ETA Prime has gotten his hands on the new $699 (US) Asus ROG ALLY. This handheld PC is meant to compete directly with the SteamDeck, but has a lot more power. The system uses the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU featuring eight Zen 4 cores with 16 threads, a 12CU RDNA3 Radeon iGPU, and 16GB of LPDDR5 at 6400MT. Storage is handled by a 2230 sized M.2 drive, and the system features a 7-inch 120Hz 1080P IPS display with FreeSync variable refresh rate. It uses Windows 11 as its OS of choice.
Aside from the increased processing power, the major advantage that the ROG ALLY has over the SteamDeck is the FreeSync display. SteamDeck has a fixed refresh rate display. While it’s semi-flexible in its user configurable refresh rate, it’s still fixed. This means that you have a choice of VSYNC stutter or screen tearing when the game can’t match the refresh rate. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of games struggle in this way. With FreeSync, the screen simply adapts to the framerate of the game.
You can check out ETA Prime’s video below. Make sure to like and subscribe to him.
