News Valve Steam Deck coming in December, starts at $399

Anybody who associates this kind of device with streaming services is missing the point; this is for occasions where you don't have access to the internet and/or need/want to play games offline natively...

 

F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 F5

:connected:

We’re sorry, all pre-orders have now been taken by scalpers

 

i will be getting one.
would be nice if my kids could play family friendly games from my account on some thing like this while i play something like doom eternal on my main pc,

 

Maybe this dock would make for a nice Switch connector

 

Not making the controllers detachable seems a bit of a dumb move considering the myriad of issues controllers frequently have like for example stick drift...

 

well got me £4 paid up took a while tho

some one has found a fix to the problem

 

This was news to me this morning, this evening after work & after 45 minutes of steam misadventures I slapped my €4 down. I saw some outlets questioning why valve should bother with this when current streaming services can be run from mobiles etc but they forget some people have crap internet and physical controls beat screen controls 100% of the time. Also I have a largish steam library and will enjoy the challenge of getting it to work on this tiny PC.

 

Also good luck streaming a game while having to kill time at say Heathrow Terminal 5 rather than at home where the "good" broadboand is...

So yeah, having this (and or a Switch) is far better.

 

How hobbled would you be running games from the SD card? Just load times, potentially?

As I understand it Steam can't run (or they don't recommend it) from an external drive on a PC, so not sure how the card speeds will stack up vs internal storage.

 

Running games from an SD card should work fine for small indie games like Stardew Valley, Terraria, Undertale and the likes.
However try running a "AAA" game from it and you are pretty likely to face issues that extend beyond just long initial load times.

You don't need to run Steam itself on an external drive anyway to have your games on an external drive, if the OS gave it a drive letter Steam allows you to choose it as an install location for the game, regardless if it is an internal or external drive.

 

Ah! So in that case it's better to go for the larger capacity models to start with (at least until someone dismantles it to show how easy/difficult it is to replace the internal SSD oneself ).

How does AAA game speed fare when installed to an external disk on regular PC (assuming Steam on internal drive)? Playable, just a bit slower for loads?

 

Provided they don't add any weird Steamdeck specific restrictions to the USB port you should be able to hook up an external drive just like with a regular PC.

For example:
https://www.ebuyer.com/1140166-sand...-1050mb-s-read-and-1000mb-s-sdssde61-1t00-g25

Obviously nowhere near as compact as an SD card, but also avoids the performance penalties of SD cards.

So I'd just wait and see until we have confirmation that they haven't done any weird things with the USB port on the Steam Deck.

But going by personal experience with an external HDD on a Laptop it should work fine (beyond initial load being a bit slower).

 

Not sure how true this is, but …

I saw an email that someone posted to Gabe, and Gabe says that even in the lowest spec version the NVMe slot is still present.

 

They've described the storage as "non-expandable" (beyond the MicroSD card slot), so if that's the case then they'll have a lot of very pissed off people on their hands.

 

Don't preorder and wait until the tear downs / reviews are out?

 

Never said I would be pissy about it. I'm already quite happy to pay for the top-end model. If the storage ends up being upgradeable then great, it's nice to have that option; if not then I've already got as much storage as I can get.

But if it turns out that they lied about not being able to upgrade the storage, then Valve will lose a lot of credibility and will rightly be panned for it. It wouldn't surprise me if that turns out to be the case because Valve are a massive corporate entity, but that doesn't make it any less of a shitty thing to do.

 

I suspect they haven’t created the handheld with a view to users upgrading it themselves - which is reasonable - they would have to design it in such a way as to provide the entrance and space to get in there and do it. So they don’t recommend it. However they have confirmed it’s doable should you want to. Of course you run the risk as always of taking apart the handheld and messing it up - which they don’t want to be held liable for.

Think of it as a closed system - soon to be featured on iFixit.

Personally I don’t care for upgrading it myself and reserved the top spec storage. If I were younger and with less disposable income - I would certainly go cheap and take it apart (assuming it is relatively easy) and upgrade it.

When I say younger - I kinda mean more adventurous like I was when I was younger

 

This and your post before are good info - nice one.

Only thing that might cause an issue then appears to be the single USB port and the relatively short battery life when running at high quality and fastest frames. No way of charging/retaining charge whilst using the external drive.

Obviously not an issue when connected to a hub, but not great when flying to Sydney.

 

Are power delivery Type-C cables not a thing? Could have sworn they were. Although I guess getting something to power the Steam Deck at full chat for long is going to be interesting, if you're not walking around next to a power outlet at least.

I'm curious to see what teardowns say about it - Not that I'm in the market for a Switch replacement really. Curiosity killed the cat, I suppose.