ASUS ROG Ally Pricing Leaks, Setting Up A Steam Deck Showdown

Asus' upcoming handheld gaming PC, the ROG Ally, is coming to a store near you — priced at $699.99 for the top-end variant with the AMD Z1 Extreme processor. That means the standard variant with the AMD Z1 silicon might hit retail outlets at an even lower asking price. 

WinFuture's Roland Quandt told The Verge about the aforementioned pricing, citing internal data. Best Buy data also corroborates the same asking price, and another fairly reliable leaker SnoopyTech also claims an identical asking price for the ROG Ally's Z1 Extreme variant.

That's a rather tantalizing asking price for the overall hardware, especially when compared to Valve's Steam Deck. The Steam Deck starts at $399 for the base storage configuration with 64GB of eMMC storage, while the higher-end 256GB and 512GB models with faster NVMe SSD storage cost $529, and $649, respectively. However, it's not just the asking price where Asus appears to be breathing on Valve's neck.

Starting with some of the core specs: The ROG Ally offers a full-HD panel with a 120Hz refresh rate, 500 nits of peak brightness, and AMD FreeSync Premium support. The Steam Deck is limited to a 7-inch panel with only HD resolution and a 60Hz refresh rate. Needless to say, high-FPS gaming will be a significantly more pleasing experience on the Asus device. The Asus handheld also touts its "Zero Gravity" thermal system that relies on a dual-fan system paired with high-friction heat pipes.

One area in particular where the ROG Ally appears to be ahead of the Steam Deck is raw processing power, especially when factoring in the asking price of the two handhelds. The Steam Deck's AMD processor relies on four Zen 2 units, while the graphics engine is also based on the older Zen 2 architecture. 

For comparison, the Asus ROG Ally comes armed with the new Zen 4-based AMD Ryzen Z1 and Ryzen Z1 Extreme processors, both of which are based on the 4nm process and will reportedly arrive on more gaming handhelds down the road.

The Extreme variant offers eight AMD Zen 4 processing cores and 16 threads, coupled with 24MB of cache memory and 12 AMD RDNA3 computer units for graphics processing. The standard AMD Z1 processor offers six cores, 12 threads, 4 RDNA3-based compute units, and 22MB cache space. Of course, we are talking about leaks here, so process the pricing information with a fair dose of skepticism.

Asus will announce official details about the pricing and availability details for the ROG Ally at an event on May 11 — starting at 10:00 a.m. EST. As for AMD, the company won't confirm if, or when, the Z1 series processors are expected to appear in more gaming handhelds. However, rumors claim that the likes of Ayaneo are prepping new machines based on AMD's silicon — further adding competition for the Steam Deck.