Asus finally admits major issue with the ROG Ally’s SD card slot

The Asus ROG Ally has been afflicted with a faulty microSD card slot that begins to malfunction when hot. Asus has finally confirmed that there’s a problem.

Reports came out a few weeks ago that users were having issues with the Asus ROG Ally’s microSD card slot. Some claimed it wasn’t functioning right as the device began to warm up, and now Asus has admitted that the hardware is indeed faulty.

In a post on Discord, Asus stated:

“After confirmation from internal testing, under certain thermal stress conditions, the SD card reader may malfunction.”

As of right now, Asus has only a workaround fix incoming. This will involve changing the fan speeds to alleviate the heat issue. In another Discord statement, Asus said:

“To alleviate the issue, we 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.”

Asus ROG Ally only gets temporary software fixes

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However, as pointed out on Reddit, this is more of a hardware issue than a software one. In our testing of the device, our SD card reader didn’t break, but the screen got unreasonably hot after a couple of hours.

It’s assumed that due to the fans that push the hot air out of the device being so close to the SD card hardware, it is causing more issues than necessary. By comparison, Valve has the Steam Deck‘s SD card slot on the bottom of the device.

The user reaction has been obviously negative. Someone who had sent their ROG Ally back to Asus for SD card reader repairs realized that the hardware will return with exactly the same issues.

It’s also not the only issue the ROG Ally is facing, as more users are reporting issues with the dead zone on the embedded joysticks. While it reads zero, dead center, people are finding that stick drift is already happening to their fresh hardware. There was also a BIOS update that tanked performance.