This undercover warranty investigation is a one-year follow-up from our series that investigated ASUS for motherboards incinerating AMD CPUs, at the end of which ASUS promised a number of improvements to its then-anti-consumer warranty processes. Spoiler alert: They’re still anti-consumer. We sent our ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme in for warranty repair for issues with the left joystick (“drift”). The device also had a broken microSD card. ASUS then pointed to the world’s tiniest scratch and tried to charge us $200 for it under threat of sending back a disassembled device if we didn’t pay within 5 days. It felt like extortion. If you’re wondering whether ASUS is worth buying, the answer for anyone who values support should be “no.”
We have now tested ASUS’ motherboard and ROG Ally warranty and RMA processes. Both have been anti-consumer experiences.
Fair warning, don’t mess with the internals of the device because - as a Chinese company - their warranty is prohibitively anti-repair, but…
OneXPlayer. Specifically the OneXFly. More ergonomic than the steam deck, far more powerful than both it and the ROG Ally, has an SD Card slot that doesn’t fry itself like the Ally, and comes with a decent warranty for what is essentially the Chinese Lamborghini of GamerDecks. Again, don’t try to fix it yourself, it works well but if anything goes wrong (I had to wipe the SSD and didn’t know how to do so without removing it physically) then you’re screwed.
If you have big hands, just buy a Steam Deck OLED. It’s about as good as it gets for customer service to rely on Valve.