It seems that the success of Steam Deck, which has managed to comfortably sell more than a million units since it went on sale in February 2022, has inspired other hardware brands to follow the same path, putting PC on the market consolidated at an affordable price for the general public. And ASUS ROG ALLY is the answer to that challenge from one of the best hardware manufacturers.
More power than Steam Deck
pc consolidated there was already before Valve released its Steam Deck, but the great success of Gabe Newell’s was to lower its price up to levels that already interested a greater number of users. Remember that there are much more powerful alternatives on the market –such as the ONE XPLAYER– that are close to and exceed a thousand euros in price, so the arrival of a much lower alternative came in handy for the sector.
Now it is ASUS that wants to try its luck, with a pc model consolidated which substantially improves much of the hardware that Steam Deck showed but from which we still do not know in what price range it is going to move, nor when it will come out. This ROG ALLY is still a kind of trial balloon that wants to measure the interest of the community in an artifact that today moves through the field of promises.
I summarize a lot, this ASUS ROG ALLY that was officially presented yesterday boasts that will have an AMD processor specifically developed for this model and that it will be much more powerful than the one that equips the same Steam Deck. There is no further data beyond this assertion. So we will have to trust.
Better screen and compact
It is true that Steam Deck seems at first a very bulky and large machine, but when you take it in hand you realize the good grip what’s wrong with it. ASUS with its ROG ALLY is going in that direction but you have compressed your layout some more to make it less monster. We’ll see when we have it in hand but, on paper, at that point it seems to significantly win over the Valve model.
The screen also improves, increasing the resolution from a simple HD/60Hz/400 nits like Steam Deck has to a FullHD 1080p/120 Hz/500 nits from ASUS ROG ALLY. At this point it is obvious that an improvement will be perceived, but the increase in that resolution must necessarily be accompanied by much more powerful hardware to be able to move four times more load of graphic information per second.
Little more can we advance, beyond that its control configuration is the standard of a gamepad for PC (D-pad, two sticks and ABYX buttons) and forgets about the touch panels that are used to move the mouse with more precision in those games that require the keyboard tandem-mouse lifelong.
In the absence of more data – it is speculated with a price between 649 and 899 dollars and a launch for October of this year -, for now this is what we have: a determined bet by ASUS for the gaming on PC with a machine of its own that remains to be known which will be the GPU that will drive its graphics, the RAM memory that it will equip and the storage alternatives that we can buy. Do you think it will sell more units than Steam Deck?
