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Tuesday 1 October 2024

ROG Ally Community Rebuilds The Proprietary Asus eGPU

As far as impressive hacks go, this one is more than enough for your daily quota. You might remember the ROG Ally, a Steam Deck-like x86 gaming console that’s graced our pages a couple lf times. Now, this is a big one – from the ROG Ally community, we get a fully open-source eGPU adapter for the ROG Ally, built by reverse-engineering the proprietary and overpriced eGPU sold by Asus.

We’ve seen this journey unfold over a year’s time, and the result is glorious – two different PCBs, one of them an upgraded drop-in replacement board for the original eGPU, and another designed to fit a common eGPU form-factor adapter. The connector on the ROG Ally is semi-proprietary, but its cable could be obtained as a repair part. From there, it was a matter of scrupulous pinout reverse-engineering, logic analyzer protocol captures, ACPI and BIOS decompiling, multiple PCB revisions and months of work – what we got is a masterpiece of community effort.

Do you want to learn how the reverse-engineering process has unfolded? Check out the Diary.md – it’s certainly got something for you to learn, especially if you plan to walk a similar path; then, make sure to read up all the other resources on the GitHub, too! This achievement follows a trend from the ROG Ally community, with us having featured dual-screen mods and battery replacements before – if it continues the same way, who knows, maybe next time we will see a BGA replacement or laser fault injection.



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