Deal | ASUS ROG Ally price hits all-time low at Best Buy alongside respectable 11% ROG Ally Z1 Extreme discount

If you are in the market for a budget Windows gaming handheld, you might be in luck as the ASUS ROG Ally with an AMD Ryzen Z1 APU has hit its lowest price to date at Best Buy (Buy it now). The discounted rate of US$449.99 is a considerable US$150 less than the US$599.99 list price (via slickdeals). However, if you don’t mind spending more, Best Buy also has the ASUS ROG Ally with an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme for only US$619.99 instead of the usual US$699.99 price tag, a US$80 reduction.

Aside from packing a less performant AMD Ryzen Z1 chip, the ASUS ROG Ally features identical hardware to the ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme. Both handhelds pack 7-inch FHD touch displays with a 120 Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync Premium. Additionally, both devices feature 16 GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory and 512 GB of storage.

In our ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme review, we praised the gaming handheld for its superb construction, solid display that boasted 474 nits of brightness and 92% sRGB coverage, and controls that reminded us of the Xbox controller.

When it comes to performance, our ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme performed quite well with Turbo mode engaged. For instance, our review device played The Witcher 3 at 47 FPS at FHD resolution with High settings. eSports titles like Dota 2 can be pushed to beyond 100 FPS at medium/low settings.

The ASUS ROG Ally with the vanilla Z1 chip is considerably less powerful than Ryzen Z1 Extreme version owing to two fewer CPU cores and a meager 4 CU Radeon 740M iGPU. So, the ROG Ally should be able to play non-intensive games like eSports titles and indie games at acceptable frame rates while modern AAA titles will struggle to run well on the device.

Finally, we measured a battery life of around 1 hour in The Witcher 3 for the ROG Ally Z1 Extreme at Turbo power mode. Dropping the settings down to Performance Power mode increased the battery life to 1 hour and 45 minutes. The ASUS ROG Ally non-Extreme should last a bit longer considering the significantly cut-back APU.