Forget Steam Deck — Asus ROG Ally X is $100 off right now in killer Black Friday deal

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This is the deal I've been waiting for

Asus ROG Ally X
(Image credit: Future)

Where are the Steam Deck Black Friday deals? It’s a question I’m asked a lot, but let me answer it with another question — what if there were better PC gaming handhelds available for cheaper?

That’s what I’ve found. Right now, the Asus ROG Ally X is down to $699 at Best Buy. That is a huge $100 saving on my favorite gaming handheld. But that’s not the only Steam Deck killer on sale, because the standard ROG Ally is $150 off and the Lenovo Legion Go is a whopping $200 off!

Asus ROG Ally X
Asus ROG Ally X: was $799 now $699 at Best Buy

Learning the lessons from the first ROG Ally, Asus created an absolute monster with the Ally X — packing that same stellar AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor, a massive 24GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and (the most important upgrade) a gigantic 70Wh battery for vastly longer gaming sessions.

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Asus ROG Ally
Asus ROG Ally: was $659 now $499 at Best Buy

Don’t count out the older ROG Ally, as this $150 saving does make this impressively strong when it comes to price to performance. With the same Ryzen Z1 Extreme chipset, you can get similar framerates to the higher-specced system above. However, the battery is significantly smaller.

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Lenovo Legion Go
Lenovo Legion Go: was $699 now $499 at Best Buy

This is a massive saving on the device that merges a PC gaming handheld with Nintendo Switch-esque versatility, thanks to those detachable controllers. Other strengths of this machine include a larger 8.8-inch QHD display with a 144Hz refresh rate and a decently sized 49Wh battery.

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With these, you’re getting impressively powerful systems. But let’s address the elephant in the room — something that we've said in our Asus ROG Ally X, Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go reviews.

As Tony Polanco says better than anyone, Windows “absolutely sucks on a handheld.” And there’s truth to that — Asus and Lenovo have tried hard to workaround this with their own launcher apps, but Windows interactions on a small screen are fiddly and can be annoying.

But I have a fix that makes me confident in calling these Steam Deck killers. Bazzite is a handy tool to install SteamOS on these Windows gaming handhelds. And as I found out in my own testing, not only is it a better UI to use, games perform better and the battery life gets better than running Windows.

So rather than waiting for Steam Deck to get a discount, just get one of these and turn them into a better Steam Deck.

Jason England
Jason England
Managing Editor — Computing

Jason brings a decade of tech and gaming journalism experience to his role as a Managing Editor of Computing at Tom's Guide. He has previously written for Laptop Mag, Tom's Hardware, Kotaku, Stuff and BBC Science Focus. In his spare time, you'll find Jason looking for good dogs to pet or thinking about eating pizza if he isn't already.