In my decade-plus as a tech writer, April Fool’s Day was one of my least favorites, right next to the rumor roundup before an Apple or Samsung event. There are many times when jokes didn’t quite land. Then there’s the other side of the coin, where a company’s PR firm doesn’t look at the calendar, does something noteworthy, and then has to spend the next week telling everyone it wasn’t a joke. That was Asus this week. Under their Republic of Gamers brand, they announced the Ally, a competitor to Valve’s Steam Deck, which looks incredibly compelling.
Update 05/07/2023
AMD has officially announced the chip inside the Ally as the Ryzen Z1-Series. The Ryzen Z1 will be 6 cores/ 12 threads with 4x RDNA 4 compute units. The Z1 Extreme will be 8 cores/ 16 threads with 12 compute units. Both versions will be in the 9-30w TDP envelope.
x86 Innovation?
Since I started the relaunch under the RoethigTech Brand, I have not done a lot of Windows gaming tech, not because I’m not interested, but because there’s not been a whole lot I’ve wanted to talk about. I really didn’t think I would be talking about anything until Qualcomm and Nvidia launched their first desktop chips later this year. Lo and behold Asus and AMD proved me wrong with something you’d be excused if you assumed was powered by a Snapdragon.
YouTuber Journalist Dave2D Released a Video with exclusive access to a preproduction version of the Ally. The device has so much potential that Best Buy already has a page up. The page doesn’t include much information and essentially links to signup for email information, but a company like Best Buy doesn’t do this on a whim. Fortunately, Dave2D’s video shows us a bit of why the real-life BuyMore was so impressed.
The machine itself is high quality and physically smaller than the Steam Deck with a brighter, 120 hz 7” 16:9 screen. While the machine itself runs Windows out of the box, much like the Ayaneo and ONEXPLAYER, I wouldn’t expect this to be doing much productivity. It comes with custom software specifically for gaming.
The most impressive part is AMD’s latest custom silicon in this device. Dave2D says the device has far better performance than the Steam Deck while remaining quiet and cool. This is Asus’s advantage, they are a large hardware company with the relationships and buying power to get this kind of custom SoC first. While a price has not been announced, the aforementioned buying power means they will probably be able to offer the machine a price much closer to the Steam Deck than either of the smaller Windows-based competitors.
The company also showed off an EGPU option. It used a custom connector based on a USB-C port. Dave2D did not offer additional information on the port’s speed, whether it was USB 3.2, USB 4, or one of the USB-C Thunderbolt varieties. While I said it wouldn’t be doing much productivity, while docked, this may be able to be used as your primary Windows machine.
The last thing Dave2D showed was upgradability and repairability with the primary SSD and joysticks both seemingly user repairable and upgradable.
Final Thoughts
While the unfortunate timing is notable, The ROG Ally from Asus is a piece of hardware I’m really looking forward to. The concept of a Windows-based Steam Deck competitor is far from new, but making it accessible is. I’ll be watching this space closely. You also have to wonder, if Asus is planning this, whether Valve will also update the Steam Deck at some point.
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