As far as impressive hacks go, this one is more than enough for your daily quota. You might remember the ROG Ally, a Steam Deck-like x86 gaming console that’s graced our pages a couple lf times. Now, this is a big one – from the ROG Ally community, we get a fully open-source eGPU adapter for the ROG Ally, built by reverse-engineering the proprietary and overpriced eGPU sold by Asus.
We’ve seen this journey unfold over a year’s time, and the result is glorious – two different PCBs, one of them an upgraded drop-in replacement board for the original eGPU, and another designed to fit a common eGPU form-factor adapter. The connector on the ROG Ally is semi-proprietary, but its cable could be obtained as a repair part. From there, it was a matter of scrupulous pinout reverse-engineering, logic analyzer protocol captures, ACPI and BIOS decompiling, multiple PCB revisions and months of work – what we got is a masterpiece of community effort.
Do you want to learn how the reverse-engineering process has unfolded? Check out the Diary.md – it’s certainly got something for you to learn, especially if you plan to walk a similar path; then, make sure to read up all the other resources on the GitHub, too! This achievement follows a trend from the ROG Ally community, with us having featured dual-screen mods and battery replacements before – if it continues the same way, who knows, maybe next time we will see a BGA replacement or laser fault injection.
Considering ASUS will void your warranty over a scratch on the case I wouldn’t touch one with a 10 foot pole
If that’s true, your warranty is worthless and you had might as well mod it to your heart’s content.
It is true, but I’d shift it to mean you should figure out small claims court should they illegally deny your warranty like that.
I’ve sent mine for RMA twice without issue. I’ve even removed the warranty void stickers inside the device when I replaced the SSD with a 4TB one. Tight fit, but it works. I just reinstall the original one but I could not fix the warranty void stickers on a few of the internal screws. No issues with warranty service.
Those stickers aren’t legally enforceable.
Thanks to Stable Diffusion, I’ve been wanting to add a better GPU to my ROG tablet. This doesn’t only work with thr Ally.
What the hell is this post even. Can we get the rest of whatever you were going to say? Or are u ai?
@Adam. Christopher is saying the dock is compatible with an ASUS ROG tablet as well as the Ally.
That does increase it’s uselfulness. Hope occulink or its successor saves us from all these proprietary junk. I had an Alienware once with a GPU dock connecter. Also proprietary :facepalm: although I guess the board of directors won’t let you have a budget for anything cool without a promise you are locked into their ecosystem.
its not only true, they will hold your device ransom to get it back
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pMrssIrKcY
This is completely external, and it uses their proprietary cable. Might as well say they void the warranty when you plug into a dock. Also they can’t void the warranty if you change the ssd. Just because their warranty service is bad doesn’t mean this trips it.
Also I imagine many here buy second-hand to avoid the depreciation hit (and/or to afford it at all!). Getting it used more than offsets the worth of a warrantee, then you just repair it yourself as necessary.
I mean its cool
But you’d be crazy to willingly buy an ally. I know its technically better than the steam deck but asus’ track record is abysmal and a propriatrary egpu connector is such a… “impolite” move.
It is indeed impressive and cool. However I’m not sure you can claim the Ally is ‘technically’ better than the deck, more parallel than one really being better than the other. As while there are some metrics the Ally is better it doesn’t have the same performance at the lower power brackets nor the same controller quality with the steam controller trackpad elements to be good for virtually any game for instance.
So the Ally (and all the other handhelds on the more stock AMD APU) only make sense if you want to crank the power consumption up to gain their better performance potential at the expense of battery powered playtime. Which is a perfectly valid thing to prefer, especially if the one game you really must be able to play won’t perform well enough on the deck in its lower power modes. But more a compromise than outright better.
That said I do agree I’d not get an ASUS one with all the recent reports around them. But there are a collection of others making similar things. I think going for that sort of product now I’d probably lean GPD as they are reportedly at least a better company to deal with for their customers and make some more interesting form factors of the concept than just the controller with a screen stuck in the middle. With all their models supporting normal eGPU docks as far as I can tell…
I mean technically better as in yes, its got better specs but a million more downsides in comparison
It is a real shame Valve didn’t add a USB4/TB connector to the Deck. Would make docked more so much more useable.
that port can push 10gb a sec, what the hell are you doing with it!?! good lord its a 300 dollar computer….