Best Buy has a fantastic deal on the Asus ROG Ally this week. The ROG Ally Z1 Extreme is on sale for $200 off, dropping the price from $650 to only $450. As an added bonus, you’ll get the official ROG Ally Travel Case, which normally costs $40, for free with your purchase. And if you’ve never been a Game Pass and/or Crunchyroll subscriber, you’ll also receive one month of Game Pass Ultimate and 60 days of Crunchyroll’s Mega Fan subscription tier.
Asus ROG Ally Z1 Extreme + Official Travel Case
$450 (was $650)
The ROG Ally Z1 Extreme comes with a sharp 1080p screen, AMD’s Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor, 16GB LPDDR5 6400 RAM, and an internal 512GB NVMe SSD. Compared to the $500 base model ROG Ally, the Z1 Extreme has two additional CPU cores and a better GPU, which can make a meaningful difference with newer, more graphically demanding games.
The ROG Ally offers impressive performance for the price. It’s not going to play graphically demanding games at the highest settings, but you still can play many AAA titles in 1080p resolution with at least 30fps. Even at its full $650 price, the ROG Ally’s performance is admirable; at $450, the ROG Ally Z1 Extreme offers incredible value.
Admittedly, you can fill a 512GB SSD fairly quickly these days, but the ROG Ally has a microSD card slot that allows you to expand your storage for cheap. For instance, you can grab a SanDisk Ultra 1TB microSD card for only $80 at Amazon. Alternatively, you can upgrade the internal SSD with an M.2 2230 NVMe SSD. One option here is Corsair’s 1TB MP600 Mini SSD for $95 (was $110).
It’s worth noting that Windows can be cumbersome on gaming handhelds, unless you pair it with a traditional mouse and keyboard setup. Asus does have a proprietary app called Armoury Crate that gives you a more traditional console-like interface for gaming, but you’ll still need to spend some time navigating Windows 11.