Yes, The Steam Deck Is That Good! The Power Of Ryzen In The Palms Of Your Hands

I am super excited because i finally got my hands on a steam dag. So this is a 512 gigabyte version, its been a long time coming. I was hoping to get one a little earlier, but unfortunately it just couldnt swing. It either way. Weve got one in house now and we can do a lot of testing on it. I will have several videos coming up. So if i didnt add something in this video, just let me know in the comments below and well put it in the next one theres going to be a lot to cover with this unit, but uh first up lets go ahead and get this out of the Box now this does come with a 45 watt charger. It charges over usb type c, and i guess some of the first steam decks coming out will get the carrying case. Im, not sure if theyre gon na have this added down the road for every steam deck. But with this 512 gigabyte version it did come with it. As you can see here so yeah, i have been waiting and waiting to get my hands on one. I do a lot of videos on these ryzen apus mini pcs, handhelds and finally, weve got the steam deck in house. Like i mentioned, this is the 512 gigabyte version, so it does have that anti glare etched glass on it and by anti glare. I guess it just kind of dulls down the glare.

I do have a big light up here, but we can still see some stuff coming through the screens not on yet, but first things. First right off the bat. This is a pretty big handheld, its not as heavy as it looks picking it up. I was really surprised by how light it is and uh yeah theyve done. A really good job with the design here. Analog sticks feel good. Weve got those touch pads, analog triggers, which is a big plus for these handhelds and yeah after getting it set up and messing around with it. For a few days, uh im really impressed by this little unit here got a great layout. There are a couple little gripes and ill talk about those in a second, but so far, ive been having a really good time with this unit. So taking a look at the top layout here, weve got our shoulder buttons. Our analog triggers our volume up and down a 3.5 millimeter audio jack and a single usb type c port really wish they would have added at least one full size usb on this unit. Moving around to the bottom, not much else going on, but we do have that micro sd card slot around back weve got four extra buttons and these can be mapped to basically anything. You need theyre, not analog, so its going to be on or off, but these will come in handy. I mean yeah. The overall layout is really nice.

Loving these analog triggers around back. They come in really handy for racing games and i know a lot of people watching. This have probably already seen the specs, but i do want to go over it real quick, so the cpu we have here in the steam deck is a custom. Zen 2 based ryzen apu weve got four cores: eight threads with a base clock of 2.4 gigahertz and a boost up to 3.5, one of the main claim to fames for the steam deck is the igpu. Now since were working with the ryzen apu in the past. Its always been vega, graphics or radeon vega, but with this its based on our dna too, we have eight cus with a clock up to 1600 megahertz and when it comes to video memory on these igpus, it utilizes system ram. So with this, instead of using ddr4 or lpddr4, theyve opted for much faster lp ddr5 running at 5500, megahertz its in quad channel weve got 16 gigabytes of it. This is really going to help out with that new igpu. When it comes to storage on the steam deck, you can get 64 gigabytes, which is actually emmc, 256 or 512, which we have here all of them utilize a 2230 m.2 ssd, and we also have that micro sd card slot, ive added a 400 gigabyte card. Just to bring it up a little more, the built in display is a 7 inch ips at 1280×800 weve got ac, wi, fi, bluetooth, 5.

0, a 40 watt hour battery with 45 watt, pd 3.0 quick charging, its running steam os 3.0, and we also have access to Kde plasma desktop, which we will take a look at in this video okay, so ive had a few days to mess around with the steam deck and, first right off the bat. The thing is pretty big, i mean it definitely looks large for a handheld, but its a lot lighter than it looks and its really comfortable to play on. I love these palm rest here. They got that little angle to them, so you kind of just fit right in this thing. Weve got these really handy track pads on each side and they have hd haptics built in when it comes to the main button placement over here. On the right hand, side at first i was a little worried about the placement of that b, button being so close to the edge, but you know i havent had any trouble with it. It actually works out really well. My one gripe here with the control layout is you: do have to reach over pretty far to get to those analog sticks. If you have smaller hands, this might present a little bit of an issue, but its something i got used to really fast and then the past couple days messing around with the steam deck. This thing has turned out to be one of the best little handhelds that ive ever messed around with, and i know everybodys saying that, but truly valve has put a lot of thought in this unit when it comes to the hardware and especially the software.

So this is running steam. Os 3.0 very easy to navigate very easy to get to your games. You can go right to the steam store if you need to download more stuff. Weve got our main menu right here. With our recent games, everythings very accessible, you can use the track pads, the d pad or the analog sticks, to navigate the interface and right out of the box. If youve already got a steam account that youve been using on your pc, i mean you can be up and playing in no time. It really depends on how fast your internet connection is, or just pick up something really quick to download. But this is truly like a console experience in a handheld form factor. Os is awesome for gaming, but when it comes down to it, this is basically just an x86 pc, and if we head to the power section, we can swap over to the kde plasma desktop that they have built in here and from here we can still access Steam its going to swap over right now and we have a full linux based desktop operating system. Here we can go through install different browsers, different applications. Emulators photo editing. Software, video editing software theres a ton that we can do with this, and i will have a full video coming up just on the desktop side of things. But in this video we will take a look at it over hdmi because after all, the steam deck does support display out over usb type c.

So if youre not into tweaking and tuning, you can actually just pick this up start playing your favorite steam deck verified games from steam very easily, but valve has also included some awesome little tools here for people who love to tweak and tune like me, and a Lot of my viewers, so if we head over here to our battery performance section, we have advanced view we can limit all games to 30 fps. This is going to put a lock at 30.. We also have a thermal power limit, so we can set this up from 1 watt to 15 watts, and this will save a lot of energy when youre not doing you know hardcore gaming tasks or just playing a 2d game. That doesnt require a lot of power. Weve got our scaling filter here, where we can turn fsr right on from here makes it really easy to basically just turn this on and off with a flick of a switch. I mean its so easy here. We can also change the sharpness directly from this menu, but one of my favorite things that theyve added here is the preference overlay. So we can actually change this from level one all the way down to off, and this is going to give us information on whats going on with the steam deck weve got our battery percentage, our load, our cpu and gpu clocks, plus wattage itll, also show us In real time the fps our games are running at it just makes it really easy to see whats going on with the steam deck, while youre playing your favorite pc games.

So, of course i wanted to jump right into some gaming and, like i mentioned, i will have several videos coming up, so if theres games you want to see running just let me know in the comments below first up, we have marvel vs, capcom, infinite. High settings were using the stock screen resolution of the steam deck 1280 by 800 and were running at 60.. When i first started this match every once in a while, i would see it drop down to around 58 and that can definitely be fixed by dropping a couple of these settings down to medium its not going to hurt image quality. That much. But i wanted to test it at high and its actually running great and by the way, this game, isnt steam deck verified and its still running as well with the steam deck we can enable fsr, even if the game doesnt support it and going into this, i Knew we werent going to run it at 60fps high settings but uh if we do go ahead and limit the frame rate to 30, we can actually run this at 30 high settings on the steam deck and its still a really enjoyable experience. I mean it would definitely be nice to play this at 60 on the steam deck, but were gon na be hard pressed to do this. This game just came out. It still needs a little bit of work on pc anyway, but i still wanted to see how it would perform at low settings with that frame lock completely off.

So i just went to low settings, restarted the game and were not that far off from high settings, and this is kind of across the board. With the amd apus ive been able to test the newer rdna 2 apu thats, much more powerful than the one in the steam deck and even at 720p on that system, its still hard pressed to run it at a stable 60 low setting. So i wasnt expecting this unit to run this game at 60 and high 30 fps looks great and its fully playable next up doomy turtle, one of my favorite games uh. This is one of my go to tests for my pc builds and i wanted to see how it would handle it were at medium settings running this at 60 and theres a chance. I could probably go up to high with this using that built in fsr heres. Another game: thats, not steam, deck, verified project, cars, 2, medium settings and i actually wasnt expecting it to run this well, we still get dips under 60, but i got a lot of settings that i can actually turn down here and at medium settings. Id still say this is really playable on the steam deck and finally, for the pc section, at least in this video we have got. Ta bore the pc port. I do have fsr enabled in the settings on the game itself, but its stating that its off over here in the game – scope not sure whats going on there, but it is on it its set to balanced and im getting an average of around 42 fps.

We can definitely get more out of this game. Remember were at the original graphics quality. We can actually drop this down to low, but one thing i wanted to do is just change the fsr setting to performance so head over here, real quick and from display from balanced well go to performance and with it set up like this still at the original Graphics, quality were getting an average of around 51., not bad at all and yeah. I mean if that fps counter wasnt on on this smaller screen. I wouldnt even notice that it does feel really good at 50 fps, but there was one last thing i wanted to. Try so i took the settings up to high turn fsr to balance and we locked it at 30.. It looks great like it sits, even with that fsr on and yeah. This is probably how im just going to end up playing so the steam deck is great. For pc gaming, but one of the main reasons i wanted to pick one up was for emulation and were going to test out a few now. There are some issues right now, with uh emulation on youtube with the steam deck. So in this, video were going to show off some ps2 ps3 and psp its actually really easy to get these emulators set up, and i will do a full tutorial if anybodys interested but lets go ahead and move over to some ps2 emulation and first up we Have soul calibur 3.

, with this im using the vulcan back end were at 720p and getting amazing performance here, im fairly, confident that we could upscale even higher with these games on an external monitor, but remember we only have a 1280×800 screen and its not going to Make much of a difference on the built in screen: heres, gran, turismo, 4, again, 720p vulcan back in really great ps2 performance on the steam deck, and i will have a full emulation. Video coming up so just stay tuned to the channel. But the way it looks right now for emulation on the steam deck i mean this thing is definitely trucking through moving over to ps3 using rpcs3 were at 720p. Here ive got the vulcan back in running tekken 6, easier one to emulate were at 60fps. It did dip down a bit when those shaders were loading but uh once everything was ironed out. It works great on this machine. Now we do have harder to emulate ps3 games like skate 3, which does require a lot of cpu power and unfortunately, at least right now, with the version of rpcs 3 im using. We cannot run this at 60, so ive locked it at 30.. When i have it unlocked its only running at about 42 fps, and like i mentioned this does require a lot of cpu. Power loves extra cores and threads, but there is a chance that the developers of rpcs 3 are going to get a hold of a steam deck and maybe work out some optimizations for this little apu running.

All of our pc games and emulators on the steamdex built in screen is really great for portability, but it does support display over usb type c im using a cheap, adapter here, usb type c to hdmi. Its got two usb ports on it valve does make a dock, but unfortunately i wasnt able to get my hands on one just yet, but this does work as soon as i plug it in its going to come up on my monitor and you can navigate the Full operating system with a keyboard and mouse i mean this is just basically an x86 pc and you could use it as an everyday pc right now were in steam. Os looking great, we can install our games, we can play our games from here. We can head over to our installed applications and run those through steam, or we could set this up and go into desktop mode, so it does have kde plasma as your desktop its a full linux operating system move over there right now and the first time you Boot this up, it might look a little odd, but you can head right over to the display settings and make sure your monitor is actually set to 60 hertz 1080p or whatever resolution you want to choose, but 60hz is definitely important with this one. When i first plugged it in it was only running at 24, but what we have now is a full pc. I mean we can browse the web.

You can check your emails. You can do some photo editing. Some video editing, theres an application store, thats, really easy to get to called discover and you can download new applications from there. Ive also installed and blender in my next video well be running some tests on those but real, quick heres. This is an open source free to use, photo editing software suite and it does work really well on the steam dag in the coming days, ill be showing more of this off, but real quick. I did install retro arch ive got psp set up, so you can play your favorite emulators right here in desktop mode, if thats, how you want to do it and by the way im using an xbox one controller connected over bluetooth. It just paired right up. So here we have psp im actually using retroarch, not the standalone version. Weve got midnight, club, dub edition and its running great on the steam deck, even in desktop mode. So first impressions here valve has really hit it out of the park with the steam deck. This is a great handheld console and it actually makes a pretty awesome. Little desktop pc, also weve got that video out, so its no problem at all, connecting it up to a different, monitor or a television. I definitely want to spend some more time with it before i give you my final thoughts, but first impressions are looking really good. Ive had it for three days right now and ive been having an absolute blast with it, but thats gon na wrap it up.

For this one really appreciate you watching if you could hit that notification bell. So you know when i post my next video, because i will have a few more coming out and let me know in the comments below what applications you want to see running on the steam deck im. Definitely going to be doing a full windows video. As of making this video, we just got the gpu drivers for the steam deck, so we can install windows 10 on this unit and, of course, ill have a full emulation video coming very shortly, but if theres anything else, you want to see running.