The ASUS ROG Ally Might Be the Best Steam Deck Clone Yet

There have been plenty of Steam Deck clones out there, but none have managed to quite match what Valve has achieved with its first piece of hardware. ASUS might just have a worthy contender for a change, though.

ASUS has announced a gaming handheld dubbed the ROG Ally. It belongs to the company’s “Republic of Gamers” sub-brand, and the handheld itself not only manages to look really clean on the outside, but it also promises to be more powerful than the Steam Deck. The handheld was announced on April 1st, leading many to believe this was an April Fools’ joke from ASUS, but the company has since clarified that it’s definitely not a joke.

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In a similar fashion to Valve, ASUS says that it partnered with AMD for a custom chip. But while the Steam Deck uses Zen 2 cores, ASUS is using much newer, and much more powerful, Zen 4 cores for its chip. It also uses RDNA 3 graphics, whereas the Steam Deck also stays behind the curve in this regard, with older RDNA 2 graphics.

All of these architectural changes result, according to ASUS at least, in a device that performs roughly twice as well in games as the Steam Deck. And if you need even better graphics, you’re even able to hook this unit up to an external GPU through an ASUS ROG XG connection — through a PCI Express x8 interface.

Unfortunately, we don’t have details on battery life, pricing, or availability, but we expect this to become available anytime within the next few months.

Source: Liliputing