The ROG Ally gets a new Zen 4c chip and a worrying price tag
That's effectively half the Steam Deck's GPU for near twice the price.
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Asus has announced it's going to be shipping the ROG Ally Z1 edition handheld PC starting from October 3 for the painfully high price of $599 (£599). This new device will ship with essentially the same base hardware as the top-spec ROG Ally, which sports the full AMD Z1 Extreme APU, so in a way you can see why it's only $100 cheaper.
After all, you're still getting the same lovely 500cd/m2 120Hz 1080p display, the same 512GB SSD, 16GB LPDDR5-6400, and a UHS-II microSD slot that may or may not melt the contents of which into so much silicon slag.
The issue is that, while the AMD Z1 is a supremely interesting chip, it's very underpowered in gaming terms compared with the Z1 Extreme because it's using the 740M iGPU as opposed to the powerful 780M option. The top chip then has the full complement of 12 compute units (CUs)—the same as the Ryzen 7 7840U that's powering all the best handheld gaming PCs right now—but the plain Z1 is rocking only a third of that.
With just four CUs you're getting 256 shaders compared with the 768 of the full Z1 Extreme chip. And that effectively puts it at half the GPU silicon of the Aerith APU at the heart of the Steam Deck. Yeah, a theoretical halving of the gaming performance of the Deck, but with a $599 price tag. Ouch.
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