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If the leaked Asus ROG Ally price is real, the Steam Deck is in trouble

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Since Asus announced its ROG Ally handheld, one question has dominated the conversation: how much will it cost? If a new leak is to be believed, the flagship model will come in at $700.

Best Buy, which seems to be exclusively handling distribution in the U.S., had a listing briefly go live for the ROG Ally. It shows a model with AMD’s Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor, 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, and 512GB of storage coming in at $700.

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Best Buy product page leaked the price of the Asus ROG Ally. It will be priced at $699 dollars for the 16GB/512GB variant. pic.twitter.com/CbfERTkGT4

— Khumail Thakur (@wickedkhumz) April 27, 2023

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The Steam Deck starts at $400, but if you want a reasonable amount of storage, you’ll spend $650 for the 512GB model. Asus claims the ROG Ally doubles the performance of the Steam Deck, so a $50 upcharge doesn’t seem unreasonable. We haven’t had the chance to get raw performance numbers, but our initial hands-on time with the ROG Ally shows performance far ahead of the Steam Deck.

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It isn’t just one leaker claiming this price, either. SnoopyTech, a Twitter leaker who commonly leaks about mobile devices, confirmed the flagship model will run $700. In addition, leaker Roland Quandt confirmed the price to The Verge. 

As we commonly see with retailer listings leaking the price of upcoming products, there’s a chance this is just a placeholder. Given how many leakers are claiming the Z1 Extreme model will run $700, though, the price seems all but settled at this point.

Z1 processor for the Asus ROG Ally.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

We don’t know the price of the base model yet, though. Asus has confirmed that in addition to the Ryzen Z1 Extreme model, the ROG Ally will also be available in a Ryzen Z1 configuration. This is a less powerful version of the Z1 Extreme, but it still comes with the same Zen 4 CPU architecture and RDNA 3 GPU architecture as the flagship chip.

Compared to the Steam Deck, the ROG Ally’s APU has much more powerful hardware. On paper, the Z1 Extreme offers 8.6 TFLOPs of GPU power, while the Steam Deck’s APU tops out at 1.6 TFLOPs. That’s just theoretical performance — the ROG Ally isn’t six times as fast as the Steam Deck — but it’s a good illustration of how much more powerful the ROG Ally’s APU really is.

Asus hasn’t confirmed pricing for the ROG Ally yet. The device is set to launch on May 11, when Asus says it will reveal final specs and pricing.

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Jacob Roach
Jacob Roach
Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
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