The Asus ROG Ally, one of the best Steam Deck alternatives and handheld PCs on the market, is getting a nice discount for Black Friday at Best Buy. The Ally Extreme – the handheld’s more powerful variant – normally goes for $699.99, but Best Buy is offering it for $619.99 from now through Nov. 25, 2023.
That’s roughly $50 more than the Steam Deck OLED with equivalent storage (512 GB), and Best Buy Plus and Total members can get an extra $20 discount.
While it might be slightly more expensive than the Steam Deck, you’re getting better performance and stability. The ROG Ally Extreme comes with AMD Extreme Z1 CPU, with eight cores and 16 threads, an RDNA 3 GPU, and 16GB of RAM. In normal speak, that means you can play some of the most demanding PC games in full HD – that’s a 1920×1080 resolution – at medium to high settings and, depending on the game, still manage to hit 60fps or near it.
Very demanding games, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, hover around 30-40fps on high settings.
It also has higher brightness settings, so while you might not get an HDR experience, you can still get the most out of the Ally’s 7-inch screen. The downside is that the battery life is, like the Steam Deck, a bit on the short side.
Still, if you’re after a strong handheld PC and don’t want to wait two more years for Valve’s upgraded Steam Deck, the Ally is a strong choice.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
