ASUS ROG Ally Owners Get A Big Warranty Extension For SD Storage Woes
We're big fans of the ASUS ROG Ally around here. It's not only one of the best-performing gaming handhelds in existence currently, but it's also one of only a very select few (including the Ayaneo KUN but excluding the Legion Go and Steam Deck OLED) to have a variable-refresh-rate display. That means that the sometimes-gnarly frame times you can get out of the integrated graphics on these machines don't result in terrible vsync judder or screen tearing.
It does have one major hardware flaw, though. The design of the ROG Ally places the micro-SD card reader directly above one of the exhaust vents for the system's cooling hardware. This is thought to be the reason that the Ally can both cook MicroSD cards to death, and destroy its own card reader. Our own ROG Ally test machine suffered such a fate, destroying an expensive 512GB Samsung PRO SD card and taking the device's card reader with it.
Well, if you're in the same boat—and you're in the US—don't despair. ASUS has elected to extend the warranty period on the ROG Ally systems to a full two years from the purchase date. If your handheld's MicroSD card reader has failed, you can send it in to ASUS for a repair at no cost. Furthermore, if your Ally killed your memory card, ASUS will refund you the cost of that, too—as long as you can present proof of purchase.
This is an encouraging move from ASUS, a company that has at times struggled with the perception of its customer service in the US. Offering repairs not only for the device but reparations for destroyed storage media goes a long way toward salving the pain of folks who may have lost media to the poor design of the Ally's microSD card slot. It won't replace any lost data, but hopefully you had backups, right?
ASUS says that it has resolved the issue with the Ally through a combination of physical changes to the design and alterations to the system's firmware that adjust minimum fan speeds. We haven't verified these claims for ourselves, but if you have an Ally and you get it fixed, we'd be curious to see if the issue crops up again. Let us know in the comments about your ROG Ally card slot story.
