I had a horrible dream last night that I had to spend a whole day, as well as a good chunk of the preceding week, rounding up discounted PC hardware. Chilling visions indeed. Good thing today is only Cyber Monday, meaning I can get away with spending a mere 80-85% of the day rounding up discounted PC hardware. Like this: this more powerful Ryzen Z1 Extreme edition of the Asus ROG Ally, a handheld Windows PC that beats the Steam Deck on 720p games performance. With £100 off in the UK and £150 off in the States, it’s now a much closer match on price as well.
]]>Valve have made no secret of their plans to make SteamOS – the Linux-based operating system that powers the Steam Deck – available to other games-playing devices, including rival handhelds. After a recent beta update mentioned adding support for the Asus ROG Ally’s inputs, The Verge confirmed with Valve that SteamOS support for non-Steam Deck portables is still very much in the works. The Deck’s long-promised dual booting capability, on the other hand, sounds further down the to-do list.
]]>"Again, but better" has become the maxim of post-Steam Deck portable PCs. Or, to be more specific, post-Steam Deck OLED ones. Now that Valve have shown it’s possible to quickly turn around an upgraded handheld without enraging owners of the original, Lenovo have hinted at a new Legion Go, MSI have revealed an improved Claw, and Asus have released this here ROG Ally X. A ROG Ally, again – but better? Yes, it is, in almost every way except the speed at which it’ll plunge you into financial destitution.
]]>Update: There's now a separate Project Killswitch for the ROG Ally X as well, which kinds of spoils my headline but WHATEVER. Original article continues below:
]]>The Asus ROG Ally X, a sort of semi-sequel to last year’s ROG Ally handheld PC, has had its specs spilled over at Videocardz. I’m usually a lot more suspicious of hardware leaks, which are often just out-of-date or otherwise inaccurate info, but I’ve also sat through enough mic-muted prebriefings to know an official slideshow when I see one, and that appears to be exactly what Videocardz got its hands on. Besides, these specs include a gigantic 80Whr battery upgrade (doubling the ROG Ally’s 40Whr capacity), so we can at least file this under "News James wants to be true."
]]>Steam Deck docks are a great upgrade for anyone that wants to use their Steam Deck (or similar PC handheld) with a TV or monitor, but the official Valve option is a little pricey at £69. Thankfully, cheaper third-party options are available, including this discounted Ugreen option that costs just £26 thanks to a voucher available at Amazon UK.
]]>It seems like just yesterday that we were reporting that the Asus ROG Ally had dropped to £539 in the UK, and now we have a similarly good deal for the US market: the same Z1 Extreme 512GB model for just $599 following a $100 discount at Best Buy.
]]>The Asus ROG Ally has dropped in price in response to the release of the Steam Deck OLED, and now a 10% off code at Very makes this handheld gaming PC even better value. You can now get the top-spec ROG Ally with the Z1 Extreme chipset and 512GB of PCIe 4.0 storage for just £539 with code VTQ8C, a brilliant price that puts it in direct competition with the 512GB Steam Deck OLED.
]]>Good news, everyone! One of the best PC gaming handhelds, the Asus ROG Ally, is done to just £599 at Currys in the UK for the higher-powered Z1 Extreme edition. This represents a £100 discount over its launch price and is a good value for a premium handheld that outperforms the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED while having a higher-res and higher refresh rate 1080p 120Hz display.
]]>Choosing the lowest storage capacity Steam Deck or other PC gaming handheld then upgrading to a high-capacity SSD is often cheaper than choosing the highest-tier storage option out of the gate, and can even provide better performance too.
If that makes sense to you, we spotted a 10% discount on the WD SN740, a solid PCIe 4.0 option that works well in the Steam Deck and even better in the ROG Ally, Legion Go and MSI Claw gaming handhelds that support faster PCIe 4.0 speeds. After the discount at Scan in the UK, the SN740 is available for £81 for 1TB.
]]>What’s the best Steam Deck accessory that isn’t a microSD card? My vote’s for a docking station: all it takes to turn this handheld PC into a functioning desktop is a few extra ports. Ports that are provided most gladly by the Syntech Docking Station, which thanks to Black Friday, is currently 20% off in the UK and 40% off in the US.
]]>To quickly recap my Steam Deck OLED review, Valve’s refreshed handheld is brilliant, serving up major improvements to screen quality and battery life while making loads of little quality-of-life tweaks. Its reveal was a surprise, mind – haven’t Valve repeatedly said that there wouldn’t be another new Steam Deck for ages?
Not quite. That warning was always qualified in that a more powerful Deck was still a ways off, and the Steam Deck OLED’s performance improvements are both tiny and a likely incidental result of its efficiency savings. This very point was repeated to me in an interview with Valve designer Jay Shaw and software engineer Jeremy Selan, which also covered the Steam Deck family’s future, its current struggles with intensive big-budget games, and why they want "more, more, more" rivals like the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go.
]]>The WD SN740 is a 2230 NVMe SSD, one of the few small enough to fit into the Steam Deck and ROG Ally gaming handhelds. It's also the cheapest of these options, and is now available for £80 at Scan - compared to £85 for the recently discounted Corsair MP600 Mini and £105 for the not-so-discounted Sabrent Rocket 2230.
]]>The Asus ROG Ally has once again made itself impossible to write about without also mentioning the Steam Deck. Its latest BIOS update - out now via the MyAsus app – includes a fix that allows the handheld Windows PC to correctly run in its fastest, power-hungriest Turbo mode when connected to sufficiently high-wattage, third-party docking stations and USB-C hubs. In other words, it now works with more of the best Steam Deck docks.
]]>The European Council of the European Union has set out new regulations on the production and recycling of portable batteries that means all devices and appliances - including gaming handhelds such as the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally - will need to have removable and replaceable batteries from 2027 onwards. The recently adopted regulation aims to “strengthen sustainability rules for batteries and waste batteries,” according to the European Council's press release, as well as ensuring that they’re “safe, sustainable and competitive.”
]]>Prime Day 2023 is scheduled to kick-off in mid-July, but we're already seeing some awesome deals on speedy Micro SD cards ahead of the big day. One that caught my eye today is the Kingston Canvas Go! Plus, which is available in a 256GB size for just £17.85 - down from an original price of £30!
For context, that's just £1 more than Samsung's Evo Plus SD card of the same size, yet you get maximum read speeds of 170MB/s compared to 130MB/s. That's 30% more, and well worth the extra quid!
]]>The Steam Deck and ROG Ally are brilliant little devices - but you do end up paying a lot more for a high-capacity version, with a £220 difference between the cheapest and most expensive Steam Decks. If you opted for one of the smaller capacities to save space, then consider this deal for a Sabrent Rocket Q4 2230 NVMe drive that offers a massive 2TB of storage for £160 - down from a usual price of £205.
To get this deal, you'll need to tick the box on the Amazon product page to get a 7% discount, then use the code SH4KDU9Z to unlock an extra discount.
]]>Mere spec sheets? Old news, friend. This Steam Deck vs Asus ROG Ally comparison is new and improved with actual testing results, both hard data (I may even borrow some benchmark graphs from the ROG Ally review) and those of the observational/anecdotal/downright take-y variety. Hopefully, by the end of it, these will give you a far better idea of which handheld gaming PC will suit your travelling needs, performance preferences, or even specific games to play on the go.
]]>The Asus ROG Ally was, in hindsight, inevitable. After the Steam Deck proved that handheld gaming PCs could flourish outside of a microscopic niche, it was surely only a matter of time before one of the big PC hardware movers would have a crack at the concept. This time, with more powerful internals, and none of the SteamOS compatibility problems that led to Valve creating a whole new verification system.
]]>The final Asus ROG Ally details slipped into place today, as Asus confirmed the price and June 13th release date of its Steam Deck-bothering handheld Windows gaming PC. And it’s honestly not as expensive as I was expecting, given the premium positioning of ROG-branded monitors and keyboards: £699 in the UK and $699 in the US. That’s more than the topmost Steam Deck model, but the ROG Ally is promising generally higher specs.
]]>A few weeks after the Asus ROG Ally was confirmed as a real thing, we have something that was missing from its faux-April Fool’s reveal: a proper look at the handheld PC’s hardware specifications. And from the boldness of its screen to the speed of its microSD card slot, the ROG Ally is already looking set to best the Steam Deck on cold, hard specs.
]]>One of the fastest gaming laptops is a solid $400 off at Best Buy, bringing an Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition to just $1250. That's an awesome price* for a laptop that comes with top-end AMD components, including a Ryzen 9 5900HX processor and RX 6800M graphics card, which for context should equal the performance of a good RTX 3080 gaming laptop.
*By comparison, the same laptop costs £1500 (equivalent to $1770) in the UK, so y'all Americans are getting darn lucky with this one.
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