ASUS ROG Ally Handheld Gaming Console Is A Real Product, Features Custom-Made AMD APU & Coming Soon

Yesterday, ASUS unveiled its ROG Ally handheld gaming console which turns out to be a real product powered by a custom-made AMD APU.

The ASUS ROG Ally handheld gaming console may have looked like a well-made April Fool joke but as it turns out, the product is indeed real. The ASUS ROG Global channel revealed today that this is an actual product and provides a link to retailer, Best Buy, where you can learn more about the pre-orders of the device.

As for the ROG Ally device itself, it seems like ASUS is also hoping onboard the recent wave of hand-held gaming console devices. The market has seen several options ever since Valve announced its Steam Deck console. While the Steam Deck uses a custom-made Van Gogh SOC codenamed Aeirth, the rest of the options utilize AMD's standard Ryzen APU options such as Cezanne, Rembrandt, and the upcoming Phoenix chips.

ASUS says in its announcement video that the ROG Ally will make use of the fastest custom-made APU yet that was worked on by AMD & ROG. The renders make it look like a custom version of AMD Rembrandt or Phoenix APUs though that remains to be seen. Since we are talking about RDNA 3, it will support AMD's RSR and FSR capabilities while delivering up to twice the performance of Steam Deck at its full 35W TDP. Even at 15W, the ROG Ally will deliver a 50% performance boost over the Steam Deck.

Update: Information by Dave2D suggests that the ASUS ROG Ally is powered by a Zen 4 + RDNA 3 APU so we are looking at a custom-built Phoenix design for this handheld gaming console. Screen on the console is a 7" 120Hz panel (5ms response time) with a maximum resolution of 1080P FHD and capable of up to 500 Nits brightness. The whole thing also weighs in at just 608g.

The handheld console features two thumbsticks, a D-Pad, and the ABXY button layout, similar to Microsoft's Xbox controllers. There is a range of other buttons along with trigger sticks on the top and back.

The front has cutouts for its stereo audio output and has large exhaust vents on the rear to vent heat out. Knowing ASUS, they are using a dual-fan exhaust system that features an integrated heat pipe implementation in the pre-production unit that Dave2D showed. The ASUS ROG logo can be seen on the back along with an accent LED strip which is engulfed in RGB lighting when the device is powered on.

Being a Windows 11 OS-powered handheld means that you will have the ability to access multiple gaming libraries while playing through cloud streaming services. Another interesting feature of the ASUS ROG Ally handheld gaming console is that it can be paired with ASUS's ROG XG Mobile dock which comes with up to an RTX 4090 laptop GPU and costs around $2500 US. When connected, the small handheld console can deliver even higher performance and make for a very portable living room gaming setup.

There are no other specifications available nor is the pricing but we expect ASUS to reveal more about its ROG Ally handheld console in the coming days.