 Just a little more. No! We are finally ready to fully explore the hardware of the Steam Deck. That includes thermals, battery life, and even performance in an assortment of valve approved titles that range from, this is a great experience to, I am really surprised they wanted us to talk about this. I could not be more excited. The seeds of the Steam Deck were planted over a decade ago with the announcement of Steam Big Picture Mode. I love that this page is still up by the way, you guys. And with all the innovations packed into it, whether you realize it yet or not, you are looking at what is arguably the most innovative gaming PC in 20 years. More maybe. Now, a lot of the secret sauce is software, but given its current rough edges, we're not gonna be showing that until Val lifts a separate embargo, but there is still a lot to jump into here. Starting with this message from our sponsor, Project Kill Switch. Very punny name, dbrand by the way. But there's nothing punny about dbrand's upcoming case for the Steam Deck. It kind of looks like their grip phone cases and their horrible attitude had a baby and then gave it a cheesy name. You can check out the teaser page at the link down below. Now, let's get into it. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. If you've watched our previous Steam Deck coverage leading up till now, I can't assume that you remember all the details. So let's blitz through the basics. Free configs with identical key specs, varied storage and aggressive console like prices that Valve CEO Gabe Newell described as painful to hit. The highlights are the custom AMD SoC featuring four Zen 2 processing cores and RDNA 2 graphics, mobile DDR5 memory and what essentially amounts to an integrated Steam controller, giving gamers a whopping five Z inputs per side, including the joystick clicks and remappable rear paddles that are, in my opinion, perfectly tuned to be easy to press but nearly impossible to accidentally mash. In games, you're gonna have the choice between analog sticks, a D-pad, a haptically enhanced dual touch pad thing, and even onboard gyro controls that by default are activated by placing a finger on the capacitive surface of the right joystick. It is an impressive arsenal of input options that promises to make everything from shooters to mouse dependent games like Civ enjoyable with a little bit of kajiggering. Of course, promises mean nothing if the hardware doesn't live up to the hype. And I want to start with the controller. Since my rushed hands-on and my initial unboxing on short circuit, I have logged hours of gaming time on the Steam Deck and while I can reach every button comfortably from a neutral relaxed position, I do find a number of them a little awkward to use. And I don't really know how to describe this other than to say it's kind of like spooning someone taller than you. Cuddling is fine, but don't try and do anything too ambitious or you might strain a muscle. If you have larger hands, you might not share these concerns but my wife and I both had similar issues, albeit with different buttons. For example, I struggled to reach the shoulders without shifting my grip a little and she found the ABXY was a little bit awkward for her. But Jake had no issues at all, so your mileage may vary and even for myself, I think it's a small price to pay for the unprecedented input flexibility afforded by Valve's design. And did I even mention the touchscreen yet? Did I even mention lttstore.com yet? Get a water bottle. And it gets even better. The feel of the sticks, buttons, triggers, and even the D-pad, which I am very particular about, are all right up there with my favorite console controllers. The joysticks in particular are miles ahead of every other handheld that I have touched, with the exception of the IONX, and Valve's repair-friendly approach to the joysticks promises a long gaming life for your deck. Of course, a big part of hardware longevity is cooling, and I'm extremely pleased to say that temperatures were well under control in all of our test scenarios. The thoughtful design of the deck keeps touch surfaces at or near skin temperature, even during an extended gaming session, which is a big advantage over more compact portable gaming PCs like the IONEO 2021 Pro and the One X Player Mini. And even though the fan looked kind of wimpy in Valve's official teardown video, get subbed by the way, because our own teardown is coming, it managed to do its job effectively and without complaint, even in control, a demanding AAA game on Valve's approved list. Even in the most aggressive SoC power profile, which allows it to draw its full 25 watts, we saw both CPU and GPU temps that were well within the range that we'd consider safe, all while remaining at the reasonable noise levels that we recorded in our tests. One oddity we observed though, the Steam Deck ran at its peak clock rate for about 15 minutes, after which it appeared to settle into a ever slightly lower clock speed, like on the order of 10 to 20 megahertz slower. Now at this time, we don't have a tool to measure fan RPM, but one theory we came up with just now, we have not verified this, is that we might've reached Valve's target GPU temperature, and then when the fan ramped up, maybe the system was left with slightly less power budget for the SoC. Hopefully we can dig into this in more depth than our full review, but even if we don't, I'm comfortable saying that it's a non-concern because performance was nearly identical after it settled in. Also, this difference was not nearly as significant as what we saw on the iNEO 2021 Pro. And that is just the tip of the Exciteberg when it comes to thermal and power management. Valve's promised TDP and clock controls mean that while you can just leave the SoC on auto, and for most people, we'd recommend doing just that and using FPS limits to extend your battery life while offering predictable performance, for the hard cores, you can also expect to be able to fine tune your power profile to optimize for your exact use case. Want to emulate PS3 games and need your CPU going hard, for example? You'll be able to, and I'm really excited to see what the community comes up with here. And the community for this thing, do not kid yourself, is gonna be enormous. Like I've seen haters out there that are like, this thing is not gonna take off. You are wrong. And now that I can show you these performance numbers, you are gonna see just how wrong you were. It's important to keep in mind that Valve did hand select each of the games for our preview embargo today, but I also haven't seen anything to make me believe that their goal was to mislead us about the deck's capabilities. So kicking things off, Control is a DirectX game with no native Linux port, but a platinum rating on ProtonDB, meaning that it should run perfectly on Linux out of the box. And that's exactly what we saw. More than perfect, I'd say, given that the Steam Deck absolutely ran away with the performance crown here. Another worth mentioning side note is that on a screen this size, even at the low preset, Control looks absolutely amazing. What a time to be alive, right? Continuing on, Devil May Cry 5 is arguably an even bigger win for the Steam Deck, which basically never dipped under 70 FPS on medium settings with anti-aliasing enabled. Okay, it's cheapo basic anti-aliasing, but come on. And it looks great. Ghostrunner continues Valve's dominance here with the Steam Deck putting up a clear win in DirectX 11 and creating a new standard for mobile gaming performance in DirectX 12. I mean, the deck's lows here managed to nearly outstrip the average frame rates of competing devices powered by Intel Xe graphics and AMD's last gen Vega architecture GPUs. But it also isn't a completely one-sided fight here. Dead Cells is the first of our, why did Valve want us to look at this? Games. On the surface, it actually seems like the Steam Deck puts up an embarrassing fight here coming in dead last. But we also observed that even though we unlocked the frame rate, SoC power consumption was quite low in this game. We've got a couple of theories about this, maybe around optimization or Valve doing something in the background to save power rather than push past 150 FPS, but we're not sure at this time. And we have no reassuring explanation for this next one. Massive credit to Valve first and foremost for getting Forza Horizon 5, a Microsoft game running at all. But while the in-game benchmark reports industry leading performance here, the gameplay experience does not hold up. Both Jake and I experienced what I would describe as kind of a physics rubber banding effect where the animation stays smooth, true to the frame rate report, but the experience of playing the game is uneven and jarring. It kind of reminds me of when a video call gets buffered and then the speaker's voice goes slow and then goes fast to catch up and then slow and fast to catch up. But issues with Forza aside, two things are clear. One is that the hardware is damn impressive. I mean, I'm sure that if we had a working Windows GPU driver in time for this preview, the Steam Deck would have peeled away from the competition in Forza as well. And the second is that Valve software team and the open source community are just S tier. There's no other way to put it. The fact that any of this works at all is a modern technological miracle. There's a lot more to gaming than FPS, however. And honestly, this is where the Steam Deck both shines and loses some of its luster. I mean, it speaks volume about the efficiency of the APU that AMD's custom SOC division put together that in spite of its mere 40 watt hour battery, that's almost 20% lower than the competition. The Steam Deck puts up better battery longevity numbers than its competitors. That eight plus hours under light loads is particularly interesting to me as a retro emulation enthusiast. I'm gonna put a lot of hours on this thing. But it's not even the star of the show in my opinion. Compared to the One X player mini and everything that I've seen from AYA, including the limited edition next preview unit that they sent me, the screen on the Steam Deck stands out as just plain better. It's not shockingly vibrant like the Switch OLED nor does its 1280 by 800 resolution give it the sharpness of the One X player mini, but it's a very complete package. Deep enough blacks that you won't find the glow of black bars distracting, indiscernible input lag and motion blur and out of the box color performance that isn't gonna win any awards, but didn't look off either until we'd run diagnostic tests in a controlled environment. The best thing about it to me though, was the excellent exemplary job that Valve has done of making the display usable under any conditions. The anti-glare coating on the 512 gig version does a fantastic job of minimizing reflections in daylight without having any noticeable in my experience effect on sharpness. But I should make it clear that I don't think I would personally spend the extra if I didn't need more storage since I find myself doing the vast majority of my gaming at night. And regardless of screen finish, the Steam Deck is by far the most comfortable handheld that I own to look at in a dimly lit environment. It just gets so much dimmer than anything else and details like that really illustrate the care and attention that Valve has poured into this project. Do not underestimate the difficulty of producing a screen that manages acceptable color performance across such a wide range of brightness settings. And believe it or not, the screen pales in comparison to the speakers. I was able to use Bluetooth or three and a half millimeter headphones, no problem. They performed as expected, but the speakers. Man, the other devices that I'm reminded of when gaming on the Steam Deck are the original HTC One and the latest generation M1 MacBook. To be clear, they're still tiny speakers. Valve can't bend the laws of physics, but I was genuinely surprised that a pair of drivers this small could create a sound stage this wide as I've have cars ripping past me in Forza Horizon 5. I mean, I guess given the performance of both the near field speakers and the microphone array on the index VR headset, I shouldn't be that surprised. So, Valve, can you hurry up and make a gaming headset already? I promise you, it would immediately obsolete most of the other crap that exists and you would sell millions. Seriously, I promise. But I said it wasn't all good, right? I wanna talk about haptics. By Valve's own admission, rumble was an afterthought on the Steam Deck. Compared to the space, power and cost downsides, they felt that the benefit was too small. And respectfully, I disagree. Even if I hadn't already experienced the tight responsive linear motors in the INEO Pro 2021, I would have immediately noticed the loose, cheap toy feel of the touch pads, both when using them as a mousing surface and when they're providing pseudo haptic feedback for the rest of the controller. There's just no nice way to put this. At the moment, haptics on this device are a poo stain on an otherwise crisp white sheet. And Valve says they're gonna fix it with software, but we're gonna have to wait for the full review embargo to find out if I need to stop mashing X for doubt over here. Sorry, here's my X button. Though Valve hasn't given me much reason to doubt them yet. They claimed at the hands-on that both the internal SSD and the microSD card would manage similar load times and I didn't believe them. But so far it appears as though I was wrong. I still do need to get more detail from them about whether this involved some kind of fancy trickery or if you can actually just copy paste a game folder off of your other desktop onto the Steam Deck. And I also need to find out what's gonna happen as game titles that are optimized for the blazing fast storage of the PS5 and the Xbox series is start to arrive. But for the time being, I can say this, you can expect to slot a terabyte of storage into your Steam Deck with very little compromise to the experience. And what that means is that if you're brave enough to tear down your deck and upgrade it with the latest from Micron, you could rock as much as three terabytes of storage in this thing. It's not as much as the eight terabytes that I have in my IONX right now, thanks to its support for full-size 2280M.2 drives. But that kind of brings up an awkward conversation that we needed to have at some point. I have spent a lot of this video talking about the Steam Deck compared to competing handheld gaming PCs. But the truth is that there aren't any competing handheld gaming PCs. I mean, obviously there are other handheld gaming PCs we showed them in the video. It's just that they don't compete with the Steam Deck in the same way that a BMW M5 doesn't compete with a Tesla Model 3. Sure, they both have four wheels and they get you from point A to point B quickly, but those vehicles are built for very different customers and at very different price points. That's the bottom line here. Starting at 400 US dollars, the Steam Deck is less than half the price of anything else we looked at in this video. So I could complain that the tactile feel of the Steam and Quick Access Menu buttons are poo poo, or that the width of the deck means that playing in unusual positions, like lying on my side in bed is a little uncomfortable because my top arm is up and the blood drains out of it. But I'm not gonna complain about those things because it is half the price. And even the top spec one has a pretty compelling value proposition with the anti-glare screen and the surprisingly nice included carrying case. And this is the real kicker. If Valve follows through on even half of their game compatibility promises, the Steam Deck is projected to have more titles available at launch than any other game console in history. So it's time to order a Steam Deck, ladies and gentlemen, is what I would say if I was irresponsible. Because the software is still make or break for this puppy and Valve has some big questions to answer about funky stuff like the game engine rubber banding that we saw in Forza Horizon 5, game compatibility across the Steam library, and things like their auto-resuming gameplay. Let's say your Steam Deck wasn't online the last time you were playing. Are you gonna overwrite a bunch of your progress when you switch to your desktop? We're gonna have a lot to talk about next time when we get to look at the software. And I have a lot to tell you about Project Kill Switch. That's right, dbrand made a case for the Steam Deck. I have no idea how they got their hands on one to prototype this thing, but it looks like, kind of like their grip case. It's got this sort of ruggedized, rubberized finish to it. Looks like it's gonna be extremely comfortable. And one of the features I'm really looking forward to is the kickstand in the back. Because that is one thing Valve did not include that I think Nintendo made pretty clear is a good feature to have. Having a little kickstand, you can plug in your dongle, get a wireless controller plugged into this thing. And that is gonna be a freaking awesome experience on the plane that Valve just doesn't really have an answer to out of the box. So guys, you can check out the product page on dbrand's website. We're gonna have that link down below. They're bad people that make good products. That's all you really need to know about them. JK, JK, JK love you dbrand. And lots of love to Valve for sending this over for the preview. I look forward to covering it in more depth as we go forward. Did I include an LTT store mention in this video? Oh crap, let's go back and find a spot for one.