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The cheaper $600 Asus ROG Ally is here, and you probably shouldn’t buy it

The Asus ROG Ally PC gaming handheld in white standing upright on a wood desk and showing a Windows homescreen.
Whether you pay $600 or $700, the Asus ROG Ally looks the same. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

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…

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