What are the Steam Deck costs? The Steam Deck is a wonderful machine, packing a shocking quantity of energy into a transportable package deal that’s additionally accessible at an inexpensive value. The value you pay for one will finally be decided by which mannequin you go for, however it can save you your self a couple of dollars optimistically and endurance.
Since our Steam Deck overview, the hand held has come alongside leaps and bounds with numerous enhancements to SteamOS and Proton, leading to a way more polished expertise. These adjustments have allowed the variety of finest Steam Deck video games to develop into the tens of 1000’s, making the Steam Deck value all of the extra palatable.
What are the Steam Deck costs?
The Steam Deck value begins at $399 / £349 for the 256GB LCD mannequin, with the 512GB OLED model coming in at $549 / £479, and the 1TB version topping out at $649 / £569.
One of the best Steam Deck costs are at all times these set by Valve itself, with third-party sellers on Amazon and different shops charging an extra premium for the machine. As such, we strongly advocate solely buying a Steam Deck by way of the Steam retailer.
Following the launch of the Steam Deck OLED, if you happen to’re searching for offers on the Steam Deck value, your finest guess is to buy one of many now older fashions, as quickly as potential. Valve has made the choice to section out the 64GB and 512GB fashions solely, and so every have obtained everlasting value drops till shares are depleted. At the moment, the 64GB mannequin is now $349 / £309, whereas the 512GB mannequin of the hand held is $449 / £389, making this your final likelihood to get these variations of the Steam Deck at a less expensive value.
Alternatively, if you happen to don’t thoughts your moveable PC being solely brand-new, you may strike fortunate with the Licensed Refurbished Steam Deck program. Costs right here begin from $279 / £249, making it the most cost effective approach to get a Steam Deck, however inventory is understandably very restricted.
What are the Steam Deck specs?
The Steam Deck specs focus on a customized quad-core AMD Zen 2 APU with eight RDNA 2 compute items, paired with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM. This chip was constructed particularly to offer stability of efficiency and energy consumption, with a TDP of simply 15W.
Steam Deck OLED | Steam Deck LCD | |
CPU | AMD Zen 2 (4 cores / 8 threads) (6nm) | AMD Zen 2 (4 cores / 8 threads) (7nm) |
GPU | AMD RDNA 2 (8 CUs) | AMD RDNA 2 (8 CUs) |
RAM | 16GB LPDDR5 (6,400MT/s) | 16GB LPDDR5 (5,500MT/s) |
Show | 7.4-inch OLED (1280 x 800 / 90Hz / HDR) | 7.0-inch IPS (1280 x 800 / 60Hz) |
Battery | 50WHr | 40WHr |
Storage | 512GB NVMe SSD 1TB NVMe SSD |
64GB eMMC 256GB NVMe SSD 512GB NVMe SSD |
Weight | 640g | 669g |
Measurement | 298mm x 117mm x 49mm | 298mm x 117mm x 49mm |
The Steam Deck has a local decision of 1280 x 800 that’s shared throughout the LCD and OLED mannequin. Nonetheless, whereas the previous tops out at 60Hz, the latter helps as much as 90Hz. These specs fall in need of the ASUS ROG Ally, however that handheld lacks an HDR OLED choice not like the Steam Deck.
In relation to storage choices, the Steam Deck is out there in three flavors of capability: 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. On the time of writing, the 64GB mannequin is within the strategy of being discontinued. When you can swap out the SSD inside the hand held, it’s a lot simpler to fit in the very best microSD card for Steam Deck because you don’t need to open up the machine.
As a substitute of Home windows 11, the Steam Deck makes use of SteamOS 3.0, Valve’s personal working system based mostly on Arch Linux with KDE Plasma 5. As such, the Proton compatibility layer is used to get video games operating on the Deck, resulting in the creation of the Deck Verified system.
Steam Deck benchmarks
Steam Deck benchmarks present that whereas Valve’s moveable PC is as a rule a perky powerhouse, there are some video games which can be merely an excessive amount of for the machine to deal with.
For instance, Baldur’s Gate 3 Steam Deck efficiency sees the verified title run at 30fps utilizing medium settings at 1080p, which could be boosted with the usage of upscaling applied sciences like AMD FSR. That is a formidable feat for the machine, given how demanding the RPG recreation is.
Nonetheless, with video games like Returnal being nigh-unplayable and Remnant 2 on the Steam Deck being a wake-up name for Valve, the machine could also be hitting its limits with fashionable releases. Even so, there are tonnes of basic video games and less-demanding titles that the Steam Deck will fortunately energy via.
The 40WHr battery within the Steam Deck LCD lasts simply shy of two hours on a full cost, whereas the 50WHr contained in the Steam Deck OLED can final nearly three-and-a-half hours when gaming at 60Hz. This falls to round two hours and fifteen minutes at 90Hz.
For these involved that microSD playing cards aren’t capable of sustain with the Steam Deck’s inner SSD, load occasions between the 2 storage mediums are broadly related. Nonetheless, a choose few video games like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Aside run noticeably slower when not put in on the inner drive.
When was the Steam Deck launch date?
The Steam Deck launch date was February 25, 2022, with Valve having to delay the launch of the machine from its preliminary window of December 2021. Nonetheless, it wasn’t till October 2022 that the Steam Deck was accessible to order and not using a reservation.
Because the Steam Deck launch date, the hand held is now accessible to buy alongside the Valve Steam Deck Docking Station, the official dock for the system. Moreover, a refresh of the PC handheld, the Steam Deck OLED, can be accessible to buy on November 16, 2023.
Try our information to the very best Steam Deck video games, so you’ll be able to correctly populate your library forward of selecting up the hand held. We’ve additionally put collectively lists of our favourite Steam Deck instances and the very best Steam Deck docks, that can assist you get essentially the most out of your new moveable PC.