Valve’s handheld gaming console had been churning the rumor mills from time to time and the device has finally manifested itself in the form of Steam Deck. Think of it as a Nintendo Switch that’s powered by SteamOS and includes all the games from your Steam library. It will cost $399 when it starts shipping this December.
As you would expect, a custom APU by AMD has gone inside it, complete with a quad-core Zen 2 CPU with eight threads and eight compute units’ worth of AMD RDNA 2 graphics. 16GB worth of LPDDR5 RAM has also been granted to the Steam Deck, apart from 64GB eMMC storage. That painfully small amount of storage can be increased using its high-speed microSD card slot, or you can rather choose the higher-priced 256GB or 512GB NVMe SSD models of the handheld.
The Steam Deck grabs two analogue sticks, two touchpads, analogue triggers, ABXY face buttons, four rear buttons, and gyro controls. Since it’s essentially a PC, this Valve-made machine will also let you install and use other software, so you can use it for browsing the web, or streaming video.
The screen size is the same as that of Nintendo’s new OLED model of the Switch – 7 inches. This LCD supports touch feedback and grabs a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. And yes, a dock will be sold separately for connecting the handheld to external displays. It will have USB slots for connecting mice, keyboards, controllers, and other accessories.
Valve touts that the 40Whr battery of the Steam Deck is good for 2 to 8 hours of gameplay. Other highlights of the handheld include Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fu support, a dual-microphone array, stereo audio channels, and USB Type-C for charging.
Paid registrations for the Steam Deck are now open in the US, Canada, EU, and the UK. They are limited to only one per Steam account holder. Anyone who wishes to buy it needs to have made a purchase on the platform prior to June 2021. Shipping will start this December. As we said, the base model will cost $399, while the one with 256GB of storage will go for $529 and the one with 512GB of storage will retail at $649.