The ASUS ROG Ally handheld console is very real despite its announcement in the april fool’s make them think that it was another joke of the day. Taiwanese manufacturer has confirmed it and it looks very good. It will be a great competition for the Steam Deck.
The segment of handheld gaming machines has been encouraged with the Valve model and many others from Chinese manufacturers such as the AYANEO or the ONEXPLAYER. Not to mention the Nintendo Switch that is used on the go almost as much as on the desktop. Now comes another very interesting one.
ASUS ROG Ally: better hardware than the Steam Deck
ASUS promises a “beautiful and smooth experience” with a 7-inch diagonal display, FHD resolution, 500 nits of brightnessresponse time of 5 ms and a refresh rate of 120 Hz. With the same screen size, the rest of the values are higher than those offered by the Steam Deck.
Same thing on internal hardware. Although the company has not described all its features, it says that it is about “the fastest AMD APU to date”. It will use a Zen4 CPU and RDNA3 graphics. Surely a custom Phoenix for this machine.
And for those who need more performance, attention to the ROG XG Mobile eGPU connector dedicated that includes and to which an external graphics card could be connected to use it as a desktop console in front of a television. Very interesting, but the problem here would be the price, because the version with the RTX 4090 is priced at $2,000… We’ll see how ASUS handles this issue.
It will be equipped with a dual-fan cooling solution that is said to be significantly quieter than the Steam Deck, 20 dB versus 37 dB for Valve’s machine under load. As you will see in the images, it is accompanied by buttons, triggers, a D-pad and sticks similar to those of a console controller. It will include special software to customize the various buttons and triggers and it also looks like it will have RGB lighting options on some parts of the chassis.
There is no known availability for this ASUS ROG Ally, although it is already listed at BestBuy. It will work on Windows 11 and Microsoft’s Game Pass will be the main service for use, which is not the only one, because it will also support Steam and others, in addition to running any local game. They say that the price will be “very competitive”, but it has not been expressly announced. We’ll keep track of it because we quite like this portable console.
