I just saw the ASUS handheld in the wild. It was running some FPS game pretty well.

Can anyone help me compare the two - Steam Deck OLED vs comparable ASUS version? Which do you prefer? Pros/cons?

I’m almost decided to buy the Deck OLED, but seeing that in the wild made me pause. It looks nice.

  • FubarberryMEnglish
    39·
    3 months ago

    This is a Steam Deck community, so I expect the answers will all be pro-steam deck, so keep that in mind.

    I generally believe the Deck is better, but the Ally does have its strengths.

    • The ally is more powerful, at the cost of battery life. Battery life is also comparatively terrible on low power games, games that last 8 hours on the deck will kill the Ally in ~2.5 hours for some reason.

    • The ally, being windows based, supports some multiplayer games that won’t run on the Deck due to anti cheat. So if your main focus is a call of duty or fortnite handheld, you’ll either want the Ally or to install windows on the Deck. Here’s a list of anticheat games and whether they work on the deck or no. For any non-anticheat games, you can usually assume they’ll work.

    The deck is going to be better on most everything else, from being able to suspend/resume mid game (I can’t overstate how important this is for how I use the deck), controls, user experience, battery life, compatibility with older games, warranty coverage, and more.

    So if you only want to play the newest most demanding AAA games or one of the non- supported multiplayer games, you may want an Ally. But for everything else I would recommend a Deck.