The Steam Deck’s reign as the handheld game machine to beat might already be coming to an end. Just weeks after Asus started teasing the ROG Ally handheld, a new leak points to a surprisingly competitive price tag. The high-end variant of the Ally with an AMD Z1 Extreme chip will reportedly retail for just $699. That’s more power than the Steam Deck for just $51 more.
Asus bizarrely opted to announce the Ally on April Fools this year, but it’s not kidding around. The Ally looks like a sleeker version of Valve’s handheld, and since it’s ROG-branded, there are flashy RGB LEDs all over the place. It seemed unlikely at the time that Asus would be able to compete with Valve on both power and price, but the Ally is shaping up to be a strong alternative.
The AMD Z1 Extreme chip is a 4nm APU with CPU and GPU cores in the same package. There’s also a non-extreme version of the Z1, and Asus has confirmed that the Ally will come with both options. The Ryzen Z1 has a six-core, 12-thread CPU and four RDNA3 graphics cores. The Extreme variant steps up to an eight-core, 16-thread CPU and 12 RDNA3 cores. AMD says the Z1 is capable of 2.8 TFLOPS of graphical performance, and the Z1 Extreme boosts that to 8.6 TFLOPS. Both chips can potentially leave Valve’s custom Zen 2 “Aerith” chip in the dust, with a 55% performance boost for the lower-end Z1.
The Ally will also have a 7-inch 1080p screen with a 120Hz refresh rate and 65W fast charging, both of which are an upgrade over all versions of the Steam Deck. It will have 16GB of RAM, like the Steam Deck. The Ally runs Windows, so it will natively support more titles than the Steam Deck with its Linux-based Steam OS.
Given these specs, many have speculated that the Z1 Extreme ROG Ally would retail for $1,000 or more. So, the $699.99 price tag might seem suspicious.
However, The Verge claims to have seen multiple retail listings that support this pricing. It’s possible the price could be a placeholder, but the same fake price in multiple locations? Probably not.
Remember, we’re just talking about the more expensive Ally with the Z1 Extreme at $700. That gives Asus some room to make the cheaper variant a real doorbuster to compete with the entry-level Steam Deck with 64GB of eMMC storage, which retails for $399.
©2001–2023 Ziff Davis, LLC., a Ziff Davis company(Opens in a new window). All Rights Reserved.
ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis and may not be used by third parties without express written permission.
