Forget the Steam Deck, the best overall gaming handheld we gave a 4.5-star review to just became much more affordable thanks to this massive Christma

Christmas is a special time of the year because retailers across the globes cut down on the prices on expensive, highly-sought after products to make them into the perfect Christmas gifts for your precious loved ones. Case in point — Best Buy is hosting a special discount on the lucrative ASUS ROG Ally, one of the best gaming handheld consoles capable of running Xbox and PC with graphical fidelity.

Normally, the ASUS ROG Ally costs a large sum of $499.99. However, with this deal, you will be able to buy it for a more affordable $349.99 at Best Buy.

Why makes the ASUS ROG Ally a great Christmas present?

In this golden age of portable gaming consoles, consumers are spoiled for choice on what to pick as there are so many amazing handhelds to choose from Valve's Steam Deck to Lenovo's Legion Go. Yet out of all the best gaming handhelds, the ASUS ROG Ally stands tall as the overall cream of the crop for many reasons.

For starters, the ASUS ROG Ally boasts powerful hardware capable of running video games at high resolutions of 1080p and framerates of 60fps via its 120Hz display. Additionally, it features a comfortable ergonomic design and extremely responsive controls that can be remapped any way you want.

To top it off, the ASUS ROG Ally has Windows 11 built-in to make it function like a gaming PC. This means that the ASUS ROG Ally will be able to download game launcher apps like Steam, Epic Games, Microsoft Store, and the Xbox app and play the best Xbox games and best PC games through them as if you were playing on a PC or an Xbox.

You can even download emulators to play ROMs of games from past consoles and stream games through cloud gaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is something not many handheld consoles can do.

That being said, the ASUS ROG Ally isn't entirely flawless. It suffers from a short battery life of 3-4 hours unplugged, and navigating the Windows interface with handheld controls can be cumbersome compared to using a regular controller or a keyboard+mouse set-up.

However, considering the ASUS ROG Ally's extraordinary graphical hardware (especially) for a handheld console and its capability to play games from multiple platforms, these drawbacks are more than worth the price of admission, especially now that it's on a mega Christmas sale.

For a limited time, you can get your hands on the ASUS ROG Ally (512GB) at a 30% discount, which has reduced its MSRP from $499.99 to $349.99 at Best Buy. (which is $199.01 cheaper than the Steam Deck's full MSRP of $549.99) Additionally, the Z1 Extreme Processor edition of the ASUS ROG Ally (which boasts higher processing power than the regular version) is also having a Christmas sale that has slashed its MSRP of $649.99 down to $499.99 at Best Buy.