Black Friday $600 portable PC gaming showdown: Asus ROG Ally or an MSI gaming laptop?
MSI Thin GF63 12VE | Core i5 12450H | RTX 4050 | 8GB DDR4 | 512GB SSD | 15.6-inch | 1080p | 144Hz | $899$599 at B&H Photo (save $300)
This is a pretty basic gaming laptop, but at $600 you really can't complain. The RTX 4050 is only good for 1080p and it is limited to 45W of power, but you can use DLSS upscaling to boost frame rates. The amount of RAM is disappointing but the storage and screen are both a nice surprise for a gaming laptop this cheap.
Price check: Newegg $699.99
Asus ROG Ally | Ryzen Z1 Extreme | 16GB LPDDR5 | 512GB SSD | 7-inch | 1080p | 120Hz | $699.99 $619.99 at Best Buy (save $80)
It's a lot of money to spend on a handheld gaming PC but it's also one of the most powerful ones you can get. That Z1 Extreme processor is a good match for the 45W RTX 4050 and the screen is a delight. You pay for all the goodies with battery life, though, so you'll only be playing for a few hours at a time.
Price check: Amazon $730 | Newegg $780
At face value, this might seem like a no-brainer. You'd go for the laptop every time, yes? Well, maybe not, especially if all you're interested in is gaming on the go.
Let's compare the specs of the two machines that relate directly to that task. Starting with the CPU, the MSI Thin GF63 uses Intel's Alder Lake-powered i5 12450H. It has four P-cores and four E-cores, for 12 threads in total. With a maximum power of 95W and a boost clock of 4.4GHz, it's a decent enough processor for gaming.
The ROG Ally sports AMD's Ryzen Z1 Extreme chip, which is essentially a Ryzen 7 7840U laptop processor. This is a combined CPU and GPU, better known as an APU, and boasts eight cores, 16 threads, and a boost clock of 5.1GHz. That sounds super impressive but the whole package has a much lower power
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