• The ASUS ROG Ally arrives in South Africa on 15th June at a price of R15 999.
• ASUS South Africa is currently fielding pre-orders from its online store as well as through Makro which will stock the console on its shelves.
• The Windows 11-powered gaming console should make for a great way to jump into PC gaming given the cost of the platform locally.

After tight-lipped silence from ASUS South Africa, the PC maker has now announced that pre-orders for the handheld console – the ROG Ally – will open on 15th June.

Following an unintentional leak last week, ASUS South Africa has thrown the covers off of local availability of the console. Pricing for the AMD Z1 Extreme variant of the console is now set at R15 999, R1 000 more than the pricing we spotted last week.

Pre-orders for the console are open now on both ASUS’ online store as well as Makro. In addition, the ROG Ally will be available on Makro shelves from 15th June.

We can also disclose that Hypertext was granted a preview of the ROG Ally ahead of its local launch and it’s an impressive device with some quirks that might be ironed out in future iterations. The handheld has been available in other parts of the world for a while already so reviews can be easily found, but when ours drops later this month we’ll focus on how it fares as a loadshedding companion.

On that note, the console is powered by a 40Wh lithium ion battery which drives the aforementioned AMD Z1 Extreme SoC housed in the device. The GPU here is integrated and can hit up to 2.7GHz while the octa-core CPU in the SoC can hit 5.1GHz boosted.

This is paired up with 16GB of LPDDR5 memory and storage is handled by a 512GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.

For connectivity WiFi 6E is on hand as is Bluetooth 5.2. A USB Type-C charging port is also available as is a 3.5mm headphone jack while ROG’s XG Mobile Interface so that you can connect an external GPU to the console and amp up its performance.

The touch display measures seven inches and sports a 120Hz refresh rate at 1920 x 1080 with a 7ms grey-to-grey response time.

The most important feature of this handheld PC however, is that it runs Windows 11. That means that you could install not just Steam but Battle.net to play Diablo IV on the go or Epic Games to play Fortnite in class. Hell, you could potentially install emulators on this thing and run retro games just like another handheld console.

For less than the price of an iPhone 13 we reckon the ROG Ally is going to sell like toilet paper did in March 2020 especially with PC gaming being as expensive as it is and the Ally performing as well as it has been shown to perform in reviews around the web.