I've been a PC gaming fan since I was old enough to start receiving issues of PC Gamer from my school's magazine sale drive. So when handheld gaming PCs became commonplace I was ecstatic.
Getting to play even the best PC games on my Asus ROG Ally when I'm on a flight or waiting for an appointment is a dream come true for my teenage self. But there is one thorny problem that keeps rearing its head when you're gaming on the go with a portable PC: battery life.
I know because I've been covering and reviewing laptops for nearly 20 years, so I've had a lot of time to think about the best ways to eke a little more battery life out of a portable PC. And while the best handheld gaming consoles don't feel like PCs because they're easy to pick up and play, inside they're basically just handheld laptops with buttons instead of a keyboard.
Knowing how to tune a laptop's power settings for maximum battery life has helped me fine-tune my Asus ROG Ally, which runs a full version of Windows 11 on a handheld 1080p screen. If you're not careful a few hours of a demanding game like Doom Eternal can eat through your Ally's battery, but if you follow these simple tips for optimizing either the ROG Ally or the more powerful Asus ROG Ally X, I think you'll be able to game longer on the go.
Turn down the screen brightness
In our Asus ROG Ally review, we celebrated how bright and colorful the handheld's 7-inch 1080p screen can get. But when you're trying to minimize power draw, it's best to dim it as far as you can stand.
This is probably one of the more obvious things you can do to cut down how much battery your Ally is using, but I wanted to call it out first for two reasons.
First, it really does make a noticeable difference if you can manage to turn down the screen brightness by 20% to 30% or more. You could get as much as an extra half-hour of game time that way. And if you don't really need the screen that bright it's basically free power you're getting back.
But sometimes turning down your Ally's screen brightness enough to make a difference in battery life does mess up your ability to enjoy a game, which is the second reason I wanted to mention this first: all of these tweaks are likely going to impair your fun in some way. To get the most gaming time possible out of your Ally, you're going to have to accept some compromises, like a dimmer screen and a less capable device.
To lower the brightness on your Ally, simply hit the Command Center button (the little button on the left side of the Ally's screen emblazoned with a triangle) and use your finger to drag the brightness slider down until the screen is just barely bright enough to make out details.
Disable all notifications, lighting, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
This is basically just laptop reviews 101, but if you want to get your Ally's battery to last as long as possible I recommend disabling all background services you can, including all notifications as well as your Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios. Also, turn off the handheld's RGB lighting — it just eats battery without giving you anything back but pretty lights.
Obviously, if you're using a Wi-Fi connection to game or download files, you should leave that on, but it's going to drain your battery faster. By disabling Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and all notifications, you cut down on how much work the Ally is doing besides powering the game you're playing, which means less power used.
To disable the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios on your Ally, simply tap the Network button on your Windows 11 taskbar and tap the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth icons until they indicate they're disabled. To disable notifications, just navigate to Settings > Notifications and switch the Notifications setting to Off.
To disable the Ally's RGB lighting, navigate to Command Center > Settings > Lighting > Settings and turn off all lighting options.
Lower the display resolution to 720p
The Ally's default 1080p resolution is lovely, but it's actually a bit of a waste on such a small 7-inch screen. So you can lower the screen's resolution to 720p to use less power. Doing so means the screen is literally working less hard than it would at 1080p. Eve better, you'll probably barely notice the difference on the handheld's display.
To lower the Ally's screen resolution to 720p, simply open the Command Center and tap the Resolution button to toggle between 1080p, 900p and 720p. And if 720p is too painful for you to use, you could try the middle ground of 900p to see if the power savings are worth the extra squinting.
You can also try playing around with AMD Radeon Super Resolution (RSR), a feature you enable or disable in the Ally's Command Center.
RSR basically uses AMD's AI-driven upscaling tech to take a game that's rendering below the screen's native resolution and upscale it to 1080p. So instead of setting the screen's resolution to 720p, you could instead leave it at 1080p, go into the settings of whatever game you're playing and set the game's resolution to 720p.
Then back out, start playing at 720p and enable AMD RSR in the Command Center to have your Ally upscale the lower-quality image to 1080p. In my experience, having AMD RSR on does seem to speed up battery drain, but it's by a small amount and it might be more palatable to you than just knocking the screen resolution down to 720p.
Create a custom power profile
The ROG Ally comes with three different performance modes by default, and they all indicate how much power they draw: Silent (10W), Performance (15W) and Turbo (30W).
You also have two secondary options: Windows, which defaults to whatever power settings you've set in Windows 11, and Manual, which lets you set custom performance settings.
Switching between these power profiles is key to eking out as much performance (and fun) as possible with your Ally. But if you really want the best battery life possible you should make your own custom power profile that draws even less than 10W of power.
Now, you'll want to be careful here and experiment as you go because lowering the power draw much past 7-8W can lead to serious performance issues on even simple games. And if you want to play something even moderately new like Baldur's Gate 3 at a decent framerate, forget about this step.
But when playing older and less demanding games, running on 8W of power or less can help your Ally last the whole plane flight instead of conking out 3/4 of the way through.
To create custom power profiles, open the Armoury Crate app (by either launching it within Windows or tapping the Armoury Crate button to the right of the screen) and navigate to Settings (gear icon) > Performance (fan icon) > Operating Mode.
From there tap the Manual icon to customize your own manual power modes, each with its own distinct settings for SPL, SPPT and FPPT. These are complicated terms, but basically: SPL is how much power the Ally should be capable of maintaining at all times, SPPT is how high it can go for up to 30 seconds or so, FPPT is how high it can boost for up to 2 minutes.
Think of these as ceilings you set for how hard you want your handheld to work. and play around with them to see how raising and lowering them affects performance in your favorite games.
Personally, I've found I can eke out a pretty good time gaming for 3 to 4 hours on a flight by knocking all of the values down to 8W, but I like to play older titles that don't demand much in the way of graphical niceties. Your mileage may vary.
Turn on your FPS limiter
The fact that the ROG Ally's screen has a 120Hz refresh rate is one of its selling points, but that fast refresh rate can also help burn through your battery with no positive return if you're not careful.
Most screens default to 60Hz, and unless you're gaming at more than 60 frames per second, there's not much reason to have your screen refresh faster than 60Hz. Having it set to 120Hz can make scrolling feel smoother and generally make the handheld feel snappier, but it's a small nicety in exchange for higher power consumption.
So unless you really need more than 60 frames per second, turn on the Ally's built-in FPS limiter to disable the 120Hz refresh rate. That will cut down on power consumption without significantly impacting your gaming performance, which is why I typically always have the FPS Limiter on when gaming on battery.
To turn your Ally's refresh rate down from 120Hz to 60Hz, simply open the Command Center and tap the FPS Limiter button until it says 60Hz. Easy!
More from Tom's Guide
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
