If you're curious about the Steam Deck's computing power, Valve has revealed that the handheld gaming PC features specs similar to a $659 mini PC you can buy on Amazon.
The company disclosed the comparison on a new web page designed to help software developers port their games to the device, which is scheduled to launch in February.
“If you are really interested in finding a PC for testing that will perform similarly to a Steam Deck (again, not required for testing), there are a few options out there,” the company says. “The team looked around and found this mini-pc on Amazon, which has roughly similar specifications to a Steam Deck.”
The mini PC seems to be the UM700 from Minisforum. The product features an AMD Ryzen 7 3750H four-core mobile processor, a Radeon RX Vega 10 GPU, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM.
However, it’s not an exact one-to-one comparison. Valve says the actual Steam Deck has a more powerful GPU and more memory bandwidth than the mini PC, although the CPU is a bit weaker.
Specifically, the full tech specs for the Steam Deck show it has a 4-core CPU capable of a 2.4GHz to 3.5GHz clock speed. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 3750H processor has a base clock speed at 2.3GHz and a max clock speed at 4.0GHz.
The GPU on the Steam Deck, meanwhile, uses the newer RDNA 2 architecture. The graphics chip spans eight cores and can reach clock speeds between 1.0 to 1.6GHz. In contrast, the mini PC uses AMD's older Vega architecture and has 10 cores at a 1.4GHz clock speed.
“It's underpowered compared to Steam Deck, but is the closest system we could find that is still generally available for purchase,” the company adds. “The team agreed that if a game runs well on this mini-PC at 1,280-by-800, it will definitely run well on Steam Deck.”
The other big difference is the power consumption. The Steam Deck promises to run more efficiently than any mini PCs on the market. “The level of performance-per-watt we were able to achieve with this processor (on Steam Deck) would have simply not have been possible with any off-the-shelf processor that exists today,” Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat said during a developer live stream event on Friday.
In addition, Valve has been shipping special developer editions of the Steam Deck to third-party programmers since September. But the company still has more orders to fulfill, so in the meantime, it’s directing developers to check out comparable AMD-powered hardware from other PC vendors to test their games.
As for consumers, Valve was forced to push back the product's initial arrival from December to February. If you pre-order the product now, expect it to arrive after Q2 2022.