The Asus ROG Ally handheld has dropped to £599 in the UK
That's £100 cheaper than the 2023 launch price and well worth considering.
Good news, everyone! One of the best PC gaming handhelds, the Asus ROG Ally, is done to just £599 at Currys in the UK for the higher-powered Z1 Extreme edition. This represents a £100 discount over its launch price and is a good value for a premium handheld that outperforms the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED while having a higher-res and higher refresh rate 1080p 120Hz display.
The big difference between the ROG Ally and the Steam Deck is that the former runs Windows 11, while the Steam Deck runs a custom Valve-made distribution of Linux called SteamOS. The Steam Deck really benefits from this, running a huge number of Windows games via the Proton compatibility layer and offering a very intuitive interface, but some software - notably anticheat software required by some titles - doesn't work here.
The ROG Ally, on the other hand, runs Windows software natively and therefore has much wider compatibility, but despite the ROG Armoury Crate software serving as a launcher and settings app, isn't as convenient to use with the controls available. Microsoft is meant to be working on a proper PC handheld interface, which could come to the rescue in the future, but for now the ROG Ally feels just a shade more awkward than its Valve competitor.
Elsewhere, the ROG Ally is generally better equipped. As well as having a higher-spec screen, its AMD Z1 Extreme processor is marginally faster than the Aerith and Sephiroth processors in the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED respectively (our testing showed between equal performance and ~40 percent higher average frame-rates depending on the game at roughly equal resolutions). The Ally also benefits from being paired with faster DDR5 memory and also faster PCIe 4.0 2230-sized NVMe SSDs. This iteration of the Ally comes with a 512GB NVMe SSD, but upgrading to a larger 1TB or even 2TB model is easy and relatively inexpensive.
Overall, the Ally is a convincing device well worth considering at this lower price point, even if the Steam Deck OLED has the better looking display and the Steam Deck is general has the best user interface available on a PC handheld right now.