Affordable handheld gaming devices are finally being developed. After Steam Machine, Valve remained committed to providing some type of open hardware platform and portable gaming unit optimized to run Steam and games from it and on July 15, 2021 they revealed the coming of the Steam Deck.
What is Steam Deck ?
The Steam Deck is handheld gaming computer developed by Valve Corporation in cooperation with AMD. The Valve’s Nintendo like handheld device is running a modified Arch Linux called SteamOS v3.0., but installing another OS will not be possible.
The device can be used not only on go as a handheld console, but can also be connected to a monitor or to a television. It’s designed to to give you access to the full Steam library, including Windows PC games via the Linux-based Proton compatibility layer.
When is the Steam Deck release date?
Valve’s Steam Deck is finally getting an official release date. witch, according to Valve’s announcement from Wednesday will be on Feb. 25. Portable Gaming Hardware will start shipping out on Feb. 28 for the first batch of order emails to reservation holders. They will have 3 days (72 hours shortly after 10:00 am on February 25th, PST) from receipt of their order email to make their purchase, before their reservation is released to the next person in the queue. The emails will be sent in the same order that reservations were made. The Steam Deck you ordered must be the same model that you originally reserved. The reservation deposit will be applied to the final price of Steam Deck, with no additional shipping costs.
What's the price of the Steam Deck ?
The price of the Steam Deck will depend on which model you pick :
- for 419€ you get 64GB eMMC internal storage and a carrying case
- for 549€ you get 256GB NVMe SSD internal storage( a.k.a. faster and bigger storage),carrying case and exclusive Steam Community profile bundle
- for 679€ you get 512GB NVMe SSD internal storage( a.k.a. faster and bigger storage),premium anti-glare etched glass,exclusive carrying case and exclusive Steam Community profile bundle and exclusive virtual keyboard theme
* All three versions will let you increase storage space with a MicroSD card
What are the Steam Deck specs?
The Steam Deck main unit is designed for handheld use. It includes a 7-inch (180 mm) touchscreen LCD display with a 1280×800 pixel resolution with a fixed 60 Hz refresh rate; The Deck includes a custom accelerated processing unit (APU) built by AMD based on their Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures. The CPU runs a four-core/eight-thread unit and the GPU runs on eight compute units with a total estimated performance of 1.6 TFLOPS. Both the CPU and GPU use variable timing frequencies, with the CPU running between 2.4 and 3.5 GHz and the GPU between 1.0 and 1.6 GHz based on current processor needs. ( Valve stated that the CPU has comparable performance to Ryzen 3000 desktop computer processors and the GPU performance to the Radeon RX 6000 series) A 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM are included in a quad-channel configuration, with a total bandwidth of 88 GB/s.
CPU | AMD Zen 2 |
Core count | 4-core/8-thread |
CPU clock speed | 2.4–3.5GHz |
GPU | AMD RDNA 2 |
GPU Compute Units | 8 |
GPU clock speed | 1–1.6GHz |
RAM | 16GB LPDDR5 @ 5,500MT/s 32-bit quad-channel |
Storage | 64GB eMMC / 256GB NVMe SSD / 512GB NVMe SSD |
Display | 7-inch LCD touchscreen |
Resolution | 1280 x 800 |
Refresh rate | 60Hz |
Audio | Stereo speakers, 3.5mm jack, dual mics, USB Type-C/Bluetooth |
Connectivity | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB Type-C with DisplayPort 1.4 support |
Battery | 40Whr |
Size | 11.7 x 4.6 x 1.8-inch (298 x 117 x 49mm) |
Weight | Approximately 1.47 lbs (669 grams) |
Price | $399 (64GB) / $529 (256GB) / $649 (512GB) |
Wanna take a look inside Steam Deck?
” We don’t recommend replacing parts yourself, but we still want you to have all of the relevant information about Steam Deck’s components.” – Valve