Hands-on: The ROG Ally is a Steam Deck competitor with more power and options

Asus enters the new portable PC gaming fray, leaning on the power of Windows and add-on GPU hardware

- MICHAEL CRIDER

You can run Windows on the Steam Deck. And you really, really shouldn’t (fave.co/3oa7YM4). Valve’s portable machine has singularly carved out a new hardware niche for PC gamers, but it did so with a system built around the Linux-based SteamOS from the ground up. Such competitors that have arrived in the last year come from smaller companies without the resources to either sell games or make software, and have thus had to settle for more expensive machines with roughly the same specs, running Windows. And frankly, they don’t measure up.

The Asus ROG Ally might just be the first competitor that can. It’s a familiar form factor, with more power thanks to a brand-new AMD Z1 chip based on Zen 4. And it was made from day one with Windows gaming in mind, to the same degree that the Steam Deck was built around its operating system. And thanks to compatibility with the same proprietary external graphics cards as the ROG Flow laptops and tablets (fave.co/3ocvFU8), it might—might—be able to fully replace a gaming laptop or desktop. Hell, it might just be able to replace a full desktop PC, period.

Will that extra capability be worth the inevitably higher price of the ROG Ally versus the Steam Deck, especially since the ROG XG Mobile eGPU is another thousand bucks (at least) on top of that? Who knows? But it’s certainly shaping up to be an interesting alternative for those who demand more power and options.