As it turned out that ASUS ROG Ally handheld console is not actually an April Fools' Day prank, more details have started to appear about this Steam Deck competitor, and these first details look pretty promising. According to the Dave2D video, showing the prototype unit in full details, the ASUS ROG Ally will indeed be based on a 4 nm custom AMD APU, featuring Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 iGPU, so we are most likely looking at a custom AMD Phoenix APU.

The video had a few nice pictures of the pre-production PCB as well as the cooling setup as well as details on the screen, and some performance of the ASUS ROG Ally. The ROG Ally measures at 280 x 133 x 39 mm and weighing 608 grams. This makes it shorter, narrower, thinner, as well as lighter, compared to the Steam Deck. It also comes with 7-inch display, but this time around, it is a 500 nits, 1920x1080 resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio, display with a 120 Hz refresh rate and 5 ms response time, which makes it much better compared to the Steam Deck.

Update: LinusTechTips is the second one to get access to ASUS ROG Ally prototype and has provided a bit more details on specifications, performance, and other things about the upcoming handheld console.ASUS was also keen to note that it poured its extensive cooling experience into the ROG Ally, so it will feature a dual-fan cooling solution which is significantly quieter than the Steam Deck, even on a prototype unit. It peaks at 20 dB of noise compared to 37 dB on the Steam Deck. The video also shows the dedicated PCIE Gen 3 x8 XG connector, meant to connect the ROG Ally to ASUS' recently launched XG Mobile GPU, an external RTX 4090 GPU which retails at $1999.99 in the US.Unfortunately, ASUS is pretty tight-lipped about the precise specifications and further details of the ROG Ally handheld console, but the video shows some impressive performance for this Windows-based console. ASUS is also not giving out any specific launch date, but the Dave2D confirms that the console will have a global launch and have a "competitive" price.


According to LinusTechTips, the ASUS ROG Ally is now confirmed to indeed come with a some type of AMD Phoenix APU, based on Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU architecture. It is likely to come with 16 GB of memory.

Linus also gave a bit more information on the actual performance, saying it will offer 50 percent higher performance at 15 W and twice the performance at 35 W, compared to the Steam Deck. He also fiddled with the ASUS Command Center, showing options to change the resolution, refresh rate, and enable AMD Radeon Super Resolution, which is an in-driver upscaling feature that uses the same algorithm as the AMD FSR, and can be used in games where FSR is not supported.

Linus also said that the ASUS ROG Ally will be coming to the market in next few months, and while ASUS is still keeping the price under tight wraps, some rumors suggest it could come at around $680, which is close to the $649.99 price of the top Steam Deck 512 GB version.