ASUS has confirmed that its ROG Ally handheld gaming console has issues with its microSD card reader, and that the problem stems from the device’s thermal design. The admittance was made by Whitson Gordon via Discord.
Gordon says that ASUS confirmed via internal testing that, under certain thermal stress conditions, the microSD card reader on the ROG Ally may “malfunction”, which is a mild way of saying that the heat generated from the handheld was literally burning up cards that were present in the slot.
To provide some context, several ROG Ally owners had been complaining about the handheld’s microSD card slot doing one of two things: not detecting a storage unit that is slotted in, or cooking the card and ultimately killing them. And trust us: we know the pain of losing an external storage device, especially one with a high storage capacity that costed us an arm and a leg to purchase.
In light of the microSD card destroying heat of the ROG Ally, Gordon goes on to say that, to alleviate the issue, ASUS will be “releasing an update that further fine-tunes the default and minimum fan speeds on the device to improve reliability while keeping fan noise in check, as we know this is a concern for many of you.”
That last part of the statement will be interesting to see how ASUS will deal with it. In our review of the ROG Ally, one thing we fell short in mentioning was the noise level of the console, generated by its Dual Intelligent cooling system. Compared to the Steam Deck, the console’s fans was barely audible, which is a good thing since the last thing we wanted was to have a fighter jet in our hands, warming up its engines and preparing for take off.
(Source: TweakTown, Tom’s Hardware)
