ASUS Making Its First Handheld Gaming PC to Beat Steam Deck
Gaming PCs are becoming powerful and compact over time. Within the past few years, gaming machines have jumped from our desks right into our hands, time to remember Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck. And now ASUS is also planning to introduce their first handheld gaming PC into the market called “ROG Ally“.
Specs of ASUS ROG Ally Known Till Now
According to ASUS, ROG Ally is a Windows gaming handheld PC that allows you to play your favorite games from the library. It comes with Windows 11 operating system and is powered by a fast APU developed by AMD and ASUS together in collaboration. According to Notebookcheck.net, it will feature Zen 4 and RDNA 3 APU to bump up the gaming experience.
Moreover, the new handheld ROG Ally will feature a 7-inch IPS 1080p display with a 120Hz refresh rate. This means that you’ll experience higher frame rates in gaming without compromising on the graphics quality. To be honest, the display panel on the ASUS ROG Ally is way better than that found on the Steam Deck.
Here in a video trailer, ASUS claims that this higher refresh display screen would be ideal for gaming in bright sunlight conditions. This also leads us to the fact that the display panel on the ASUS ROG Ally packs a lot of “nits” into it. There’s no detail given by ASUS on how many nits are on this panel, but I guess it would be 300 nits+.
Furthermore, ASUS has introduced a dual fan design into this machine for better thermal management. Having two fans would keep the device cooler in your hands for a longer time. According to Sebastian, the fan noise on ROG Ally peaks at 15dB under a full workload. Now, this is way lower than what I’ve found on Steam Deck (37dB at peak load).
In terms of storage, Ally makes use of M.2 2230 SSDs that leave you with just 1TB of storage. The way games are evolving today and swapping every bit of space on your disk drive, I believe this is a very limited space. However, ASUS gives you the option to expand storage capacity on ROG Ally with a UHD II MicroSD card reader.
As far as the I/Os are concerned, the ASUS ROG Ally comes up with the most advanced option right out of the box.
On the top of the device, you get a fingerprint sensor, a headphone jack, a micro-SD card, a volume rocker, and an external graphics docking port for ASUS’s XG Mobile, which acts like an external graphics card for this device to rev up your gaming experience. Moreover, there’s a USB port within the docking port to charge your device or connect it to your PC.
ASUS has included a 65W charger for fast charging this device. However, there are no details yet about the battery capacity and the battery life itself. Based on the specs, I think that it will last the same as the Steam Deck.
What to Expect
Based on the features and appreciation from the online gaming community, it looks like ASUS ROG Ally will beat the Steam Deck in every aspect. But as we all know that ASUS ROG products are expensive, and ASUS still hasn’t confirmed the price of their next-gen handheld device. So far, BestBuy is taking the pre-orders for the ASUS ROG Ally, but there are still no clues what the actual price would be. To stay in the game, ASUS has to stick a reasonable price tag with this device if they want to beat Steam Deck.
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Hi, this is Masab, the Founder of PC Building Lab. I’m a PC enthusiast who loves to share the prior knowledge and experience that I have with computers. Well, troubleshooting computers is in my DNA, what else I could say….