The Valve Steam Deck OLED Model: Status, Upgrades, and a New Game-Playing Computer ($2TB for $649$)
But while the original Deck was shoved out the door months before it was ready, I feel far more confident recommending this one, and I’d argue Valve has more than earned the benefit of the doubt. Over the past 21 months it’s been shipped over 300 updates to the original Steam Deck, making it a genre- defining handheld. Between those updates and the hardware customer support I’ve seen, I now trust Valve more than any other gadget maker.
Valve’s first Deck was a bit of a shock to behold at first, with its, shall we say, utilitarian design. It was big, it was wide, and it was chonky. But in use, it was also a winner, giving you a lot of control over a wide variety of games. The new Steam Deck OLED model doesn’t mess with a good thing and keeps the layout, size, and shape the same. You can easily access controller and even some mouse-driven games with its touch screen, twin thumb sticks, buttons,triggers, and dual touchpads. Some design details for the new model have been changed by Valve. The legend on the keys has a darker tone, the sticks have a grippier design and the bumpers up top have been changed for better responsiveness. The company’s engineers told me even the rumble of the twin touchpads is more precise in the revised Deck.
Good things often come to gamers who wait. There will always be more power efficient consoles such as the Sony or Microsoft. New combinations of screen size, color, and battery life have been worked out by Nintendo.
Valve’s original handheld gaming PC has been fixed, without any new catch. You can get 1TB for $649, the same price as last year, but with half the capacity.
Faster, Cooler, Quirker, and Less Battery: The Steam Deck OLED Review: Better, not faster, and I’m excited to try something new
You can find the word for word from my test notes that says, “Cyberpunk is running faster, cooler, quieter, and drawing less power from a larger battery and looks brighter and clearer and better.”
That’s what I want for all of my games, and that’s what I want for you. I only meant four frames per second when I said “faster.”
When I finished I had played an hour and 15 minutes of Duck Game with some friends and had 84 percent of my battery left in the tank. The Deck organic review unit is telling me that I can play Slay the Spire for seven more hours since it draws just 5.3 watt now. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time looks like it’ll last eight hours total, up from five or so previously.
I am not going to write a 4,000-word review, but I will focus on what is new. If you’re wondering “What is this thing, and why would I want one,” check out my original review video and my long-term Steam Deck review.
Control took about two hours to play on my original Steam deck review unit at 60 frames per second. This past week, I played the same game at up to 80 frames per second for two hours, 11 minutes.
I also played over three hours of Nier: Two hours at 60 frames per second was the average over the course of two days. When the Deck said I only had 30 percent battery left and 37 more minutes to play, I simply dropped the frame rate to 45fps and, later, 30fps to nearly double that remaining playtime — getting another entire hour and 10 minutes before the Deck shut down. There is three hours of Control left, at 45 frames per second.
Source: Steam Deck OLED review: better, not faster
Why did Valve use an OLED device? Performance Comparisons on a Large Scale LCD, OLED Heatsink, Fan, and Battery
Valve pointed almost all of the efficiency toward power savings, like Nintendo and Nvidia did with the Nintendo Switch, even though they only used it for performance.
A Valve hardware engineer says the hardware is enough on its own to not have intervention from the company. “We picked OLED because we were able to prove to ourselves that the longevity in the device was there.” Valve says the company also does “accelerated testing at max brightness for weeks or months on end.”
And because that new screen was thinner, Valve managed to fit a thicker heatsink, larger fan, and a 22 percent higher capacity 50 watt-hour battery pack into the same space.
I am seeing big games draw two watt less on the steam deck with the exception of the 24 watt, where the original drew 26 or 27. There are exceptions: Nidhogg consumed 7.2W on OLED versus 6W on LCD at the same 60fps, and Max Payne 2 drew roughly the same 10W on each on default settings.
The bigger battery makes games last longer. The new die-shrunk “Sephiroth” chip, and the slight increase to memory make them play better.
Let me be clear: Starfield still runs like crap. And I won’t say I didn’t see mysterious stutter in other games because I absolutely did. But in Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and yes, even Starfield, I saw very slightly higher frame rates and fewer frame time spikes for more stable gameplay than the OG Deck — and I believe I’m seeing similar stability in less intensive games, too. The old Deck has a maximum of 60 frames per second, so playing an old game at a smooth 80 or 90 frames per second definitely counts as more performance than that.
One of the biggest issues with the original is now fixed by the whisper-quiet fan. The entire handheld runs cooler. It simply doesn’t get uncomfortably hot, even after fully draining the battery with an intensive game. The battery charges faster, at least relatively speaking: while the OLED model actually took over 30 minutes longer than my LCD model to completely top off, I saw it take its larger battery from 2 percent to 80 percent in just 71 minutes — compared to 99 minutes for the LCD model. According to my wattmeter, the new Deck takes full advantage of its 45W USB-C PD charger right up to the 65 percent mark.
Speaking of chargers, every Steam Deck OLED now comes with a longer 2.5-meter (up from 1.5-meter) power cable, and the 1TB model comes with a fancy two-in-one case — a smaller shell suitable for stuffing your Deck into a bag, Velcroed into a larger carrying case for standalone protection. I find it’s a tad harder to zip up — but the small version is actually useful.
There are two antennas with either 5 GHz or 6 GHz for faster downloads. My home network’s still on Wi-Fi 6, but I’m still seeing respectable 500Mbps-plus downloads straight from Valve’s servers. The Deck also has a dedicated Bluetooth antenna now — and while I haven’t yet tested Valve’s claim that it better supports multiple simultaneous wireless gamepads for couch games, I am so happy to confirm the Deck finally supports Bluetooth microphones for chat. You’ll need a pair of headphones or earbuds to avoid audio lag in the game.
When I pick up the new deck, it is 29 grams lighter, so I can tell it’s a different deck. The shoulder buttons and Steam / Quick Access buttons are clickier. The thumbstick tops are taller, wider, and grippier, making it slightly easier to make your character keep running in one direction; they’ve got a tackier, more recessed smooth divot on top that’s a lovely (and hopefully easier to clean) perch for your thumb.
Steam Deck OLED Review: Better, not faster, or a bit of a Wild West: A review by Yazan Aldehayyat
They’re not Hall effect magnetic joysticks, by the way, just normal ones. Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat says they have not seen a lot of complaints with the program.
The screen may be better than the one I have, though I know I have yet to use one with the high levels of color accuracy that the DOCi-P3 displays.
Functionally, that means the Steam Deck OLED always gets brighter than the Steam Deck LCD in every situation — and in HDR, your games finally have real light. Neon lights in Cyberpunk look like tubes. The jump jets and sparks in armored core VI are realistic. Elden Ring’s magical bolts of fire come alive, and after some in-game HDR brightness adjustment, the golden light of the Erdtree starts to feel blindingly divine.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps, widely regarded as one of the best made-for-HDR games, constantly bursts with glorious light — and without the rest of the screen awkwardly dimming like I saw in my recent gaming monitor review. I would prefer it to be on display in 16:10.
Still, there aren’t a lot of HDR games out there last I checked, and you’ll have a tough time finding HDR video to play on this system, too. There’s no HDR Netflix, no HDR YouTube, no other HDR streaming services I’m aware of on Linux. My opinion is that Valve is helping to build some of the first settlements out there, and that HDR on Linux is a bit of a Wild West.
Jeremy says the variable refresh rate doesn’t make it into the current revision, so the steam deck can run into stutter when games can’t keep up with the refresh rate you select. Some of the frame rates divide nicely into the refresh rates Valve has created, but I can not say with 100% certainty which games work with which refresh. 30 frames per second should do the job, but I’m only seeing it in a few titles. Even 60/60 wasn’t perfectly smooth in everything I’ve tried.
Source: Steam Deck OLED review: better, not faster
The Valve Steam Deck HQ: What’s New, What Is the Same, and Where I’m Getting My Playsets
I keep the very best versions of every game console that I own. The PS3 is backwards compatible. A Homebrew Channel-hacked Wii for my GameCube games. The Red Ring of Death-proof motherboard and swappable hard drive is part of a new console from Microsoft. There is a Nintendo DS Lite that has a Game Boy Advance which can be used to play Japanese games. The PS2 was rigged to load games faster than discs.
Valve does not say yes. We should think of this as the last Steam Deck 1, and then a Steam Deck 2 won’t happen until there’s a “generational improvement especially in performance.”
Even though it was an overhauled version of Valve’s handheld gaming PC but not one that was focused on performance, the company is not going to make a faster handheld for the next two years.
You don’t have time to read a full review, so you just want the specifications and some FAQ. This post is for that. Here’s a monster list of what’s new, what’s the same, and a few other things I learned at Valve’s HQ.
Lawrence says the Hardware warranty covers issues with all Steam Deck components, including the display. We are continuing to wonder if this means it covers burn-in specifically for companies that need to be chased.
Overdesigned Power Regulators and Turbo Mode Aldeyayat: a case for overdesigned power regulators in Electron Resonance
“If you want to have turbo mode you have to design the product to be able to handle turbo mode… You carry around a lot of stuff, and you only be able to useTurbo Mode on certain occasions. Aldeyayat says that overdesigned power regulators are a case in point.