After its initial reveal on April 1st this year, Asus is finally ready to shed more light on its ROG Ally handheld gaming PC, which launches on May 11th and will be sold by Currys in the UK. The Steam Deck competitor looks to be a more premium device than Valve’s offering, with a faster AMD Ryzen Z1 series processor, seven-inch 1080p 120Hz touch screen and Windows 11 – but no price has yet been announced.
The hardware side of the equation is perhaps the most fascinating, so let’s begin there. The Ally is powered by a ‘custom’ Ryzen Z1 chipset that includes Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 graphics produced on a 4nm node. (By comparison, current Ryzen 7000 desktop designs use a mixture of 5nm and 6nm processes, which should give the Ally’s APU an advantage in terms of performance per watt.) We expect to see configurations of the device featuring the Z1 (6C/12T, 22MB cache, 2.8TF 4CU GPU) and Z1 Extreme (8C/16T, 24MB cache, 8.6TF 12CU GPU) processors announced by AMD earlier today, offering increasing levels of horsepower for a higher asking price.
Speaking of which, the impressive-looking APU is backed with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM in dual-channel mode, while storage is up to a 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD and UHS-2 Micro SD card expansion – faster than what is available on the Deck, which is limited to PCIe 3.0 storage and UHS-1 Micro SD cards. Wi-Fi 6E is also included, in comparison to WiFi 5 on Steam Deck. It’ll be interesting to see whether all SKUs of the Ally come with the full complement of RAM and storage, or whether this will be pared back on the cheaper options.
