On April 1st, we informed you about the game console ASUS ROG Ally, which looked like an ambitious competitor to Valve’s Steam Deck. The only downside was that we were really good they didn’t know if the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer was just kidding us, or if the announcement was serious. The trailer looked pretty elaborate, and a Best Buy e-store page was also created, but April Fool’s Day is April Fool’s Day. But now the situation is clear.
Yesterday, ASUS through the official Twitter account confirmedthat it was not a joke and we will actually see the console. In the post, the company says to stay tuned for more details. But the question is, what should we really expect? We already have a lot of details available.
ROG Ally Pocket Console now it got some well-known creators as part of the preview, including Linus from the channel Linus Tech Tips. So not only do we know what the keyboard looks like in terms of design, but we can also get an idea of what hardware it will offer us.
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It is currently known that we can count IPS LCD screen 7 inches with FullHD resolution (1920×1080) and 120 Hz refresh rate. Its maximum brightness will be able to climb up to 500 nits.
Much more interesting, however, is what we find under the hood. Asus as well as Valve merged with AMDwhich gave him processor built on the Zen 4 architecture and graphics RDNA 3. However, the GPU is certainly not listed here separately, and is most likely an APU.
Just for comparison – Steam Deck uses a chip with Zen 2 architecture and RDNA 2 graphics core. So in practice this means that the ASUS handset will offer higher performance, even twice as much.
Since what the testers had in their hands is only an engineering sample, they couldn’t tell the world details about the number of cores, frequencies, battery capacity or overall durability. However, we learned from YouTuber Dave2D that it is ASUS ROG Ally quieter than Steam Deckand even up to 17 dB, which is definitely a positive feature. It has two fans to cool it down.
PRICE AND AVAILABILITY
ASUS hasn’t yet revealed when its Steam Deck competitor will hit the market, but someone else has apparently taken care of that. We also learn the first details about the price.
A Reddit user named reme2fly believes he knows more details than the general public. According to him we have to count on two different models that differ in storage capacity, which will be available in two different colors. In addition to white, which appears in all materials, a black version could also theoretically come (perhaps with red elements, as ASUS is used to?).
According to the leaker, we should expect a 512GB variant at a price $549 (converted to 11,800 CZK) and a 1TB variant that comes in $899 (converted to 19,300 CZK).
The cheapest model will be close to the mid-range version of the Steam Deck, which has 256 GB of storage, but the best configuration will cost significantly more than the TOP handheld model from Valve. However, we must not forget that it will offer significantly higher performance and double the SSD capacity.
According to remy2fly, the ROG Ally will arrive in October.
LEAKER REVEALED MORE DETAILS
In addition to the price and availability details, thanks to the leaker we have interesting information about other key features of the ROG Ally handheld. The device must use its own operating system (based on Windows), which will be possible link accounts on Epic Games platforms, the EA app, Steam and Xbox. Additionally, on the Xbox side, Microsoft is set to promote its outgoing Game Pass gaming subscription.
We already know that the handset will support an external graphics card to achieve even higher performance, however The leaker also talks about virtual reality support. It is suspected that there is a problem with the control, which does not make good friends with Windows.