Steam Deck

Valve Steam Deck Review

Welcome to my review of the Steam Deck. If you’ve been living in a cave for a while and haven’t heard of the Steam Deck, it is a handheld gaming PC from Valve akin to the Nintendo Switch. It’s also pretty darned-powerful for what it is. For the purpose of my review, I have the 64Gb model, which I upgraded the internal storage to 512Gb myself.

Wow. Just wow.

So just how powerful is the Steam Deck? and will it actually have any sort of battery life or just be plugged in all the time? Continue reading to find out. You can also check out our previous reviews.

The Hardware

Valve says that the Steam Deck has the highest graphics performance of any handheld device. This may now be debatable thanks to the likes of the AyaNeo and OneXPlayer handhelds that are now available. However, the Steam Deck has a true advantage over the other handhelds. SteamOS. We’ll go more into that down below.

Steam Deck
Image credit: Valve

The Deck comes in three size options which are listed below. There is no real difference between the first two other than some digital content for your Steam profile. The 512Gb option comes with an anti-glare screen and a fancy case, as well as some extra digital content for your profile.

Key Features of all models:

  • Custom AMD APU based on Zen 2 CPU with 4 cores and 8 threads – Up to 448 GFlops
  • Custom AMD APU with 8 RDNA 2 CUs with speeds of 1.0-1.6GHz – Up to 1.6 TFlops
  • 4 watts through to 15 watts for the power of the APU
  • 16Gb LPDDR5 on-board RAM – 5500MT/s quad 32-bit channels.
  • Three storage options – 64Gb EMMC / 256Gb NVMe SSD PCIe Gen 3×4 / 512Gb High-Speed NVMe SSD PCIe Gen 3×4
  • 7″ diagonal 1280×800 16:10 60Hz IPS LCD Touch enabled Screen
  • High-speed MicroSD card slot
  • Bluetooth 5.0 and WiFi 5 (AC)

So I mentioned above about upgrading the storage myself. I highly recommend you do not do this if you’re not too sure about what you’re doing. However, there are a ton of guides on the Internet that can help you decide if you should give it a go or not. It’s not overly difficult as long as you take care and do not force anything apart. The only two reasons I did this were so I could get the faster storage so SteamOS works a bit quicker, and of course the extra storage.

Steam Deck
Image credit: Valve

If your only concern is storage and you have a 64Gb model, you may be more comfortable with just adding a large MicroSD card to your Deck.

The battery life of the Deck varies on what tasks you are performing whilst using it, of course. The battery size comes in at 5313mAh which is 1,103mAh larger than the 4,210mAh battery in the Nintendo Switch. I have found that the battery life lasts around 2-3 hours when playing 3D games, whilst 2D games seem to be more in the 3-4 hours region. Of course, this all depends on the game you’re playing and what settings you have in the SteamOS battery menu.

Valve has developed some battery-friendly options into SteamOS which I will go into more detail below in the software section.

Design and Functionality

Coming in at 669 grams you’d think the Steam Deck would feel heavy in your hands and cause strain on your wrists. It does not. Ben also commented on how he expected it to feel heavier than it actually does, especially as we’re both used to holding the Nintendo Switch which comes in just under half the weight of the Steam Deck.

Valve designed the Steam Deck with all options in mind, they actually went through a huge design process and designed over 100 prototypes until settling on the final design. I must add that I actually love the final design and it fits very well in your hands. Even the buttons on the rear are comfortable to press and don’t feel awkward at all to press.

Steam Deck

Speaking of buttons, the Steam Deck has a ton of them! It has two thumb sticks with buttons and touch detection, two trackpads with clickable buttons, eight buttons, four triggers, four paddles, and to top it off, a touchscreen. That’s not it though, as Valve has implemented some hotkeys where you can press the Steam button along with R1 and this will take a screenshot, for example. Another example is if you press and hold the Steam button and B, after a few seconds it will force quit the game or app you are in, this will then take you back to the SteamOS home page.

You can also configure each button to do different things if you wish, through the SteamOS controller menu. For example, you could configure the L4 and R4 rear buttons to act as any button on the keyboard. You could also configure them to act as X and B if you wanted them to be that. Imagine you’re playing a racing game such as F1 22 and you want easy access to gear changing, L4 and R4 are your friends for this. You could also use L5 and R5 if you wish. The choice is literally yours.

Steam Deck
PC gaming in bed!

I also found that some keyboard and mouse-heavy games work well with all the buttons we have. One of my favourite games, Oxygen Not Included, works surprisingly well with the Steam Deck and the different combinations you can use. A lot of games have official button templates from developers, as well as community-made layouts.

I will say that out of the boatload of games I’ve tried on the Steam Deck, the only game I have had problems with so far is Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed. This may have been because it was a new game at the time, but it sent my fan into overdrive even with different graphical options and power settings setups. The game also didn’t run too well.

The Steam Deck is also an emulation powerhouse, but that’s for someone else to comment on properly.

Connection and Software

Connection-wise, we have Bluetooth 5.0 for connecting controllers and other hardware such as Bluetooth headphones to the Deck. It’s also sporting a WiFi 5 chip inside, which gives us WiFi speeds of up to 1.3Gbps (theoretically).

So as mentioned above, the Steam Deck is running on SteamOS. SteamOS 3.0 is a custom OS based on Arch Linux, prior to this version it was built on Debian 7 and 8. SteamOS 3.0 also introduced Proton which is a Windows-compatibility layer that assists in playing games that were not built to play on Linux.

The Steam Deck has two main modes, gaming mode, and desktop mode. Desktop mode is literally as it sounds, you get a desktop environment on your Deck that is built on KDE Plasma 5.0. Gaming mode is similar to the OS we see on the Nintendo Switch and is a lot more dumbed down for ease of use.

Steam Deck
SteamOS – Image Credit: Valve

I mentioned battery-friendly options above, what I mean by this is Valve has baked some options into the SteamOS gaming mode that allows you to preserve battery life if you wish to. For example, you can reduce the screen refresh rate to 40Hz, which appears smoother than 30Hz but consumes less battery than 60Hz.

You can also limit the frame rate of games, for example, you can tap a button, access the menu, and limit your game to 30 fps. This can all be accessed via the controller buttons and no need for an external controller or keyboard and mouse.

Another awesome feature is you can limit the power usage of your Steam Deck. At its highest, the Deck will use 15 watts of power. But you can drop that down to as low as 3 watts. Naturally, this limits your Steam Deck a lot but saves quite a bit of power. I’ve personally found the sweet spot seems to be leaving it at 8 watts. You can also limit the GPU usage from 1Ghz through to 1.6Ghz if you wanted.

Steam Deck
Some of the battery-saving options

You can also have a “per game profile” for the battery options I’ve mentioned above. For example, for Days Gone I have upped the screen refresh to 60Hz and the power to 10 watts. As soon as I quit Days Gone the Deck will refer back to its standard profile that I’ve set for 40Hz on the screen and 8 watts of power usage. For the above screenshot, I set the power to 3 watts for the purpose of the screenshot.

It’s pretty awesome, to be honest, and very easy to use. It’s also great because you can’t break anything in these menus. You’re not overclocking your hardware or forcing it to do something it shouldn’t be able to do.

Conclusions

The Steam Deck is an absolutely incredible bit of kit. Now it may not be the most powerful handheld PC on the market at the moment. However, The Steam Deck is the most supported and has solid software thanks to SteamOS. Ben also recently got his Deck and his first words about it were “It’s f**king beautiful and I love it already”. Fair play, I totally understand.

I give the Steam Deck a solid Controller Nerds score of 10/10. Now go buy one.

We Score This Game

rating score: 10

Absolutely Fantastic!

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