Take notes Nintendo.
Valve has revealed a revamp of its Steam Deck, arguably the most popular of the modular handheld PC’s and if we’re being honest the trend setter that set off the whole craze to begin with.
This revamp provides an immensely greater quality screen, out with the old garbage 7-inch 60Hz LCD display and in with a much more vivid 7.4-inch OLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate, this combined with other adjustments such as a 50 Whr battery.
A 50 Whr battery is an improvement over the older 40 Whr battery found inside the Steam Deck, alongside a 6nm revision of AMD’s “Van Gogh” APU, now dubbed “Sephiroth”.
Sephiroth continues to contain the same 4-cores based on AMD’s much older Zen 2 architecture alongside 8 effective Compute Units based on RDNA 2, the Steam Deck continues to be one of the slowest performers when it comes to these handheld PCs but don’t let that deter you.
A 6nm revision equates to a slightly smaller die size footprint and a meek increase in power efficiency, the real improvement from Van Gogh to Sephiroth is the incorporation of slightly faster LPDDR5 memory (6400 MT/s vs 5500 MT/s).
So despite being effectively the same hardware under the hood, depending on the game, depending on the scenario, you are going to see small improvements in overall performance especially in more CPU heavy situations during gameplay.
In fact Shill Foundry themselves have noted increased framerates during gameplay on this new OLED rendition of the Steam Deck.
Bigger battery, more efficient hardware, faster memory means slightly better performance, Valve proclaim a 20-30% longer overall battery life compared to the previous LCD varieties in terms of how long the battery charge will last.
And unlike how Nintendo swindles consumers by charging more money for its OLED rendition of its age old Switch console, the OLED screen found on the new Steam Deck isn’t low caliber rubbish intended for mobile phones, the 7.4-inch screen is genuine as noted by Digital Foundry.
Boasting a peak of HDR 1000-nits / SDR 600-nits the new OLED display isn’t just larger but it also features a narrower bezel, and given that it’s OLED the display consumes marginally less power than the previous LCD screen which benefits the systems increased battery life.
It offers true HDR compliancy which will allow you to re-experience gaming in a whole new light with HDR enabled, you’ll undoubtably question yourself and the quality of LCD displays whether they be top of the line VA or IPS, this puny little handheld has as vivid of a display in terms of color accuracy, immersion and peak brightness as OLED televisions do today, it’s uncanny.
You’d expect Valve to gouge their customers with this new rendition but apparently not, with the new OLED Steam Deck only being offered in 512GB and 1TB flavors.
The Steam Deck launched almost two years ago, which was made available at a starting price point of just $399, which at the time mind you was merely $50 more expensive than the Nintendo Switch OLED.
But that was for a disgusting 64GB EMMB rendition that seemingly yearned for additional storage space space and speed, additional offerings were available for increasingly outlandish prices, with Valve providing a 256 GB NVMe SSD for just $529 and for $649 you could buy a 512GB option.
Valve were effectively selling the 64GB machine at a reduced profit margin and upsold consumers on trumped up models with depressing storage capacities.
Now however, Valve will be slashing the price of its older 256 GB model, which will retain its LCD display and 7nm based Van Gogh APU, down from an embarrassing $529 to just $399, the same price as the long forgotten entry level 64GB base model which now apparently costs just $349 so now there’s zero benefit to actually buying one and expanding it yourself later on.
Valve are quite cunning, they’ve priced a 512GB OLED Steam Deck for $549, rather than simply usurp the previous’ price tag they’re going to charge you an extra twenty dollars for this new fangled OLED machine, but given how the Nintendo Switch OLED even all these years later continues to demand $330 USD, honestly for the immensely superior display and improved battery life it’s a compelling option.
If you want superior performance then the ASUS ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go absolutely demolish the Steam Deck, with their superior APUs providing more cores and threads from a newer generation, utilizing even faster LPDDR5X memory, alongside RDNA 3 derived integrated graphical solutions, they are better machines but they’re costly.
A base model ROG Ally will set you back $599, a whole fifty dollars more than the 512GB Steam Deck, it may provide superior gaming performance but it only contains 256GB of storage, and the higher resolution LCD screen is both unnecessarily high in overall resolution and is a sharp decline versus the OLED screen on the Steam Deck.
And if you want the superior ROG Ally with the Z1 Extreme processor, that’ll cost you $699 and only come with 512GB. Coincidentally Lenovo’s Legion Go starts from $699 and features 512GB of internal storage but this is utilizing the inferior non-Extreme Z1 AMD Ryzen processor so Lenovo can just fuck off with their outrageous pricing.
Voting with my wallet, I’d buy the deck. What it lacks in performance it makes up for with greater capacity for the dollar and that glorious OLED screen, the games I tend to play are typically older titles that don’t need demanding hardware anyway, or simply just emulation. The OLED screen alone is worth the purchase over the base ROG Ally in my eyes.
Valve are also offering a new 1TB flavor of the OLED Steam Deck for the illusive $699 which might sound compelling but it genuinely isn’t, the price tag for the 512GB model is already excessively high, you’re not really getting much more for your money for the extra hundred dollars so I would probably avoid that.
If you were in the market for one of these popularized handheld PC’s and simply want to remain ostracized from enthusiasts with horrible LCD display technology then the 256GB model for $399 is a very compelling machine, but if you wanted something that’ll give your games an amazing “pop” and “flare”, the sort or flare that will rape your retinas with enhanced visual clarity, depth and immersion.
You can look forward to losing a considerable amount of your machines second hand value by instead buying Valve’s new 512GB Steam Deck OLED for just $549.
