Best Buy’s three-day weekend sale includes abnormally large discounts on the Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld. The base model ROG Ally with Ryzen Z1 chipset is on sale for only $380 (was $500), while the Z1 Extreme edition has received an even steeper discount of $150, dropping the price from $650 to $500. As an added bonus, you’ll also get the official ROG Ally travel case. ($40 value) and one month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. The ROG Ally runs Windows, but Valve confirmed this week that the handheld will receive Steam Deck OS support.
These Asus ROG Ally deals end on Sunday, August 18 at 10 PM PT / 1 AM ET (Monday).
While the model with the Ryzen Z1 Extreme CPU is the more powerful of the two configurations, both offer similar specs otherwise, including gorgeous seven-inch 1080p screens with 120Hz refresh rates, RDNA 3 graphics chip,16GB RAM, and 512GB of built-in storage. Unlike other handhelds that run Android or Linux (like the Steam Deck), the ROG Ally offers a standard Windows 11 experience.
It’s worth noting that Windows is tricky to use on any gaming handheld, unless you pair it with a traditional mouse and keyboard setup. We’d recommend grabbing a budget-friendly docking station, so you can use the device like a regular desktop PC when needing to do anything complex within Windows. Asus also makes a 65W Charger Dock, which has ports for USB-C, USB 2.0, and HDMI 2.0.
Asus has a proprietary app called Armoury Crate that gives you a more traditional console-like interface for gaming, which is quite helpful after you have things squared away on the Windows side.
Though these deals are great, you should be aware that Asus recently released a new, more powerful refresh, the ROG Ally X, which uses the same Z1 Extreme chipset and seven-inch screen, but has 24GB RAM, 1TB storage space, longer battery life, and upgraded joysticks. You can get the ROG Ally X for $800 at Best Buy.. Admittedly, that’s pretty expensive–twice the cost of the base model right now–so newcomers to the PC handheld scene may want to snag one of the existing models instead. But the ROG Ally X has earned impressive reviews from critics and users alike, so if your ultimate goal is power, the ROG Ally X is the ideal option on the Windows side of gaming handhelds.
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