The rumors were true: Valve’s handheld gaming PC is real.
On Thursday, the company debuted Steam Deck, which is launching this December for $399. The product promises to run all your favorite games from Steam, including AAA titles, but from a portable device.
To pull this off, the hardware uses an AMD APU chip, which includes both a CPU and dedicated graphics built into the silicon. The chip itself features a four-core/eight-thread CPU built with AMD’s older Zen 2 architecture that can achieve a 3.5GHz max clock speed.
Meanwhile, the graphics uses AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture, the same technology that powers the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The GPU spans eight RDNA 2 compute units capable of up to 1.6 Teraflops. That’s slightly under the graphics power of the original PlayStation 4, which was capable of 1.84 Teraflops.
However, the Steam Deck does compromise in one area: The product isn't powering PC gaming at a 1080p resolution. Instead, the Steam Deck features a 7-inch LCD screen with a 1280 by 800 resolution —which is similar to the 720p screen you’ll find on a standard Nintendo Switch.
According to Valve, the Steam Deck can run for two to eight hours on a single charge. Other features include 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, Bluetooth 5.0, a dual-band WiFi modem, a headphone jack and USB-C slot with DisplayPort 1.4 built-in. So you can hook it up to a PC monitor.
However, the hardware is a bit hefty. IGN was able to try out the product, and as you can see it’s quite sizable, weighing in at 1.4 pounds. In contrast, the Nintendo Switch weighs 0.88 pounds in handheld mode.
Although Valve calls the Steam Deck a portable PC, it doesn’t run Windows, but the company's own software, dubbed SteamOS 3.0. Once you power on the device, you can log into your Steam account, and proceed to download and install your games.
The Steam Deck starts with the $399, which includes 64GB of eMMC PCIe Gen 2 internal storage. However, you can receive faster loading times with the $529 model, which features 256GB of PCIe Gen 3 NVME SSD storage. The $649 model bumps up the NVME SSD to 512GB and upgrades the display with “anti-glared etched glass.” All models contain a microSD card slot for additional memory.
Valve also says it's preparing a special dock for the Steam Deck, loading with additional ports.
The company is opening pre-orders for the product tomorrow July 16th at 10am PST through a store page on Steam. The product is first launching in the US, Canada and Europe in December before rolling out to other regions in 2022.