Hello fellow devs.
I’m in need of a new machine as I had a little mishap with my notebook. For a long time, I thought on buying a gaming notebook as normally they should have the best hardware for my personal (gaming, light video edit) and professional (full stack web dev) needs.
Next week, Asus will launch the ROG Ally X officially on my country. So, I’m wondering if it could be a viable alternative.
The other possible devices would be ROG Ally (Z1 Extreme) and Lenovo Legion Go, as Steam Deck is not available here.
I work from home for a foreign company. I have a monitor, a wireless keyboard, and a usb trackball already. I bought them to use with a mac mini my previous company lend to me. I do not have a desktop and do not intend to buy one right now.
So… My questions: Does any of you have experience using a handheld device as a main dev machine? Are there any cons I’m not considering?
Thank you!
The ROG Ally X has 12 GB of RAM. That could be an issue if you run lots of VMs, docker images, big databases, etc.
Connectivity for external devices seems good. Although it doesn’t say what resolutions are supported for external displays.
It is 24GB of RAM (12 GB x 2), but from my research, 8GB are dedicated to video memory. So it leaves 16GB “usefull” for development.
Also, display is not a concern as my monitor is 1080p.
If you end up doing this, you should write a blog post about how it went after a couple of months. It’s an intriguing idea.
Oh, for sure!
I did see lots of youtube videos using theese handhelds as “gaming pcs”, or from someone whose main workflow is office work… I’m having a hard time find any article about general development. At max, I did find some reddit comments saying they use a Steam Deck for gaming dev, which makes a lot of sense if the Deck is the target.
The amount of memory that is dedicated to the iGPU can be changed (at least on the normal ally non x) It’s a range from basically none (auto) to 8GB on my normal ally
In terms of external displays i believe you wont have a problem with them considering on the x you could hook up a (standard usb 4) egpu and even on the non x with a dock you can get a 4k60 display (depending on the dock and maybe even freesync) I don’t think the cpu performance is the limit (it performs on par with a i9 4 generations behind but with 30W), nor the ram (windows paging is what makes win11 usable on that when gaming), although battery life on my z1e ally (non x) is awful but when plugged in that won’t matter. What I am concerned about is longevity of the hardware, its not like a standard laptop where the ram is socketed, the wifi card is socketrd (which I HATE, please do put that in mind this is a mediatek wifi card which isn’t replacable and has latencies that spike so bad for absolutely no reason and it makes remote desktop unbearable) although you can always plug in a usb to ethernet NIC on that hyptothetical dock youd be using it on