This is OVERKILL – ROG Ally + RTX 4090 XG Mobile Review
I’ve been using the Rog Ally daily since I got it and I’ve been having a blast it plays all of the games that I want with some compromises here and there but often find myself looking at the expansion port on the top wondering what it would be like if this weren’t limited by an igbu and thanks to Rog for letting me borrow the thing that plugs into that Port I can finally find out so that brings us to this Beast which is the XG mobile essentially the XG mobile is an igpu solution that Rog created
for their products with a proprietary connector the main benefit of this solution is that it has much higher bandwidth than Thunderbolts and USB 4.0 typically egpu Solutions will use desktop class gpus but this one uses a mobile one even though it is a laptop GPU it’s the top of the line mobile GPU on the market today that is also why this thing is almost equivalent to the cost of three allies so why would you want something like this Beyond getting a ridiculous boost in your gaming performance you’re also going to be able to get a
bunch of additional ports it’s kind of unfortunate that Ally only has a single USB port steamed notwithstanding the other things that this competes with have two
video editing and you needed to dump some video files onto the device the back of the XG mobile has a little flap that allows you to prop this up on your desk so you can use it with your ally there are three versions of the XG mobile and this one is the highest end version and it’s kind of nuts let’s quickly go over some specs the XG mobile 4090 comes with a GeForce RTX 4090 laptop GPU with 16 gigabytes of gddr6 it has 9728 Cuda cores and a tgp of 150 watts with the available boost
in Armory crate we can get a Max Base clock of 2 0.5 gigahertz and a max memory clock of 2.3 gigahertz needless to say this is a beast before we do anything with the XG mobile I want to show you the software that we have how it functions with this device and what kind of controls we have over the performance of the GPU so what you’re going to do is take this connector and directly insert it into the top slot so you line it up and push it into place this light will light up white
then you’re going to push down the switch to lock it into place the screen will come up asking you to activate the GPU when you press OK it will give you a list of anything that’s open using the igpu you’ll have to stop all of them to be able to continue once you do that it will process the change over to the e-gpu for rendering you’ll know that this is active because that white light will turn red now this process does seem kind of convoluted it works better than some of the normal e-gpus that I’ve
used but it’s not as seamless as something like the switch we now have some new settings that we can change inside Armory crate if we go into the settings menu and then go over to operating mode you can see that I’m I’m in manual mode right now right now I’m working under manual mode 2 and you can see that our SPL limit goes from 7 to 30 Watts I talked about this before so I’ll just use this time to talk about it now we do have custom TDP control on this handheld but we don’t have
it all the way down to 7 watt TDP across the board the settings that don’t go that low are sppt and fppt values listed under these will boost your TDP up to around two minutes before going down to your SPL value if you look at those and you bring those down to their minimum values we have a 15 watt minimum all of these would need to go down to seven to improve battery life or ideally all of them would need to go down to 5 Watts but that’s a topic for a different video I have
53 Watts set for the fastboot and for some reason I can’t get to this one okay there we go and now this is 43 Watts so what this will do is it’ll boost up to 53 Watts for a short duration and then it will go down to 43 Watts after the Boost duration is over it will go down to 30 watts and it should stay there as long as we have enough load to handle this TDP and to make sure we don’t have any throttling in this video I’m going to go down to the fan
settings and I’m just going to increase this entire range to 100 so we get a best case scenario in this video now let’s continue to the XG mobile we have two new things here but we unfortunately do not have any control over the amount of power that this is using it will just use a Max of 150 watts I tested out the overclocking functionality of this to see if it works and it does I’m going to Max these values out for the rest of this video but right now I have the bass clock in the
memory clock set to these values when it comes to the fans we can come in here and boost this if we want the XG mobile should not thermal throttle using the default settings but I’m just going to come in here and set this to 70 fan speed across the board just to be sure we’re going to apply this now by pressing on the check box I know this is working because the fans on both devices are pretty loud right now but it’s fine and I wouldn’t be able to hear them if I had headphones on
the system view now lists the increased fan speeds for the Ally and they rate their this at 41 DB which is much louder than stock but the XG mobile fans at 70 percent dwarf Ally and even though it’s a bit off screen to the corner right now it’s a lot louder than Ally I want to point out that you can use XG mobile without an external screen just fine however if you want to take full advantage of the extra performance of the 4090 you’re going to want to use a high resolution monitor or a high
refresh rate monitor this cable is a bit short so you may not have a lot of room on your desk to move it around I think this is kind of like a security lock that stores would use on controllers that were hooked up to kiosk consoles when you use the XG mobile without an external screen there should be a small performance hit because of the way that the signal has to travel other egpus have this bottleneck issue but it doesn’t seem to be that significant on this one I’ll do some benchmarks with and without an
external screen to show you the difference in our maximum performance I also want to point out that I did some modifications to my overlay just for this video to make it easier to see clock speeds bus load and throttling conditions let’s kick things off with some benchmarks I’m and I want to point out that I started filming this video about 10 days ago 11 days ago I got an update for this device that capped my XG mobile at 115 watts and I couldn’t do anything to fix it I ddu drivers and nothing worked Rog also
didn’t seem to have any insight on this issue so this entire video just sat until I got another two updates for Ally on Saturday that also came with a new GeForce driver update that fixed things if the same thing happens to you and these don’t fix it you might be Sol but you wouldn’t if Rog just added tgb control to Armory crate here’s what my 115 Watt score was and here’s the normal one our Graphics score is a bit over 20 000 now and our CPU also isn’t doing that bad at over 10 000. this
is what the max boost to Bass and memory clocks on the 4090. when we run this without an external screen our graphic score goes down to 19762 which is around a two percent performance hit I also went ahead and ran fire strike Ultra I got 12 862 for graphics on Li but I got 13 387 with an external screen so that is about a four percent hit and just to round things out I ran the shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark and I got an average FPS score of 135 using the highest preset at 1080p
on Ally but I got 143 using an external screen this was the biggest performance hit at just under six percent not the end of the world but it is worth knowing because of this I’m gonna film most of the games in this video with an external screen so our first game in this video is shadow of the Tomb Raider I have the resolution set to 4K and I’m using the highest Graphics preset I’m not using any resolution scaling options as you can see we’re getting great FPS in the jungle we’re also pulling 150 watts on
the GPU this is not typical for every game but it is for shadow of the Tomb Raider could be useful the silver crown Mountain I’m getting closer foreign our next game is Horizon zero Dawn we’re also running this at 4K with the ultra quality preset we don’t have any FSR or any upscaling turned on we’re currently capping the frame rate at 60fps with vsync on but I want to disable that to see what kind of performance we could get if we were using a higher refresh rate screen as you can see we’re at 150 watts
almost on the GPU and we’re getting about 70 FPS in the open world however when we go into the city the frame rate drops down to the 40s despite this FPS drop the picture quality is still awesome there’s no trick when we’re in combat the FPS is much better which is a lot more important even fighting this guy we have good FPS could be overhead Spider-Man remastered is a great game to test and one of the reasons is its support for Ray tracing we’re currently running this at 4K with a very high preset we’re not
using any resolution scaling options here when we bump out of this menu you can see that we’re getting around 70 FPS the only problem with this preset is that the reflections on the window are fake for example there’s a big building behind me in this window but when I turn around there’s a small church if we turn on Ray tracing support we can keep the same preset option once this reloads you’ll see that the reflections are now Ray traced the cars also have Ray tracing but it’s not always perfect the only issue is that we
don’t have enough performance to run this game at 4K with rt on high it’s a huge demand on this GPU and it’s not a lot better if we lowered the resolution to 1080p it’s cool to see but I wouldn’t play this game with rt turned on unless I was using f Sr the FPS is too low and I’d rather run this at a better fps with normal reflections foreign Survivor is a meme game but I wanted to test it out anyway I started the game out at 1440p resolution using the Epic preset and no Ray
tracing if you turn on RT with this game it kind of Claws by at 40 FPS with these settings we’re getting just under 60 FPS when we go through this area and we jump into combat we’re gonna go down to 50 FPS but it’s still pretty good this is totally playable you could lower some settings if you really wanted to hit 60 more often but a lock 60 doesn’t really exist with this port even with Overkill Hardware like this the only problem is that after I got a little further into this I got a crash
message saying that I ran out of memory so I had to restart the entire game this doesn’t make a lot of sense with 16 gigabytes of gddr but whatever I loaded the game back up again and this time I used the low preset we’re still at 1440p but now we’re closer to 75 FPS when we go into combat we still have some dips down to 50 so that doesn’t really seem to change that much the game is overall a lot smoother and a lot more enjoyable especially in combat now this did seem like it wasn’t
going to have any issues I was playing this game for a while because I like this game but when I got over to the ledge here and I went down to jump Rog got the last laugh this isn’t really their fault though this is just a bad Port now let’s look at Assassin’s Creed Odyssey this is actually a pretty demanding title at 1080p using the very high preset this is what I had to use to be able to get 60 FPS in some demanding scenes you could probably up the resolution a bit higher and get
closer to 60 FPS but I wanted to see 60 FPS regardless of where I was these are the settings that I needed to use in most areas oh this is Far Cry 6 at 4K Ultra settings now I have dxr settings turned on but I’m gonna disable those right now because that brought me down to 50 FPS with those off we can get 60 FPS and we still have a bit of extra Headroom on the XG mobile we’re at 80 to 90 load here but when we go into the city it’s gonna max out when
that happens we won’t hit 60fps but it’s still pretty good if you didn’t have an overlay on you probably wouldn’t know go found all your Juan that’s what I’ve been saying Halo Reach is easier to run but we’re able to Max this out at 4K resolution we will be well over 120 FPS in normal areas but this will drop down to a bit under 120 FPS when we are in combat oh you don’t believe those enemy dropships inbound our last game is Elden ring at 4K maximum settings this thing looks and runs great using these
settings on the XG mobile foreign you don’t really need an XT mobile for emulation because you already have enough power in here to emulate basically anything you could want with the igpu but we’re going to be able to do a lot more with this for example we can play demanding PS2 games at 4K resolution and we could go much higher than 4K if we want it if you’re going to be limited by anything it’s going to be the CPU before it’ll be the GPU here we have Xbox emulation with the xmu emulator and we’re at
4X resolution this looks great but we still have Sun lag especially in games like Panzer Dragoon for this game I had to bump down to 2x native we’re not using the GPU that much so this comes down to the emulator and our CPU more than anything else I think where you’re going to see the difference in this is going to be in PS3 emulation and if you can’t play a PS3 game on this Hardware then that game must need a super computer or it’s an emulator issue this emulator can boot every game but not every
game will run well but you can play some demanding games like God of War very well on this foreign we can also upscale switch games to 4K no problem I want to wrap up this video with my thoughts on the XG mobile and whether or not I would buy one the XG mobile that I used in this video is super expensive but it does expand the functionality of the Ally beyond what we can do with the internal GPU before I made this video I probably would have had the view that all of the XT mobiles
are not worth considering but I could see myself buying one maybe not the 4090 but Rog could have done things to push me in that direction let’s start with the 4090 and then go to the one model that I would be more comfortable buying so with the 4090 I would consider buying it under a few conditions condition number one would be if I were trying to use this thing as my only PC the docked performance of the z1e coupled with the 4090 mobile is a beast and even though you could probably build a comparable PC
for way less money it’s not the worst option in the world even if this were the case for me I would probably also need to be in the XD mobile ecosystem already for this to make sense ideally I would own at least one more device that could take advantage of the XG mobile to spread out the investment I don’t have anything else they can use in HTML mobile so that brings us to the third point I would want an attachment or an adapter that would allow the XG mobile to communicate at lower bandwidth over USB
4 or Thunderbolt then I would be able to use this with almost any device that I own and it would make a lot more sense this egpu is well built and it’s easier to transport than other e-gpus that I’ve used and I would be willing to pay a premium for added usability since those last two things aren’t true for me then I move down to the remaining XG mobiles I don’t think I would buy the other Nvidia GPU because the performance isn’t that great for the asking price but I would buy the AMD one that
one is easier to work with and it would mean that I wouldn’t need to deal with changing settings in two different GPU control panels it’s still expensive but the price versus performance is not that bad compared to other solutions that are on the market the added bandwidth of the XG mobile allows the AMD SKU to punch higher than bandwidth starved Thunderbolt docs so that’s an added benefit as a fan of the Ally my only gripe with the XG mobile is that the connector is a little short and that means I cannot use Ally connected to
an egpu in the same way that I can with Thunderbolt docs on competing devices I imagine this cable is this short due to Signal Integrity issues but if that weren’t the case this thing should be at least double the length that it is and it probably should not be connected to the end that exhausts air because that makes for strange Arrangements when you’re using this with Ally but those are my thoughts on the 4090 XG mobile I’ll have links to this one and the one that I recommend down below if you enjoyed this video and
you want to take a look at another feel free to take a look at my recent video on an overclock 7840hs Mini PC happy gaming everyone taki out
