ASUS officially announced the ROG Ally rocking the AMD Ryzen Z1 SoC. This is not to be confused with the ROG Ally with the more potent Z1 Extreme chipset that we reviewed back in July this year. More importantly, the “watered-down” version of the console is coming to Malaysia.
To recap, the difference between the Ryzen Z1 Extreme and non-Extreme SKU is the difference between a Ryzen 7 7840U and Ryzen 5 7640U. To that end, the Z1 comes with two CPU cores less than its more powerful counterpart, which is a 6-cores, 12-threads CPU.
The SoC also has eight RDNA3 cores less than the Extreme model at four cores, and a slightly smaller total cache size of 22MB. Beyond the difference in chipset, every other component virtually remains the same, including the 120Hz 7-inch display, the 16GB LPDDR5 RAM, the same PCIe Gen4 storage capacity of 512GB, a microSD card reader, and ASUS’ own proprietary XG Mobile connector.
At the time of writing, ASUS still isn’t able to provide a specific availability date or official pricing for the Z1 ROG Ally, although globally, the console already retails at an SRP of US$599 (~RM2,813). Interestingly, the PC brand also says that its new handheld console will only be available exclusively through a local telco, although which telco the Taiwan-based brand is working with is still a closely guarded secret.
(Source: ASUS)
