There’s no denying that Steam Deck is the most popular gaming handheld out there. But recently, Asus did grab a lot of attention by debuting the ROG Ally. Even though many believed it to be an April Fools’ joke, considering the fact that the announcement came on April 1, it’s very real!
Nonetheless, the debut of the Asus Rog Ally is apparently the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AMD-powered Steam Deck rivals. To be exact, at least four handhelds based on the same SoC are yet to be unveiled. And when all those go out in the wild, Valve’s handheld could definitely lose its spark.
AMD Has Multiple APUs That Can Go All Out on Steam Deck!
There are many reasons to get excited about the upcoming Steam Deck competitors. Let’s take the Asus ROG Ally, for example. As Asus hinted, it might be the very first gaming handheld since Valve’s offering that comes with custom hardware. And a growing body of recent leaks is suggesting that collaboration with AMD will go by the name of Ryzen Z1.
Moreover, recent Geekbench leaks of the Rog Ally suggest that Asus might be utilizing two such chips. According to them, the first chipset of the Steam Deck competitor is a six-core Ryzen Z1 chipset with two RDNA 3 graphics compute units. And the second one is an eight-core Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC with six RDNA 3 compute units.
From what it seems like, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme could have a higher power consumption. Obviously, that would lead to higher performance gains, probably a lot higher than Steam Deck.
It does not stop there, though. A shipping manifest further shows a Rog Ally with another unannounced Ryzen chipset, which has been spotted by VideoCardz. That shows the Steam Deck competitor with a Ryzen 7 7840U chipset. It runs at 3.3GHz and boasts a Radeon 780M graphics, supposedly an identical chipset to the Ryzen Z1 Extreme.
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Asus Rog Ally Is Not the Only One!
The Ryzen 7 7840U does not appear to be an exclusive chipset for the Asus Rog Ally. This same chipset has been tipped for the Aokzoe A1 Pro, a GPD Win Mini clamshell, and an unannounced Ayaneo 2s. With the new AMD chipset, these can definitely heat up the handheld gaming market. And as you can guess, this is not a piece of great news for the Steam Deck.
Of course, this is not the first time Steam Deck competitors are pushing their luck. A year ago, these manufacturers tried out an off-the-shelf AMD laptop chip. Named the AMD 6800U, unfortunately, the chip did not turn out to be efficient enough to be a competent portable gaming device.
However, this time, Aokzoe appears to be pretty confident with its latest offering. The brand believes it can definitely match or surpass Steam Deck with the 7840U. It has been posting videos stating how powerful the A1 Pro is. There’s even one small clip that showcases the A1 Pro running the same game at a similar battery drain and processor wattage as the Steam Deck. In that clip, Aokoze boasted about how faster the A1 Pro actually is in comparison.
And if that is actually how the AMD 7840U performs, Steam Deck might be in a tough spot now. But yes, all these videos and teasers are not showcasing the value of the competing handhelds.
There’s a high chance that none of the companies will be able to hit the right price to actually compete with Valve’s handheld. Also, they will need support from Microsoft to turn Windows into something that makes the Steam Deck competitors easy and comfortable to use.
