We have had to wait a bit longer for the launch of a lesser ASUS ROG Ally variant—the Windows 11 handheld gaming PC was officially revealed sporting an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU . A non-Extreme variant was teased to launch at a later date, which appears to be within the last couple of days—emerging first in North America. The more affordable—$599—offering has popped up for sale on Best Buy , and the ASUS store has a listing although it is currently "out of stock." This non-Extreme model's (RC71L-Z1512) arrival at retail coincides with Valve running a 20% price reduction on its Steam Deck handheld gaming range.

The $100 saving over the ROG Ally Extreme ($699) nets the customer largely identical features and specifications, apart from the main choice of APU. The Z1 non-Extreme chipset was analyzed earlier this month , with its "Phoenix 2" origin revealing usage of Zen 4c cores. The standard Z1 seems to be very similar in makeup to the mobile series Ryzen 5 7540U APU. The AMD Ryzen Z1 is a six-core Zen 4/Zen 4c APU with four RDNA 3 compute units, which is nowhere near as fierce as the "Phoenix 1" Ryzen Z1 Extreme—sporting eight cores (all Zen 4) and twelve RDNA 3 compute units.