Following some rumours, Valve has officially taken the wraps off their Steam Deck portable console.
“We think Steam Deck gives people another way to play the games they love on a high-performance device at a great price,” says Valve founder Gabe Newell. “As a gamer, this is a product I’ve always wanted. And as a game developer, it’s the mobile device I’ve always wanted for our partners.”
The Steam Deck is being powered a custom AMD chip that is based on the Zen 2 architecture, similar to CPUs in the Xbox Series X & S and PS5 consoles.
The custom AMD chip has 4 cores and 8 threads clocked at 2.4-3.5GHz. The CPU uses 8 RDNA 2 CUs at 1.0-1.6GHz.
The display on the Steam Deck is a 7-inch LCD touchscreen with a 1280 x 800 resolution, slightly above the Nintendo Switch’s 720p display. It’s also 60Hz and offers 400 nits of brightness.
There’s dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0 and a number of buttons and features including:
- A B X Y buttons
- D-pad
- L & R analog triggers
- L & R bumpers
- View & Menu buttons
- 4 x assignable grip buttons
- 2 x full-size analog sticks with capacitive touch
- HD haptics
- 2 x 32.5mm square trackpads with haptic feedback
- 55% better latency compared to Steam Controller
- Pressure-sensitivity for configurable click strength
- Headphone jack
- USB-C port
- MicroSD card slot
There’s 16GB of RAM in the Steam Deck along with 64GB of flash storage and up to a 512GB SSD.
The 40Whr battery can get your around 2-8 hours of gameplay, which can be charged using the 45W USB-C charger.
Just like the Switch, the Steam Deck will have a official dock (that’s sold separately) and adds a USB-A 3.1 port, 2 USB-A 2.0 ports, Ethernet, DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0.
The Steam Deck is running SteamOS 3.0 which is their Linux-based operating system. You’ll be able to access the usual Steam features like the store, friends and even remote play from your gaming PC.
The Steam Deck will be launching in December with a starting price of $499 CAD ($399 USD) for the 64GB model, $659 CAD ($529 USD) for the 256GB SSD model and $819 CAD ($649 USD) for the 512GB SSD model.
You can reserve your Steam Deck starting tomorrow at 1pm EDT (10 am EDT) with a $5.70 CAD reservation fee (that is refundable).
The Steam Deck will be available for reservation in Canada, the US, Europe, the UK with more countries down at a later date.
Update – July 16th, 2021: The Steam Deck is now available for reservation but the servers are over capacity, so you may have some issues. Currently orders have slipped into 2022.
Source: Valve
TheCanadianTechie 