Steam Deck – Review
The Steam Deck is the newest child of the Valve company behind the well known Steam. The compact gaming console had it’s launch on February 25th this year and at the time of writing this article, there are whooping 2374 games that have been tested and work perfectly on steam deck. This still doesn’t count games that have not been tested by Valve or require some use of touch screen.
The whole thing runs on Steam OS which is a modified version of Arch Linux with an upgraded Big Picture. The new version of Proton includes even a partial anti-cheat support. You can, of course install any system you want on it, but I haven’t encountered any reason to do so. If there is something you would like to do outside of steam, you can enter Desktop Mode and do anything you would like to do on a normal computer. It allows us to add custom games to our steam library or install some other applications of our choice via flatpak.
Now, let’s talk performance-wise. Steam Deck handles very well games like Battlefront 2 or NBA 2K22 without any FPS drops, but the downside of all that, is the fact that you probably will not do that more than about 2 hours without charging your device. I leave the specs here for your further examination.
| Category | Steam Deck |
|---|---|
| Operating System | SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based) |
| Display | 7-inch diagonal, 1200×800 px |
| Brightness | 400 nits |
| Refresh rate | 60hz |
| Processor | AMD APU, Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz |
| Graphics | 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz |
| Memory | 16GB LPDDR5 RAM 5500MT/s quad 32-bit channels |
| Storage | 64GB eMMC / 256GB SSD / 512GB SSD |
| Expandable storage | Yes, microSD card slot |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 5.0 |
| Wi-Fi | Dual-band Wi-Fi radio, 2.4GHz and 5GHz |
| Headphone jack | 3.5mm stereo headphone / headset jack |
| Charging input | 45W USB Type-C PD3.0 power supply |
| Battery | 40Whr battery, 2-8 hours of gameplay |
| Size | 298mm x 117mm x 49mm |
| Weight | 1.47 pounds (669 grams) |
There are three types of Steam Deck you can order. Most of them differ only by memory you have available although the cheapest version has an eMMC drive instead of SSD available in the other ones. You also get a number of bonuses and perks with the highest version like an exclusive virtual keyboard theme. Fortunately, even if you ordered Steam Deck and feel like it doesn’t have enough memory, you can use a micro SD card to expand it.
What do you think of Steam Deck? Let us know in the comments down below.