Let’s be clear, hardware manufacturers have been trying to make handheld gaming PCs forever. The Steam Deck isn’t the first and won’t be the last, it was just the first really successful. A result of this success is that competitors now have a benchmark to aim for. and one of the first companies to venture on Valve’s new crown is ASUS.
The ROG Ally launches under the company’s Republic of Gamers (ROG) label. While the handhelds reveal The video runs for a full three minutes, there is not a single mention of the specs, just the announcement that it will run on a custom AMD chip and that it will be compatible with ASUS’ existing external GPU/power unit (the ROG XG Mobile eGPU) used by its laptops.
A number of influencers got their hands on the device early, and while their videos don’t include even the most useful hard numbers, they do mention details like the fact that the Ally will have an impressive 1920 x 1080/120Hz display (in comparison to the Steam Deck’s 1280 x 800 /60hz) and that it’s also smaller and lighter than Valve’s handheld.
The Ally will run Windows 11 and has a fairly traditional control setup, with two analog sticks, a D-Pad, four primary face buttons, and a couple of triggers. It certainly looks good in the videos, but this is pre-release marketing after all, and how good it looks now will be complete irrelevant whether the price of the ally, battery life, performance and storage are not up to par. As I said before, this isn’t the first and won’t be the last time a PC hardware manufacturer has done this attempted to make a handheld gaming PC; ASUS needs to get the mix Only