If you’ve been eying an Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld but can’t quite justify the $700 price tag… you’ll probably want to keep on waiting. Today, the company has begun selling a less-expensive $600 model with a lower-performance AMD Z1 chip, but early reviews suggest the Windows gaming handheld is too compromised to justify the purchase.
Bottom line: Z1 performance is reportedly worse than the $400-and-up Steam Deck, without any significant battery life benefit to make up for the loss of power.
Brief refresher: three months ago, Asus began shipping the ROG Ally, a Windows gaming handheld designed to compete on price and performance with Valve’s Steam Deck. It had a lot going for it, including mostly better-than-Deck performance, an…