The Steam Deck Killer? The Asus Rog Ally
There have been droves of windows based handhelds coming out in recent years, but they’ve all fallen by the wayside as the Steamdeck gobbles up attention and more importantly, marketshare. Asus is coming out swinging with the Rog Ally. It’s top of the line and offers better performance across the board compared to the Steamdeck, and at a comparable price to boot, which is incredible.
This thing has an insane power draw to support its high frame rates but that does mean you’ll be burning through the battery in no time at all. Since it’s windows based it does mean that you’ll have a wider selection of games available compared to the Steamdeck, and I see this device being a popular choice for the emulator scene as it can do everything you can manage on your desktop, including Switch at 60fps. Finally I can play the Switch in a handheld form factor… Wait a minute.
The CPU is a eight-core, 16-thread AMD Z1 Extreme which can clock up to 5.10GHz. Ram is coming in with 16GB of LPDDR5. The display is an IPS-level 1080p screen with a 120hz refresh rate. Although for the sake of battery you probably won’t be pulling on all that grunt all of the time. But setting it up as a little desktop machine in a pinch means you’ll be gaming with no worries at all. Storage is a super quick 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD. All of this is drawing on a 40Wh battery, that could maybe have done with being a bit bulkier.
In the hand it’s comfortable to hold, and is noticeably smaller, narrower, and lighter than its bulky competitor.
Asus have been watching early reviews like a hawk, and seem to be addressing all of the concerns that have been raised in them, most importantly button sticking issues, which they say will be replaced before consumers get their hands on them, and reviewers will be getting sent replacements. Other issues include some software jank that could use some smoothing, that will be smoothed over both pre and post launch.
Asus seems committed to making this device fly, and if they could manage that with passion alone, I think it’ll do just fine.
Pricing starts at $1499