 Beneath this protective shroud is the world's ultimate, the greatest steam deck. Or at least it will be. By the time we're done, we will have replaced the inherently flawed analog sticks with hall effect sticks, we will have added tempered glass protection to the screen, we will have upgraded both the cooling and the battery, allowing us to run faster, longer, and quieter, and we will have upgraded it to a staggering 3 terabytes of storage. That's without violating Valve's guidance on aftermarket SSD upgrades. Probably the biggest change though, is to the protection. This video is brought to you by dbrand, who is showing off their Kill Switch Steam Deck Protector. It's both a carrying case slash grip, complete with kickstand, and a protective cover so you can hook your steam deck into your bag, preferably one from lttstore.com, and you're off to the races. Linode! Linode is a powerful, affordable, and easy to use Linux-based cloud computing service that has one-click apps for websites, game servers, and more. Sign up today at linode.com slash linus to get a free $100 60-day credit. What qualifies a Steam Deck as the ultimate Steam Deck? Well, there's kind of two routes that you can go down. I'm gonna come over here, Brandon. One route is the ultimate dock station. So like here we have the JSOCs. I don't know if that's actually how you say it, but they're dock. So you're able to come in, you know, set your Steam Deck down, keyboard, mouse, have ethernet. You could even plug it into a whole display with HDMI port. I don't really like that because kind of the logical extreme of that is this is the ultimate Steam Deck and it's just a gaming computer. Instead, what we want to do is work on everything that's inside of it and then makes it better as like a portable gaming station. The first thing we're going to do then is upgrade the storage. A really easy way to upgrade it is a 1 terabyte SD card. Now, 1 terabyte is fine, but we want to go even further, which is why we have this right here. It's only 30 millimeters long, but inside of this is 2 terabytes of storage. It's an engineering sample for Micron. They're not totally sure that it's going to work in the Steam Deck. They send it over to us and we're just like, hey guys, can you test if this works? If it does, we'll go and sell it to people. You can even see like a little connector here for debugging. To make opening up our Steam Deck a little bit easier, we have this 3D print right here. It's from Ma Strong Bad Ma. Whatever. They give you the 3D print. You can pop it out pretty simply. There we go. Getting into the Steam Deck is pretty simple. Now, there have been modifications to put a 45 millimeter drive into the Steam Deck, but that causes quite a few issues. This is the charging IC. It kind of handles all of your battery management and crap. And even from the factory, it gets over 90 degrees Celsius. So if you're putting, you know, an SSD over top of it, you're going to have a really bad time. Now, we did add a heat sink to it and I need to upgrade that later. But fortunately, by putting our 30 millimeter one in here, we don't have to worry about, you know, Val getting super mad at us. Once the SSD is installed, it's very simple to get Steam OS back onto here. So you just go to this Steam support page and download the recovery image. Use Rufus to check it on a USB like this one right here. And then very simply plug that in. When you boot up, you hold volume down and power at the same time until you hear a chime. I think it chimed. There we go. And you end up in the boot manager. Okay, it's just working. I lied earlier. I tested this yesterday. The SSD is fine. Storage. Yep. 1.6 free of 1.8 terabytes. We also going to be able to add this one terabyte right here and then boom, three terabytes of storage. That's freaking sweet. Now, this is not the most storage that's ever been on a Steam Deck. Brett from UFD Tech was able to do 20 terabytes. It was ridiculous. The stuff that he did. We could try and do that, but it looked like just one of the most painful things ever and a bunch of Linux. If you want to see that, watch his video. I'm not doing it. The next thing on our list is the upgraded joysticks. So these are electromagnetic joysticks from GuliKit. Freaking sweet because they replace our potentiometer based joysticks in here, which are, you know, they can cause joystick drifting and stuff like that. Look at these, Brett. Okay, let's get the old guys out. Now, why would you want to replace this joystick? As you move it around, a wiper is on a resistive layer and that's what gives you the output. I've got one right here. This right here is the resistive layer. And as you turn it, the amount of resistance changes. These joysticks from GuliKit work a little bit different. They have a magnet and as the magnet moves, the electromagnetic field changes and then that gives you your output. Normally the amount of error in a joystick with a potentiometer is like 5 to 10%. So you just need a dead zone. That's 5 to 10%. On this right here, it can be less than 1%. One thing you might have noticed is that this is not the most satisfying of joystick toppers ever. So we need to take it off of here. Now, the problem is that this right here senses when you're touching it and we need to get rid of a little lead and solder it back on. Well, that was easy. Chuck her in like that. The factory joysticks would have had a calibration in them so that, you know, from the factory you don't have joystick drift. In order to change that, we need to first turn it on with the back off and then press this tiny little button that's right there. Once we do that, it should all be fine. We'll verify that later though. Okay, yeah, the joysticks are absolutely dead on. I even have the dead zone because like, why not? Next thing we need to do is add an external fan. Now, if you haven't watched it already, you should definitely watch the video where me and Linus made the Steam Deck cooler. But the problem is, is that we thought that it would just cool everything passively. But after about half an hour of gameplay or so, it ends up just getting to the same temperature and this thing is scalding hot. What we did find out is that it works incredibly well if you just add a fan. Who would have thought? Problem is, is that I need somewhere to attach this fan. I don't know where though. And it's going to involve cutting a hole in our Steam Deck. I ask you how you are, you just have to... After an in-depth pondering with the Creator Warehouse actual electrical engineers, we decided that the best course of action is to just say, f*** it and not make it removable. When this is on here, if the heat sink is on there, you can very easily put the back on, take the back off. If you want to remove the fan and the heat sink, you have to remove both fans and heat sinks. This way we can just do it in a couple minutes and it's going to be functionally just the same. Bye. Oh, this is going to be terrible. Look at how small those wires are. Like, that's my fingernail compared to it. Well, that's the point of no return right here. There it is. Unsurprisingly, we don't have wire strippers that are this small. I don't really trust myself to just like take a flush cutter and get that off. So, that's what we're going to do. Yeah, I was really done cutting this. Nine out of ten electrical engineers recommend you do your very small soldering exactly like this. The only unfortunate thing is that Linus is going to open up the back of this and immediately make fun of us. Oh, no. I've never been made fun of on the internet for my soldering skills. Thank you, commenters, for saying how great my soldering job was. We did it. Yay. Let's wait for this one to turn off. Maybe it's not turning off. Oh, we're running doom. Oh, we're running doom. That would do it. Oh, and our ground wire. Of course. All right, got the fan working. Total pain in the butt. Really wish that we had a data sheet for this. But for everyone that's going to be modifying the fans of this and probably mostly for future Alex, it goes ground PWM, sense and then five volt. Turns out that if you connect a PWM signal for your other fan to a sense wire, it makes them kind of invert each other. So when the one spins up, the other one spins down. As you can see, they are both running. And when this one turns off, they both should turn off. There we go. Perfect. Works great. The final thing we need to do in here is fix this tiny little battery management chip. It gets super hot. And so the last time we put this very tiny heat sink on it. Problem is, is that the thermal adhesive that we used on it was not very great. So it came loose and made a bunch of sparks when it moved around. We're going to use some proper thermal epoxy to attach it this time. I'm also going to conformal coat everything around it just to be sure. To attach it, we're just using thermal conductive adhesive from MG Chemicals. It's a two part mix and it kind of smells like fish sauce. Yeah, definitely don't eat it. Perfect. Now we can leave that to dry overnight and it should not come off again. All right. It's the next day. This heat sink is absolutely not coming off. And I believe we are good with the internals of the steam deck. To protect our steam deck, we're going to be using the D brand kill switch. There's only one problem. We added a heat sink. I just had a brilliant idea though for how we can cut a nice hole in the back. Watch this Brandon. Perfect. Now we know just where to cut. I'm so happy with myself that I figured that one out. I'm going to have a bunch of ducks show up outside. I was very concerned that the whole thing would just turn into a real floppy mess once we removed all that plastic because you know, this back bit here is the hard plastic that kind of holds it all together. Seems like it's fine though. You need to take off just a tiny bit more, but this is going to work great. Okay, our case is on. Next thing we want to do is protect our joysticks. And to tell you about that, here's past Alex. To get our joystick protectors, what we want to do is create a mold inside of these 3D printed pieces. Now it's pretty simple. We take 10 of this, one of this, combine them together in here and then stick it into our vacuum chamber. That takes up all of the bubbles that we've created when we mix them together and makes it so you don't have, you know, well, bubbles in your finished part. Then you just simply inject it into the mold piece here until it squirts out of all of the other holes. That means that you don't have any like voids in your mold. And then you wait 24 hours, see you when they're done. Why thank you past Alex. Now it's been, it's actually been two days. So these should be nice and set. Okay, look at that. Even our LTT got in there. Also, you can see all of the lines from the 3D print. Okay, DIY injection molding, that worked great. Does it fit here? Just head-crabing my controller. Yeah, that should prevent it from getting too smashed around in your bag. I can dig it. Now we need to protect up around this area from scratches and so on. Same as this one right here. Because you're paying for this video, I even went ahead and watched the install instructions, Dbrand. Be proud of me. To continue protecting this thing, we're going to add some tempered glass. Wiping with the cloth, we wipe with some liquor. And interestingly, I thought these were just stickers and like they are, but their intended use case is actually to take it. And if you have like lint or anything on your screen, you can just do that. Comes right off. All right, moving the backing. Have to be real careful not to touch this. That's pretty cool looking, actually. All right, that looks really good. Really? This is the cable we're using? We haven't even told the people what we're doing yet. We want to upgrade the battery, but you obviously can't do that inside. So, you know, this. Okay, it's a bit of a hack. Hey, speaking of hacks, really? That's the mounting mechanism for the fan still? Do you have a better idea? Yes, I do have a better idea. We could drill through the heat sink this way, put a bolt and then a nut on the end, and it could be held in with like hardware. There's a heat pipe there though. You need to have the fan up like a quarter inch. Oh, so there is. It just doesn't feel very ultimate. Turn it on. It has actual PWM. It's controlled by the steam deck. Yeah. Linus is going to open up the back of this and immediately make fun of us. Did you just pigtail it off the stock contract? Yes. Wow. Good soldering. It was very difficult. Oh, this is amazing. So it's built into it now. Yeah. This is going to be my steam deck now, right? Sure, if you want it. You see these things? Yeah, the kickstand thing. Yeah, these right here because they're prototypes are just hand assembled, which means this pin comes out super easily. Do you know if it's pretty well in this spot? A battery. Oh, that's cool. So our battery can be magnetic. Yeah. Yeah, and this thing right here is what? 36 watt hours. That almost doubles your battery life. If that isn't enough, you know what you can always do. Oh my God. Are we talking about this again? Yes, it's so good. Look at this. It's just over nine pounds. You can stash it in your backpack because it's a well-made backpack, you know. It's not too heavy when you have it on like this. Over 10 hours of battery life. This is the best. I love it, but it's stupid. What's your plan for attaching this to that? Belt sander off these and double-sided tape it on. And this will never come off. I do have to wonder about our total weight now that we've added all of this extra cooling and battery. Oh! I mean, given the magnet was designed to hold on a little piece of plastic, not a battery bang, I guess that makes sense. Does this just feel deluxe or what? Like, oh man. It's like gold controller vibes. I definitely... It is a prototype. Made a second error. It'll be fine. It just needs to, I just need to put it in the right way. Wow, that was really not designed to come apart. Cool. Hey, there we go. Nice. Oh man, that looks so clean. I love it. All right, what you said before though, I really want to see what the weight difference is. Oh yeah, that's... So this is a normal one. 677. Whoa! 1.1 kilos. So we added about, what, like half a kilogram? Yeah, over 400 grams. How much is it without this? Only 874. Another point. No, that is not an argument in favor of the backpack battery. I mean, yeah, but you're wearing a backpack all the time. You have a heat sink at the back of your steam deck and this is what you're concerned about? Oh, oh sick. Oh sick. Who needs a kickstand anymore? Hey, dbrand. Hey, if you guys are watching this, which I know you are, you should do a battery kickstand. This is the deluxist steam deck that does exist. We are hitting over two gigahertz on nearly on every CPU core right now while gaming with our CPU at 46% usage. This is butter smooth. I'm running Doom Eternal at medium at native resolution and we're getting 60 FPS fricking locked. Oh my gosh, it's going to get a little hotter. We know this already. But our CPU and GPU are both 50 to 55 degrees right now. That is like nothing. Oh, yeah, if this fan is not turning, that fan is not turning. Wait, have we been gaming all this time completely fanlessly? Yeah. Wow. Have you noticed any difference in the joysticks at all? Uh, no. Yeah, I halved the dead zone and you can probably make it even smaller. Wow. The dead zone is something that's configurable on the steam deck, right? Yeah, so you can make it probably even smaller than it is right now. And the reason these Hall of Fame joysticks allow you to shrink the dead zone is because they're so precise. So you don't have to have that slop in the middle to account for them wearing out. What are the temps at though? Still 59 degrees. Yeah, and our external fan hasn't even kicked in yet. Damn. This is wild. Like our sponsor. dbrand. Oh, those guys. Yep. They drove a big truck full of money into our office to push their latest plastic thing, Project Kill Switch, on pretty much every Steam Deck video we have. What's Project Kill Switch, you might ask? What are you, some kind of dbrand show? All right, it's kind of cool though. It's like their grip cases for phones and other devices, but it's for your Steam Deck. It's got a rugged rubberized finish plus a kickstand for when you're out on the go and you want to pull out your controller in game. They've also got their tempered glass screen protectors for the Steam Deck, which we tested out for them. As it turns out, regular tempered glass screen protectors inhibit touch sensitivity, while dbrand screen protectors are super precise and guaranteed to work on your display. So you can think of them kind of like the super thin condom, except they probably won't break. You can reserve your Project Kill Switch now at dbrand.com slash kill switch, or at the link down below. It is a pre-order, but to my knowledge, they're the only game in town. So what are you going to do? Take your business elsewhere? Also dbrand. Give the people the scorpion. If you guys enjoyed this, check out the full video on adding extra cooling to the Steam Deck. The results, although not as impressive as we got today, obviously were absolutely mind-blowing. Oh, the fan turned on. Oh, there it goes. Shut down. Thank you.