Over the last few months been interested in how the ASUS ROG Ally would land its pricing as someone who plays a lot of games on my Steam Deck. Looks like I finally got my answer as ASUS has finally confirmed details of the device’s specs, pricing, and when it’s launching which is not that far away; a little over a month away in fact.
First and foremost the ASUS ROG Ally will launch this June in North America for $699 USD and $899 CAD. Not gonna lie here the pricing is a bit shocking as I didn’t know how they were going to price with the amount of impressive specs (compared to the Steam Deck) the device was offering and the difference is about $50 USD / $80 CAD to the most expensive Steam Deck tier ( the one I currently own), so it shows how much ASUS is willing to compete with Valve this the PC handheld market.
Speaking of the specs, both Valve’s Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally feature a 512 GB SSD, 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM and a 7-inch screen… this is where the difference starts to diverge as the PC handheld offers a lot more in its specs. First off starting with the screen, the ASUS ROG Ally offers a more impressive 7-inch screen as this one is a 120 HZ 1080p 7-inch Ful HD IPS display that enables users to go as high as 500 nits in peak brightness. Additionally, the screen also comes packed with AMD FreeSync Premium technology and Dolby Vision HDR.
Getting more into the guts of the device, ASUS ROG Ally is powered by the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme which is utilizes AMD’s Zen 4 architecture, plus has 8 cores and 16 threads in the chip of the PC handheld which is supported by the GPU which has 12 RDNA3 CUs. This version of the device is seemingly the more powerful ASUS ROG Ally as the company is planning to release a slightly lesser version which comes with a 6-core and 12-thread version of the AMD Ryzen Z1 processor set to release sometime in Q3 2023, no pricing details at this moment.
The ASUS ROG Ally also comes with what you’d expect as far as the very buttons on the device including A, B, X, and Y buttons, D-pad, L & R Hall Effect analog triggers, L & R bumpers, a View button, a Menu button, a Command Centre button, an Armoury Crate button, assignable grip buttons, 2 full-size analog sticks with capacitive touch. Out of the box, the device also comes with a two-speaker system, Dolby Atmos support, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, a fingerprint sensor, a microSD card slot, and a 3.5mm headphone hack. The ASUS ROG Ally comes with a 40 WHr battery and runs on Windows 11 so you can play any PC game no matter which PC game storefront you prefer – Steam, Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store, GOG, etc.
The last thing it comes with is a ROG XG Mobile Interface port which you can use to plug in an Asus ROG XG Mobile external GPU to make the device run even better. You will be able to actually get one as ASUS is offering a ROG XG Mobile with the RTX 4090 Laptop GPU for $1999 USD / $2499 CAD. It’s pretty nice but playing a game handheld with a GPU hanging right there is a little weird but it’s nice to have options I guess. As a bonus, Microsoft is seemingly supporting ASUS’ PC handheld endeavour as the ASUS ROG Ally comes with three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate so you try out what PC Game Pass has to offer on the device.
“With the ROG Ally and Game Pass Ultimate, we can’t wait for people to discover and play their next favourite game on the go, whether it’s playing native PC games with Windows or streaming console games with Xbox Cloud Gaming,” Microsoft Head of Xbox Hardware, Roanne Sones said in a statement.
The ASUS ROG Ally is set to launch on June 13th for $699 USD / $899 CAD with preorders already live and will be able to purchase on the company’s website and Best Buy Canada. If you want to go all in on the device, ASUS also sells a dock and travel case separately for USD 64.99 and $ 39.99.
