No joke – Asus is launching a Steam Deck competitor

Asus released a trailer for its portable Steam Deck competitor over the weekend, but there was just one catch. The teaser was dropped on April 1st, leading many to assume it was an elaborate, high-budget April Fools’ joke, but Asus has confirmed that its gaming laptop is real and coming soon.

The ROG Ally is coming soon, according to Asus, and there too The page is directly on Best Buy If you want to be notified when pre-orders end. The mobile includes “AMD’s most powerful APU yet,” according to Asus, and appears to be running Windows 11 with an Asus custom overlay.

Additionally, Ally supports Asus’ XG Mobile GPU, which can carry up to a laptop-grade RTX 4090. This is seen in the ad trailer, which definitely carries the tone that Ally was an April Fools’ joke.

It looks like Asus planned this rollout out, though. On Monday morning, YouTuber Dave2D posted a video comparing an early prototype Ally to a Steam Deck, confirming that it was real and that Asus had likely been working on the Ally for some time.

Dave2D confirmed some other important specifications about the device as well. It carries a custom Zen 4 APU, the same architecture behind the Ryzen 7000 processors, along with RDNA 3 graphics, which power graphics cards like the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. In addition, it has a 7-inch 1080p screen with a refresh rate of 120Hz. All that, and Dave2D says the Ally is smaller, lighter, and quieter than the Steam Deck.

The YouTuber didn’t go into performance details, but said that Ally allows games to run at much higher frame rates with higher graphics settings compared to the Steam Deck, showing titles like Resident Evil 4 remake And Warhammer 40K: Darktide.

Even more impressive, Dave2D said he couldn’t hear the fan noise while gaming. In his measurements, the Ally’s propeller noise was about half the volume of the Steam Deck under load on the prototype model.

However, there are still a lot of details we don’t know about the ROG Ally. Crucially, we don’t know its price and release date. Rumors have it coming this year, and given the hardware inside, it’ll likely cost more than the $400 base Steam Deck price. I’ve reached out to Asus to see if the company has any more details to share at this time.

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