The ASUS ROG Ally handheld console is very real despite its announcement in april fool to make them think it was another joke of the day. Taiwanese manufacturer he confirmed it and it looks very good. This will be a big competition for the Steam Deck.

The segment of handheld gaming machines was encouraged by the Valve model and many others from Chinese manufacturers such as AYANEO or ONEXPLAYER. Not to mention the Nintendo Switch, which is used almost as much on the go as it is on the desktop. Now comes another very interesting one.

ASUS ROG Ally: better hardware than Steam Deck

ASUS promises a “beautiful and fluid experience” with the 7-inch display, FHD resolution, 500 nits brightness5 ms response time and 120 Hz refresh rate. At the same screen size, the other values ​​are higher than those offered by Steam Deck.

Same on internal hardware. Although the company hasn’t described all of its features, it says it’s about “the fastest AMD APU yet”. It will use Zen4 processor and RDNA3 graphics. Definitely a custom Phoenix for this machine.

And for those who need more performance, attention to ROG XG Mobile eGPU connector a dedicated one that contains and can be connected to an external graphics card and used as a desktop console in front of the TV. Very interesting, but the price would be an issue here, as the version with RTX 4090 is priced at $2000… We’ll see how ASUS deals with this matter.

It will feature a dual-fan cooling solution that is said to be significantly quieter than the Steam Deck, 20dB versus 37dB for the Valve machine under load. As you will see in the pictures, it is complete with buttons, triggers, D-pad and sticks similar to those of a console controller. It will include special software to customize the various buttons and triggers, and it also looks like it will have RGB lighting capabilities on some parts of the chassis.

There is no known availability of this ASUS ROG Ally, although it is already listed on BestBuy. It will work on Windows 11 and the main service to use will be Microsoft Game Pass, which is not the only one, because in addition to running any local game, it will also support Steam and others. They say that the price will be “very competitive”, but it was not explicitly announced. We’ll keep an eye on it as we quite like this portable console.