It isn’t often that my people across the pond get to enjoy a genuinely great deal during the discount frenzies of events like Amazon Prime Day (and CEO Jeff Bezos is stretching the definition of a ‘day’ at this point). Nevertheless, in a miracle that feels rarer than rocking horse dirt, my daily-driven handheld gaming PC has been slashed to a price reminiscent of Black Friday legends.
Yes, chums, the Windows 11-based ASUS ROG Ally is £399.99 at Amazon UK, down from its usually eyebrow-raising £599 RRP as a Prime Day deal. Yes, that’s an exclusive price for Prime members, but you could always start a 30-day trial of Amazon Prime and just.. cancel it later. I won’t tell anyone. Frankly, it almost feels offensive to have ignored my Steam Deck for as long as I have, but the Z1 Ally is utterly consuming my recent evenings.
I swear, I’m not a Windows handheld shill
“Oh, the guy from Windows Central is promoting a handheld gaming PC that runs Windows 11? Big surprise.”
No, I get it. It’s easy to understand why people might think I’m accepting bags of cash under the table to promote a device that runs Windows 11, but that’s not the case. Ever since our own Jez Corden fell in love with the Lenovo Legion Go and palmed off his ASUS ROG Ally to me, I find myself using my Steam Deck less and less.
Not because I prefer the Windows 11 experience on a handheld over SteamOS, my goodness no. Trust me, I do not enjoy running Windows Update so often (and Microsoft Store updates, companion app updates, etc.) but I’m just so used to the OS that it doesn’t bother me that much. Besides, it runs literally everything I play without any real issue, especially if I drop the resolution and use something like Lossless Scaling to give it a visual bump.
If you’re looking for a handheld that doesn’t suffer from anti-cheat blocks and works just like your Windows PC, this is it. No need to settle for the non-Extreme Z1 unit either, this is the full-fat ROG Ally, warts and all. I love it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to annoying my partner by decorating our beautiful house in Valheim with some of the ugliest furniture I can build.
