Technology is an expensive hobby, but one I love very much! Having grown up “on a budget” and very much still there, it often has meant I jump onto the latest and greatest new thing late. So it was with Asus ROG Ally Z1 Extreme (what a mouthful). I picked up this beauty off of Facebook Marketplace for 300 bucks!

But oh wow was it worth the wait! Having been an on and off PC gamer for years I have a fairly healthy Steam library of games, not to mention the collection of freebies I’ve gathered from Epic (which is also why I opted for a windows machine vs a Steamdeck). And even more interesting, with the Z2 generation being announced at CES and the power seemingly not that big of a leap over the Z1 generation] . I really am quite pleased!

As far as what I am doing with the machine, mostly it’s just catching up on a bunch of indies I hadn’t yet gotten around to playing. This thing is no slouch on AAA games. I picked up Jedi Survivor on sale a few weeks back and Ally run it well on low settings. My only quibble is battery life, if you’re running a AAA game on 15 W mode, you’re going to not even hit 2 hours of battery. This is fine for me since I’m just playing around the house and rarely play more than an hour at time, but it’s no Switch on the battery department.

If your needs are similar to mine and you value portability over graphics, then this gets a hardy thumbs up from me!