Asus has announced it’s going to be shipping the ROG Ally Z1 edition handheld PC starting from October 3 for the painfully high price of $599 (£599). This new device will ship with essentially the same base hardware as the top-spec ROG Ally, which sports the full AMD Z1 Extreme APU, so in a way you can see why it’s only $100 cheaper.
After all, you’re still getting the same lovely 500cd/m2 120Hz 1080p display, the same 512GB SSD, 16GB LPDDR5-6400, and a UHS-II microSD slot that may or may not melt the contents of which into so much silicon slag.
The issue is that, while the AMD Z1 is a supremely interesting chip, it’s very underpowered in gaming terms compared with the Z1 Extreme because it’s using the 740M iGPU as opposed to the powerful 780M option. Th…