Fans were surprised when ASUS made an announcement for a new handheld on April 1, and the best part is that it wasn't an April Fool's joke. The upcoming ASUS ROG Ally has been touted as a serious competitor to Valve’s Steam Deck, which is disrupting the market at the moment.
The initial reviews to the ROG Ally have been extremely positive so far albeit with no hardware specs confirmed whatsoever, end users don't exactly know what to make of it as of yet - until now.
A leaker claims to know what the hardware specs for the ROG Ally are going to be and fans are excited to get their hands on it.
According to the leaks, the ASUS ROG Ally will be powered by a custom AMD Ryzen Z1 Series APU.
😉 pic.twitter.com/Mu6kcCxXmi
— Hifihedgehog (@hifihedgehog) April 18, 2023
The leaked specs for the ASUS ROG Ally are as follows:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen Z1 Series
- DISPLAY: Full 1080p HD 120Hz Display
- RAM: 16 GB LPDDR5 Dual Channel
- STORAGE: M.2-2230 512 GB PCIe Gen4
- WEIGHT: 608g
Further, the ROG Ally will reportedly be equipped with "ROG Intelligent Cooling" technology, a MicroSD slot, Dolby Atmos speakers, and the ASUS Armoury Crate SE. The handheld will run on Windows 11 and can run Steam, Epic, Xbox Game Pass, and other gaming services.
Another leak from Videocardz.com suggests that the AMD Ryzen Z1 series processor on the ASUS ROG Ally is a custom version of the Ryzen 7 7840U APU. The APU is an 8-core/16-thread Zen 4 CPU with a base clock of 3.3GHz and has an AMD Radeon 780M RDNA 3 architecture GPU with 12 Compute Units (CU), or a total of 768 stream processors.
The custom Ryzen APU needs to be very efficient as battery life is one of the main downsides of the Steam Deck and the Ryzen 7 7840U APU should fit the bill as it runs anywhere from 15W to 28W.
Looking at the leaked specs sheet, the ASUS ROG Ally looks like a proper handheld computer. More importantly, it feels like it's going to fulfill ASUS's claims that it will be twice as fast as what Valve is offering.
On paper, ASUS’s claims may be right as the ROG Ally has twice as many CPU cores as the Steam Deck. The ROG Ally’s RDNA3 GPU also has 12 CUs against the 8 CUs of the Steam Decks RDNA2 GPU.
If the leaks are right, then ASUS will also have a massive advantage as it features a 1080p 120Hz display. Valve’s handheld only has a 1280x800 60Hz display.
One thing that the leaks don’t mention is the battery of the new ASUS ROG Ally. The Steam Deck is equipped with a 40 Whr battery. We assume the ROG Ally will have a bigger battery considering that it has a much more powerful APU.
All things considered, the ASUS ROG Ally seems like a worthy competitor to the Steam Deck. The only thing that we need to know now is how much will it cost us at launch. ASUS has not yet revealed a price but insiders expect it to be in the range of $600.
