Asus ROG Ally Release Date and Price Confirmed, Steam Deck's Big Competitor

The Asus ROG Ally has been hyped up as the biggest competition to the Steam Deck in the handheld gaming PC space. And while we've already known about its general tech specs, its price and release date have now been officially revealed during the company's launch event. The Asus ROG Ally will launch on June 13 for $700 USD, and preorders are now open on Best Buy.

Asus ROG Ally

Z1 - $400 (was $600) | Z1 Extreme - $600 (was $700)

See at Best Buy (Z1) See at Best Buy (Z1 Extreme)

On paper, the ROG Ally has an upper hand on the Steam Deck in several respects. Its AMD Ryzen Z1 processor, which houses a Zen 4 8-core CPU and RDNA 3 GPU rated at 8.6 TFlops, makes it the most powerful handheld PC thus far--for comparison, the Steam Deck uses a Zen 2 CPU and RDNA 2 GPU rated for 1.6 TFlops. The ROG Ally also features a higher resolution IPS screen at 1080p with up to a 120Hz refresh rate, compared to Steam Deck's 1280x800 60Hz display. Another notable spec is the relatively lighter weight at 608 grams (1.34 lbs) whereas the Steam Deck weighs in at 669 grams (1.47 lbs).

You can check out the full list of the Asus ROG Ally tech specs in the table below.

Asus ROG Ally Full Tech Specs

As an added perk, those who purchase an Asus ROG Ally will get three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for free. Seeing as how the ROG Ally is essentially a PC running Windows, having native Game Pass support is another advantage over the Steam Deck, which natively runs Linux, leaving you to play Game Pass games in the cloud without further tinkering.

There are a few options when it comes to how you want to use the Asus ROG Ally--the ROG Gaming Charger Dock (sold separately) allows the unit to connect to a TV similar to the Nintendo Switch dock. There are also some pricey external GPUs that will be available, if you want to use your ROG Ally like a powerful desktop PC: The ROG XG Mobile with an Nvidia RTX 4090 laptop GPU goes for $2,000 and one with an AMD Radeon 6850M XT goes for $800.

One thing to note is that there will only be one model to choose from for now, so $700 is the entry price for the Asus ROG Ally. A scaled-down version with a 6-core/12-thread AMD Ryzen Z1 CPU will be available in Q3 2023 and will go for $600. For reference, Valve offers cheaper options for Steam Decks based on storage drive space (and other minor features) at $400 with 64GB eMMC storage and $530 with a 256GB NVMe SSD, while the top-end option is the $650 model with a 512GB NVMe SSD.

The big remaining questions are battery life, power and performance balance, and thermal management under load. And while the built-in gamepad has all the things you expect from a modern controller, we'd like to get a feel for the ergonomics along with its two programmable back buttons.

For more on the growing handheld gaming PC market, check out our recent feature on the new Aya Neo Neo Air Plus, our Aya Neo Air review, and our Steam Deck review if you haven't already.