Asus ROG Ally

The first in line for the Steam Deck's throne

- DAVE JAMES

THE ASUS ROG ALLY is really, really good. So good, in fact, that it might just be the best budget gaming PC you can buy right now, and may even make cheap gaming laptops an irrelevance, too.

Asus has made a genuinely next-gen Steam Deck in the ROG Ally. That’s probably the highest praise you can give a modern handheld gaming PC. It might sound mean, but I’m surprised that Asus has really got what made the Deck such a good machine. It has priced it smartly, delivered a fantastic user experience— occasional Windows-based niggles aside—and made it a very open platform.

The performance of the system itself is what sets it apart from Valve’s inaugural handheld, though. That AMD Z1 Extreme APU is a stunning piece of mobile silicon, with a CPU heart capable of easily outstripping modern Alder Lake Core i5 and Core i7 processors. That, along with its surfeit of DDR5 memory and PCIe 4.0 SSD, makes it a supremely responsive system and pleasure to use.