Valve has now announced its handheld gaming console called the Steam Deck. It runs on a custom-made SteamOS tied in a compact gaming PC allowing users to play all Steam games without any hitch.
Steam Deck uses a PlayStation Vita-like portable gaming console that has buttons and analog keys on the same plane along with two capacitive trackpads. It even has some additional buttons at the back that can be mapped as per the requirements.
Valve Steam Deck packs a 7-inch IPS LCD panel with a 1280×800 pixel resolution and an aspect ratio of 16:10. It has 400 nits of maximum brightness on-board. The UI is handled by custom-made SteamOS 3.0 that allows players to interact via the touch UI. You can even customize points on the touch screen during games to complete specific commands. SteamOS 3.0 uses compatibility layer Proton to run games made for the Windows system which means you can run all the games on Steam Deck except those running on Linux.
About the hardware on-board, there’s a custom-made AMD APU. There’s a 4-cores and 8-threads CPU based on Zen 2 architecture with a variable clock speed of 2.4GHz to 3.GHz. The portable gaming PC uses RDNA2 GPU with 8 compute units. Its APU has a power envelope of 4-15W.
Moving on, all the models have 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM onboard. As usual, the NVMe SSD storage on the middle and top variants is way faster than the eMMC storage found on the base variant. In packs in a 40Wh battery under the hood which is advertised to last for 8 hours on basic 2D games. On 3D games, however, the battery backup is 2 hours approximately. According to the specs sheet, there’s a 45W USB-C PD charging in the retail box.
About the ports, you get a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port that can double as a USB-C port for users to connect PC and accessories. The port supports up to 8K at 60Hz or you can go up to 4K at 120Hz using the DisplayPort 1.4 Alt-mode. You get Bluetooth 5.0 along with dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac with Steam Deck. Steam Deck is synced with Steam cloud which means you dabble between PC and the portable console or vice versa exactly where you left it.
As per pricing and availability are concerned, the Steam Deck will be available for purchase by December 2021 in Canada, European Union, United States, and the United Kingdom. The price tag for the base 64GB eMMC model is $399. It is at $529 for 256GB NVMe SSD storage, the 512GB NVMe SSD model arrives at a price tag of $649. You get a single color option with Steam Deck i.e. Black at the time of writing this.
