It would be fair to say that the Steam Deck popularized the idea of a portable, handheld PC, but Asus has been hot on Valve’s heels. Not only did the original ROG Ally arrive fairly shortly with a sharper display, but the underlying Z1 Extreme chip offered more power, too (as we covered in our review).

In recent years, both manufacturers have released revisions of the hardware, but looking at the base models, there’s still a lot to like for each. Whether you’re looking for the simple, Linux-based nature of a Steam Deck or the Windows compatibility of the Asus ROG Ally, we’ve put together this handy comparison between each.

Price was the main point in question for the ROG Ally, especially against the aggressively-priced Steam Deck. But it’s clear Asus was ready to fire back at Valve’s handheld with equally aggressive pricing.

Asus has continued to refine things, with multiple SKUs with different chips starting at around $550, but running up to the Asus ROG Xbox Ally at $999. That means there’s likely to be a version for just about any budget, but it’s still cheaper to buy a Steam Deck.

The Steam Deck starts $349, but that’s only with 64GB of slow storage, and it’s seeing regular discounts in Valve’s Steam sales. That’s also the LCD model, which is on the way out as Valve replenishes stock with the Steam Deck OLED model.

The Steam Deck OLED is priced more similarly to the ASUS ROG Ally, and offers an OLED display which even the priciest, Xbox-branded model doesn’t have. Still, the Steam Deck lags behind on performance, so you can expect games to run better on the ASUS but at the cost of having to navigate Windows on a handheld – more on that, shortly.

The ROG Ally looks pretty, that’s for sure, but it’s really the underlying hardware that makes Asus’ handheld exciting. The ROG Ally is powered by AMD’s Z1 Series processors, custom APUs leveraging Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 GPU cores. AMD has two of these Z1 processors available, though, and they’re very different.

The Ryzen Z1 comes with six Zen 4 cores and four RDNA 3 cores for a total of up to 2.8 TFLOPS of theoretical performance. The Ryzen Z1 Extreme, by contrast, comes with eight Zen 4 cores and a massive 12 RDNA 3 cores. That enables much higher performance — up to 8.6 TFLOPs, according to AMD.

The ROG Ally was the first device to debut the Z1 Extreme, but there are competitors now. Lenovo’s Legion Go packs a Z1 Extreme, and the Ayaneo 2S uses a Ryzen 7 7840U, which is a rebranded version of the Z1 Extreme.

The new 2025 models, both branded with Xbox designs, come with Z2 or Z2 Extreme chips. Both should outperform the Steam Deck handily, and minimize some of the pain points of running Windows on a handheld with an ‘Xbox Full Screen Experience’ that aggregates the games you own across multiple libraries.

By comparison, the Steam Deck is packing much weaker hardware. Regardless of the model you choose, you’re getting four Zen 2 cores and eight RDNA 2 cores, which offer up to 1.6 TFLOPs of theoretical performance. The Steam Deck’s APU also tops out at 15 watts, while the ROG Ally can go up to 30W in its Turbo mode.

There’s a big difference between the APUs, but the Steam Deck and ROG Ally have some specs in common as well. Both devices come with 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, and they both include a Micro SD card slot for storage expansion. They also both support USB-C for charging and come with a 3.5mm headphone jack. The ROG Ally X is a bit of an outlier, packing in 24GB of LPDDR5 memory, and that’s the same for the Xbox Ally X, too.

The Micro SD card is a point of contention. Asus has confirmed that the ROG Ally can cause the Micro SD card to fail under certain thermal conditions. We’ve run one for months without issue, but remains a problem that people are experiencing.

There’s no question — the ROG Ally with the Z1 Extreme is faster than the Steam Deck. In an apples-to-apples comparison with the same resolution and APU wattage, the ROG Ally is upwards of 50% faster than the Steam Deck. It’s important to note that the ROG Ally can scale higher, too. The Steam Deck tops out at 15W, but the ROG Ally can go up to 30W in its Turbo mode with the charger plugged in, or 25W on battery.

It was clear from the start that the ROG Ally would be faster, but it comes with a higher-resolution screen, as well. At 1080p, the ROG Ally starts to slip. It’s still a great performer, though, especially when it can run the most demanding games available today at Medium settings while maintaining close to 30 frames per second (fps).

Since release, Asus has released a number of updates for the ROG Ally, and they haven’t improved performance. In fact, performance has regressed. As you can see in our retesting of the device in July 2024, it slips a bit in the comparison to the Steam Deck.

It’s still faster, for sure, but it’s disconcerting to see the ROG Ally slip in performance at the whim of a BIOS update. This update was, apparently, meant to improve performance as well. The previous one was even slower.

Bringing the ROG Ally X and competitors like the MSI Claw into the equation, you can see that Asus maintains a lead in most games. As the Steam Deck and ROG Ally have both seen updates, however, their performance has gotten closer at 720p.

Thankfully, there’s some room to improve your performance with different performance modes and upscaling. That’s true for both the ROG Ally and the Steam Deck; the ROG Ally can just go higher. You can run its APU between 7W and 30W, while the Steam Deck only operates between 5W and 15W.

I wouldn’t recommend running the ROG Ally at a full 30W, but it’s nice to have the option if you’re close to a charger and want a boost in performance. Turbo mode isn’t practical on the go, though. It will kill your battery quickly.

The Steam Deck and ROG Ally are pretty close in overall battery life. At the default Performance mode on the ROG Ally and the Steam Deck at full tilt, you can get about two hours of a demanding AAA game. Turbo mode on the ROG Ally is much worse — in my testing, the device died in under an hour. The ROG Ally X with its 80WHr battery changes that dynamic, often doubling the battery life the original model can achieve.

Overall, though, the ROG Ally feels like a quality upgrade over the Steam Deck, not a performance upgrade. It’s faster and more efficient, but you’ll mainly be running games with better visual quality at a higher resolution while getting similar performance and battery life.

There’s also a point to be made here about how you would use a handheld gaming device. Assuming it’s not your only gaming platform, the Steam Deck can make more sense, even if it’s less powerful. That’s a big reason why I switched back to using my Steam Deck after several months with the ROG Ally.

How about the version with the Ryzen Z1, though? As you can read in our Asus ROG Ally Z1 review, it’s not a great option. Above, you can see that the model with the Ryzen Z1 can’t keep pace with the Steam Deck at 720p with the default Performance mode.

In our testing, the device doesn’t benefit much from higher wattages, either. If you’re considering the Asus ROG Ally with the Ryzen Z1, you should stick with the Steam Deck or spend a little extra on the Z1 Extreme model.

One of the most important differences between the ROG Ally and Steam Deck is the operating system. The Steam Deck uses Valve’s custom SteamOS, while the ROG Ally will leverage Windows 11.

There are pros and cons no matter which way you look. For the Steam Deck, SteamOS provides an easy-to-use, streamlined interface for handheld gaming. It certainly helps that it’s tied into the largest distribution network for PC games, as well, allowing you to easily shop for new titles.

Valve ships updates very regularly, improving a lot of the bugs we encountered in prior versions of this comparison, but the biggest issue with SteamOS is that it’s built on Linux. That means it’s easy-to-use and you can boot into desktop mode, but plenty of games that run anti-cheat software simply won’t work. That rules of the likes of Call of Duty Warzone, Destiny 2, and others.

There are some downsides to Windows 11, though. The first is that it’s a desktop operating system, not a handheld gaming one. Instead, Asus’ Armoury Crate runs on top of Windows. It allows you to do things like launch games — it hooks into the EA app, Xbox app, Ubisoft Connect, GOG Galaxy, Epic Games Store, and Steam — and configure settings on the device.

The new Xbox full-screen experience makes things easier, but it still requires some grasp of Windows to get set up. Once that’s done, though, you no longer need to go into Windows to install games, plus the aggregate game library is handy if your titles are split between, say, Steam, Xbox, and Battle net.

The new Armoury Crate SE 1.5, which arrived alongside the ROG Ally X, comes with some major improvements as well. You have features like AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) available through the overlay, and you can customize your home screen to display your games how you want. In addition, Asus now supports importing and exporting controller profiles, closing the gap on a big point in the Steam Deck’s favor.

The Steam Deck has compatibility concerns, but it remains a more console-like experience unless you want to play an unsupported game. The ROG Ally has those issues inherently, and it feels more like a handheld laptop than a handheld console. The Steam Deck wins here, but if you were hoping to play Warzone on the go, you might be disappointed.

One area where the Steam Deck shoots ahead of the ROG Ally is the feel. It’s big and bulky, but Valve makes good use of that space with quality thumbsticks and buttons, as well as trackpads that can be helpful in games that require a lot of precision.

The ROG Ally doesn’t have trackpads, but the real problem is that its buttons don’t feel as good in the earliest versions. That’s been rectified in newer models, thankfully, and the Xbox-branded versions at include more comfortable, controller-like grips.

That makes the ROG Ally is more comfortable to hold, It’s slightly lighter but much smaller. I’m much more comfortable pulling out the ROG Ally on a plane over the Steam Deck; it doesn’t feel nearly as unruly.

The difference in feel is much closer with the ROG Ally X. Asus updated everything but the face buttons. The D-pad is much nicer, the triggers have a comfortable resistance, and the shoulder buttons are clicky like an Xbox controller. The original ROG Ally is a clear downgrade in feel compared to the Steam Deck, but the ROG Ally X can go toe-to-toe with Valve’s handheld.

The ROG Ally comes with its own problems. It doesn’t immediately solve all the issues of the Steam Deck. But for a higher price, Asus is offering acceptable battery life, better performance, more game support through Xbox Game Pass, and a much nicer screen (than the LCD model, at least).

That’s only for the flagship model, though. The base model of the ROG Ally with the Ryzen Z1 is a clear step below the Steam Deck, and it doesn’t have any of the quality-of-life features we see in Valve’s handheld.

However, you should not regret buying a Steam Deck. The Steam Deck, especially now that the ROG Ally has seen some rough updates, still continues to impress with its stability. The ROG Ally is the device to pick if you don’t already have a handheld gaming PC, but it’s not enough to justify upgrading if you already have a Steam Deck.

That’s even more true now that the Steam Deck OLED is here. Valve is also offering the Steam Deck OLED at a much lower price than the original model, making the Ally look far more expensive by comparison. The ROG Ally X comes in at an even higher price, and although it has some big upgrades, it’s hard to justify it over the Steam Deck OLED.

We’ve found that if you own a Steam Deck, it’s not necessarily worth it at this time to “upgrade” to a ROG Ally, and that’s because the ROG Ally has been given some recent updates that we feel has caused its performance to decline a bit.

At this time the ROG Ally with Z1 Extreme now goes for around $600, but you can sometimes find it cheaper at around $500 during sale events. The ROG Ally X is $800, but the Xbox Ally X will set you back $999.

During our testing, we found that the battery life of the Asus ROG Ally with Z1 Extreme was as follows:

Fortunately, our Steam Deck battery management tips also work on the Asus ROG Ally and other handhelds.