probably doesn't work. And we don't have an SSD. And supposedly it does have a Z1 Extreme. We'll have to get into the BIOS in just a second, but it definitely looks like somebody's gotten into this. There are aftermarket screws here, but the biggest reason I picked this up is because I only paid $270 for this thing shipped to the house. And yeah, the uh LED on that right analog stick isn't working. So, we'll have to get in here and see what's going on with it. And just to check that BIOS real quick, yep, it's the Z1 Extreme and they only made a 16 gig version. Keep in mind, they did make two different variants of this. So, you can get the Z1 with six cores and 12 threads. And the CPU isn't the issue on that one. It's the low-end GPU they use. With this, we get the 780M or the 12MP compute unit RDNA3based GPU. I'm going to be adding a 1 TB M.2 SSD, and this takes a 2230, but there's tons of mods for the original ROG Ally. You can actually buy an adapter and add a 2280. I did a video on this when the Ally released. If you want to check that out, I'll leave a link in the description. Might be able to get out cheaper with that. But I pulled this 1 TB from another unit, so I figured we'd just use it here. And I'm not going to be running Windows on this. It looks like AMD may be stopping driver updates for the Z1 Extreme. Uh Lenovo recently announced that they're not going to be releasing any more drivers. Asus did release a newer one, but there's no change log. So, I want to install Steam OS. And the easiest way to go about this for me was to clone my Steam Deck's hard drive directly in the operating system on the Steam Deck. So, I've got a little uh M.2 adapter, just plug in to the USB port on the Steam Deck. You can do it from terminal or you could install something like Etcher and totally clone the full drive to another drive. So, there's actually nothing else that I'll need to do. There's no secure boot with the Steam Deck. So, this drive should theoretically just boot right up and I should be signed into my Steam account. I should have all of my games and everything like that. But if you're doing a fresh install, you'll need a USB drive. You'll download the Steam Deck recovery image, flash it to the USB drive, move back over to your Ally, and install it like any other operating system. Valve has a full tutorial over on their website. And of course, if you still wanted to go with Windows, not an issue. You could install Windows on this. I need to find an M.2 screw to get this thing situated. But now let's tackle that right analog stick. I did pick up a replacement, but I might have just lucked out here. It looks like this is unplugged. And it could be unplugged because it doesn't work. They got in here and just was trying to replace it maybe. So, I'm going to plug it in and see if it works. So, right here, make sure that clip is situated. And if we go over to the other side, you can see that this one's plugged in. So, there's going to be no issue. And the light did come on with that one, but there's a chance it still won't work. Like I mentioned, they probably unplugged in. There are a ton of mods for the ROG Ally. And I'd say one of the big downsides to this handheld out of the box is battery size. It's only got a 40watth battery. And it's definitely small compared to newer handhelds hitting the market with 80Wh batteries. But luckily, there are battery upgrade kits on the market which are really easy to install, like the Jox 65 watt. I think I've even seen a 72 watt floating around somewhere. So, you can upgrade the run time on this. And, you know, if you don't want to get into this and upgrade the battery, you can always add an external battery around back. You can use a little magnetic adapter. I've done it with several different handhelds and it works out pretty well. But, this should boot into Steam OS because I've just cloned my real Steam Deck hard drive onto this hard drive. I shouldn't even have to log in. Like I mentioned, there's no secure boot, but it's taking a little longer than I thought it would. There we go. And yeah, logs me right in. And I've got my games. I've got it set up just like I did on my original Steam Deck. So, this is pretty awesome. You might notice that the light on the right analog stick is now working, but I need to get into the settings to test it. So, from here, we'll go to controller, and it works. That's awesome. I was actually going to upgrade the hallbased analog sticks. It's a pretty simple process once the back's pulled off, but since these are working, I'm going to leave them in place. And I can tell that this has definitely been a used ROG Ally. The analog sticks feel a lot looser than I remember them being on this unit. Now, they were never the best analog sticks on the market with a handheld, but you know, they definitely got you by. The only thing that doesn't work on the original Ally with official Steam OS out of the box is RGB control, but this can be fixed using Decki and a plugin known as Huync. So, I've installed Decki and I already actually had it installed on my original Steam Deck. I just needed to do hu here and now we can control the RGB. But when it comes to like TDP control, it's already built in. We've got three different profiles, plus we can fully adjust that TDP. I jumped in here with my game capture to give you a closer look. And when it comes to TDP control on the original ROG Ally with official Steam OS, it's actually here, right over here in our performance. We've got three modes we can work with. Plus, we've got a manual mode, so low power. We've also got a balance mode and we've got a performance mode. But if we move down here to our TDP limit, we can set this all the way up to 30 watts. And if you really wanted to, you could definitely install a third party plugin like Simple Decki TDP. This will allow us to go up to 40. I'm just going to be using the stock profiles here. So, go back to balanced while I'm messing around here. We can also adjust the GPU clock. It is correct. Up to 2700 MHz. If you were going to take the resolution down in some games and you wanted to do some scaling systemwide, you can do it here from performance in Steam OS. And the last thing I wanted to take a look at here was RAM because I did not check the BIOS for VRAM. I may need to go back and change this, but you can see we've got Steam OS Hollow official Steam Deck 3.9 Z1 Extreme. Oh, yeah. So, we're at eight gigs of VRAM and eight gigs on the system. So, I think I'm going to be good with that. That's how I personally would have set it up, but you can always go down to four or even two from the BIOS if you want. I think uh eight on system, eight on VRAM is really where it's at with this system. I'm afraid to test the SD card slot with any of the SD cards I have because these have been known to burn SD cards up. With that out of the way, let's go ahead and see how this thing performs. I mean, is it going to be worth picking something like this up on eBay or a decent deal? Now, obviously, getting something exactly like this with a supposed broken analog stick, micro SD card not functioning, and no SSD, you will spend a bit more because most of them are going to have the SSD. But if you take a look, you can pick these up for like 350 with a 512 GB M.2 SSD. And if you look at the Steam Deck on eBay right now, that's going for like $100 more. So, this could be a decent deal. Let's get in here and see how this thing performs with all of the Steam OS updates from the past year because it's been a while since I've tested this specific device with Steam OS. But, I do think we're going to see some pretty good performance. Let's go with Let's start out here with Cyberpunk 2077. We're going to test this a couple different ways. And the first way I wanted to test was as close to the Steam Deck as we could get. So, we're at 720p because we've got a 16x9 aspect ratio display instead of a 16x10 like we have on the Steam Deck. We're using the Steam Deck preset. I'm in balanced mode right now. And we're getting a pretty decent frame rate. I mean, I wouldn't mind playing it like this, but we can get a lot more out of this game, especially on the Z1 Extreme. We've got extra power that's on the table, even in balance mode, because we've got those extra cores and a much more powerful iGPU. So, what we can do here is enable FSR frame gen. And now instead of running at 720p, we're at 1080. Still using the Steam Deck preset in balanced mode. And we're seeing mid70s on the FPS. And yeah, there's people out there that just don't like frame gen. They're like, "Oh, you're using frame gen." Well, we're working with a very low-end iGPU. This is not a high-end PC by any means. When you're on a budget, you definitely don't mind using something like this to get a better frame rate out of it, or at least make it feel like it's getting a better frame rate. So now instead of balance mode, I just took it up to performance. This is going to take us up into the high8s and it does feel a lot smoother. Uh you might even be able to see it in the video. It just kind of feels a little more fluid. So yeah, of course this thing can run Cyberpunk really well with some frame gen. And even without if you don't mind playing at 720p, turn that frame rate off so you're not looking at it all the time and you can have fun with this game for sure. Another thing I wanted to take a look at was just low power mode with an easier to run 2D game. So, this is going to pertain to a bunch of games over on Steam, ND2D. So, just in low power mode, I turned the brightness on the screen down a bit. I wanted to see what kind of wattage this thing's pulling, and it looks like we're at around 9.5 watts being drawn from the battery in total. And unfortunately, we've got a small 40watth battery here when you compare it to new handhelds on the market. So, we're not going to get 8 hours of run time out of a 2D game like this. It looks like we'll see around 4 and 1/2 hours of run time playing this game. just like it is with the battery charged up to 100%. I wanted to show off some other games here, so I just set this thing down stationary to make it a little easier on myself. Resident Evil Reququum 1080p medium low mix in performance mode. This does kind of lock down at 60. And if you wanted to use frame gen, you can actually play this at 120. So from the settings, you can lock it. And I've been having a lot of fun with this game on a bunch of different devices. I was even able to emulate this game on Android just two days after it released. But this does run really well on the ROG Ally with Steam OS installed. Elden Ring. I was kind of hoping with all of the uh driver updates, Messa GPU driver updates, that we would be able to hit 60 with this, and it really doesn't seem like we can with the Z1 Extreme. And that's been the case for a long time with this. Even if I was to take this down to 720p low settings, we're still only going to see like 56 to 59. It's really weird how this game works on this chipset. So, I'm at medium 1080 performance mode. I could still play it like this just fine. Here's Spider-Man 2 1080 medium with FSR frame jam on performance mode. This is the way you really want to run it unless you don't mind locking this down at 30. Taking it down to 720p low settings with FSR set to balance. Doesn't look good on any screen, even these smaller screens. So, I don't mind using frame gen with this. And the last one I have here is The Witcher 3 at 1080p medium performance mode without dynamic resolution scale. FSR is set to quality. And when you boot this up on the Steam Deck, it goes to the Steam Deck preset, but it uses dynamic resolution. And that screen's only at 800p. goes well below that. We're at 1080 medium with a little bit of FSR, so we've got a little bit of scaling going, but we're over 70 FPS on average, and it feels awesome on this thing. So, is it worth buying one of these in 2026? Well, it really depends on the end user and the price you can pick this up for. On eBay, you can find the Z1 Extreme version of this with a 512 GB M.2 SSD for $350 to $400. And I really wouldn't spend over 360 for this thing used. And of course, there are other handhelds out there with much larger batteries and better screens. But the problem with those is they're going for $800 to $1,200 depending on which one you're going to pick up. So seeing one of these working coming in at 380, and again, I wouldn't do over 360 for this, it is a pretty decent deal, especially if you're on a budget and you want a handheld. Plus, if you install some thirdparty plugins with Steam OS, you can take the wattage up a bit in dock mode, I'd say. And the aftermarket for this is still popping. Larger batteries, shells, cases. There's a bunch of stuff that you can do with the original ROG Ally. So, in the end, it's really going to be up to you. If you're on a super budget, it is still a great performer, but you're not going to get a ton of battery life out of this 40watth battery. But that's going to wrap it up for this one. If there's anything else you want to see running on this ROG Ally, just let me know in the comments below. And it'd be really cool if you could hit that like button and think about subscribing so you know when I post the next one. And like always, thanks for watching.

I bought the cheapest ROG ally I could find on the eBay and in this video we take a look to see if it’s worth picking one of these up in 2026 the unit that I received didn’t have an SSD and supposedly the right analog stick wasn’t working but either way the ROG ally used on eBay with the Ryzen Z1 extreme can be had for as little as 350 and with PC part prices being outrageous, steam deck availability being very scarce this could be a good option for somebody looking to buy a budget handheld the aftermarket scene for the ROG ally is still there. You can get a bigger batteries, shells, cases, docs, coolers and performance is still on par with newer hand houses with Z2 Ryzen and chips so is it worth buying a used ROG ally in 2026 let’s find out. Buy The ROG Ally on eBay: https://ebay.us/ca3WEZ WOOT also had the Ally On sale open Box: https://howl.link/u6305u0recz6x Follow Me On Twitter: https://twitter.com/theetaprime Follow Me On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/etaprime/ Vip-URCDKey 25% code for software: ETA Windows 11 Pro Key($25):https://biitt.ly/RUZiX Windows 11 Home Key($23):https://biitt.ly/SQKqi Windows 10 Pro OEM Key($20):https://biitt.ly/KpEmf Windows10 Home Key($17):https://biitt.ly/2tPi1 Windows 10 LTSC 2021 Key($15): https://biitt.ly/W564e Office 2019 pro key($63):https://biitt.ly/o0OQT 2016 pro key($32): https://biitt.ly/xWmvn Buy Windows 11 Pro Key at: https://www.vip-urcdkey.com DISCLAIMER: This video and description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you! THIS VIDEO IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY!