We could put our feet directly in the dish, wondering what’s the point of trying to walk on the flowerbeds of Nintendo. With its 125 million Nintendo Switch sold across the globe, who could compete with Big N in the portable machine market? Despite an undeniable hegemony, the competition continues to struggle, going to the foot of PC gamers. The Steam Deck is already in place (with more than a million machines sold in October 2022), and here comes the Asus ROG Ally with its immaculate look. The machine will be available from June 13, 2023.
Everything, everything, everything, you will know everything about the ROG Ally
Built around an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU (Zen 4 architecture with 4nm process, 8 cores 16 threads, 24MB cache, up to 5.10 Ghz boost), the Asus ROG Ally wants to position itself as a vigorous machine . With 16GB of on-board LPDDR5 RAM, a 512GB SSD, and the presence of the AMD Radeon Navi3 (12 RDNA3 CU, up to 2.7GHz, 8.6 TFlops), the device is intended to be able to run just about any AAA title from the Steam, Epic or Xbox Game Pass catalogs. Running on Windows 11 ensures full compatibility with these platforms. For good readability, users can count on a 7-inch touch screen in Full HD 1920×1080, in 16: 9 format, clocked at 120 Hz (against 1280 × 800, 720p for the Steam Deck). Like the Nintendo Switch, the Asus ROG Ally can be docked via the ROG Gaming Charger Dock so that you can play directly on your 50-inch TV screen alone or with others, while recharging it. You can access all the technical characteristics of the machine below.
Let’s come to the sinews of war: the price. The Steam Deck is available in three different models, for prices of 419 euros, 549 euros or 679 euros. The Asus ROG Ally arises in high-end equipment, and the price is affected: the beast made in Taiwan will be put on the market naked at the price of 799 €.
The performance of the machine can even be increased, as the official press release states: “Combined with an external ROG XG Mobile GPU equipped with NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4090 laptop graphics, ROG Ally turns into a real gaming machine for gaming on the living room couch or for a full desktop experience with the mouse and the keyboard“. From then on, the joys of AAA in 4K are yours with DLSS and Ray Tracing everywhere. But then you will have to pay at least a minimum wage, or even two: “ROG XG Mobile is equipped with either an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU priced at €2,499.99 including VAT, or an AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT GPU priced at €1,299.99 including VAT“.