Asus ROG Ally Pre-Orders Open Today At $700: Here's When You Can Get One

The ASUS ROG Ally was revealed back in April as a compact competitor to the Steam Deck, Valve's portable PC gaming machine. Today, ASUS announced that you can now preorder the Ally ahead of its June 13 release date. 

According to an ASUS press release, the price will start at $699.99 for the version that's equipped with a 512GB NVMe M.2 SSD, an eight-core AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor and 16GB of RAM. However, as with all things, there's a little bit of a caveat. The Ally can only be preordered through Best Buy.

The ROG Ally will run on Windows 11, and ASUS has partnered with a number of developers, including Xbox Game Studios, over the course of development. As such, the ROG Ally will come with three months of complimentary Xbox's Game Pass membership. The Ally will also support Steam, the Epic Games Store, and a variety of other launchers.

The ROG Ally sports a seven-inch 120hz, 1080p display, as opposed to the Steam Deck's 720p screen. Under the hood, it has the aforementioned AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor that supports up to 16 threads of processing horsepower. Audio is supplied via Dolby Atmos speakers that come with noise cancelling technology powered by AI. 

The device also supports the use of external graphics cards up to and including the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and the AMD Radeon RX 6850M laptop GPUs. On the outside, it comes packed with a variety of mappable buttons and switches one would expect from a new gaming machine. The device will also come standard with a microSD card reader to expand your storage if 512GB wasn't enough.

According to ASUS, a six-core version of the Z1 will be available during the third quarter of 2023. According to Best Buy's website, that version is listed at $599.99, although that has not been confirmed by ASUS.