ASUS has announced that the ROG Ally with Ryzen Z1 Extreme will be available in the US for $699 at Best Buy, with pre-orders starting today ahead of its June 13, 2023 release, while the Ryzen Z1 variant will also be available later this year for $599. Both of these Windows 11 gaming handhelds feature a 7-inch 1080p screen and up to 512 GB of NVMe storage, with the Ryzen Z1 Extreme model offering up to 8.6 teraflops of graphics performance, according to a chart that ASUS shared. AMD has also published a set of benchmarks that suggest the Ryzen Z1 Extreme can deliver frame rates of over 200 FPS in popular games that include CS:GO, but many of the early reviews that went out today have suggested that the ROG Ally has “super short” battery life, with gaming sessions lasting for around 2 hours.
From an ASUS ROG post:
At the beating heart of the Ally is the AMD Ryzen Z1 series of APUs. With up to 8 cores, 16 threads, and 8.6 teraflops of graphics performance, these chips are built on the 4 nanometer Zen 4 architecture. Featuring the latest RDNA 3 graphics engine as well as full support for AMD’s incredible upscaling technologies like Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) and FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), the Z1 series delivers incredible performance and the best power efficiency available in a handheld or console today. The top-end Ryzen Z1 Extreme rivals the graphics power of modern living room consoles, providing that coveted 60 frame per second level of AAA performance that’s been missing in handhelds for so long.
A powerful processor isn’t all it takes to make a powerful gaming machine. The Ally also features 16GB of ultra-high speed LDPPR5 6400Mhz memory to keep the APU fed with data, allowing the silicon to nimbly jump from task to task and keep the machine feeling snappy in game and on the Windows desktop. That fast memory is supported by high-speed storage, in the form of both a dedicated M.2 2230 PCIe Gen 4 drive, as well as a UHS-II microSD card slot. The microSD slot is a quick and easy way to expand your game library as large as you need it, without sacrificing load times. In fact, during internal testing, we found that the PCIe Gen 4 drive and microSD drive performed within 4% of each other, giving you a seamless experience wherever you install your games.
The ROG Ally can be used as a standalone handheld, achieving excellent framerates in story-driven single-player AAA titles. But with the right accessories, it can also become so much more. Pair it with the ROG Gaming Charger Dock to charge and output video to your TV at the same time, allowing you to pair multiple controllers for couch co-op and multiplayer. Games like FIFA 23, Moving Out, and Street Fighter V all run at over 60 FPS for a party that never stops. Or connect the Ally to the ROG XG Mobile suite of external GPUs for ultra high-end performance and enough I/O for a monitor, mouse and keyboard. With the power of up to a GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, you’ll be able to play AAA games at 4K with ray tracing and DLSS3, or dominate the battlefield in esports titles with super high refresh rates for pro-level precision.
