ASUS ROG Ally Release Date, Specs, And Price Revealed

ASUS has revealed the release date, price, and specs for its upcoming ASUS ROG Ally handheld, plus more.


Published: May 11, 2023 10:56 AM /

By:


A gamer playing Ship of Fools on the ASUS ROG Ally

ASUS has revealed new details about its upcoming ROG Ally handheld. The console, which is intended as a competitor to Valve's Steam Deck and the Nintendo Switch, will come in two models, and the more powerful one will be available in June for $699 at Best Buy. 

In a launch presentation for the ROG Ally, ASUS gaming product management director Shawn Yen discusses what you can expect from the purported Steam Deck killer. According to Yen, the ROG Ally's most powerful model is targeting 1080p resolutions at 60 FPS. Under the hood, the handheld will boast a Ryzen Z1 chip, and a more powerful version will also be available that houses a Ryzen Z1 Extreme.

The ROG Ally will have a 7-inch touch screen with a brightness of 500 nits and a contrast ratio of 1000:1. That's around the same size as the OLED Switch and the Steam Deck, but it's the performance where the difference is likely to be felt the most. ASUS is clearly leveraging the ROG brand's reputation for high-end gamer gear with this new machine.

According to ASUS, the ROG Ally has been designed with consolidating your libraries in mind. It runs Windows 11 and will play games from any app that's compatible with that OS, which means that Steam, Epic, Battle.net, the EA app, and lots more should all be supported. The proprietary Armory Crate SE software is designed to collect your games from all of these libraries together and provide shortcuts to help you navigate them more easily.

Just like the Steam Deck and the Switch, the ROG Ally will also support docking, and ASUS will offer an extra docking peripheral that comes with a whole bunch of extra ports. It's also compatible with ROG's XG Mobile external GPUs, so if you want to buff the performance up a little, you've got that option as well.

The Z1 Extreme model of the ASUS ROG Ally launches in June and will set you back $699 via Best Buy. There's also a base Z1 model coming; that one's launching sometime in Q3 2023 and will cost $100 less, although it'll have the same screen and storage space (512GB) as its larger cousin.

Both models come with 3 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate at no extra cost, which ain't too shabby. Of course, since it's intended for gamers, it wouldn't be much of a handheld without RGB lighting, and joyously enough, ROG has included that as well. With no Steam Deck 2 on the horizon, this might be the upgrade you've been waiting for. Stay tuned for more ROG Ally news as we get it.

Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net


Joe Allen's profile picture
| Senior Writer

Joe has been writing for TechRaptor for five years, and in those five years has learned a lot about the gaming industry and its foibles. He’s originally an… More about Joseph