Steam Deck is a new portable handheld gaming PC that combines the form factor of a Nintendo Switch with the vast game library of Steam. Valve co-founder and Managing Director Gabe Newell had teased the device in May and it has been made official now with shipping starting December this year.
Steam Deck runs on Arch Linux-based SteamOS 3.0 that has been optimized for a handheld experience. It features a 7-inch LCD display with 1,280×800 pixels resolution, a 16:10 aspect ratio, a 60Hz refresh rate, and 400 nits of peak brightness. It is touch-enabled and has an ambient light sensor as well. Valve has packed a 40Whr battery in the Steam Deck that is said to deliver between two to eight hours of gameplay. The USB Type-C port supports 45W charging as well.
Under the hood, the Steam Deck is powered by an AMD APU that includes a Zen 2 based 4-core 8-thread CPU with clock speed ranging from 2.4GHz to 3.5GHz and a GPU with 8 RDNA 2 compute units (CUs) that ranges from 1.0GHz to 1.6GHz. The APU’s power ranges from 4W to 15W. It comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and three storage options – 64GB eMMC (PCIe Gen 2 x1) storage, 256GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4), and 512GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4). All three models have expandable storage via a microSD card slot that works with SD, SDXC, and SDHC cards.
For connectivity, the Steam Deck has dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v5, a 3.5mm stereo headphone combo jack, and a USB Type-C port that can be used to output the display on a TV or monitor. It can do up to 8K at 60Hz or 4K at 120Hz. In terms of controls, you get a D-pad, two analog sticks, A B X Y buttons, bumpers, triggers, two trackpads, and four additional buttons on the back that can be assigned in-game. The Steam Deck has a built-in gyro sensor as well.
Steam Deck is priced at $399 (roughly Rs. 29,800) for the 64GB eMMC internal storage option, $529 (roughly Rs. 39,500) for the 256GB NVMe SSD internal storage model, and $649 (roughly Rs. 48,400) for the 512GB NVMe SSD model. As of now, there seems to be only a black color option for the Steam Deck. It will be available for purchase starting December this year in the US, Canada, European Union, and the UK.