 Need to game on a budget? Normally the answer is obvious. Find an empty corner of your room and plunk a DIY PC in there. But, and I can't believe I'm saying this, with the incredible performance of Valve's Steam Deck handheld console, not to mention its aggressive pricing, it might make more sense to forget all that hassle and pick up one of these instead. But can it possibly keep up with the performance of a custom gaming PC? Obviously, as the build a PC guy, my instinct is to side with Jackery, who sponsored this video. Do whatever it takes to game on PC. But if you care about portability at all, that might not be the best idea. And even if you don't, Valve's new dock accessory turns the Steam Deck into a bonafide desktop. And besides, there are other options for portability, like this eBay special gaming laptop. So we're gonna take all three and put them to the test to see what deserves your hard earned money. The challenge was simple. Take the budget of a Steam Deck, you know, the one with the storage that people actually buy and stretch it as far as we can to build a full, ready to game desktop, including monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Then, we're gonna take the money and we're gonna take the money and we're gonna take the money and we're gonna take the money and we're gonna take the money and we're gonna take the money and we're gonna take the money and we're gonna take the money to grab the Frances Set Drop Not 잘 다 improvement and toward that, we're gonna train the dolphine and use it 파acja to easily獲得 graphics. 256 gig SATA SSD. So it's not fast, but look, with motherboards, cases, and power supplies being as expensive as they are, some sacrifices had to be made in order to afford our secondhand GTX 1070 without going even farther over our budget. Seriously though, there was a chance custom PC was gonna lose this fight if we went all new. So I have no regrets. The 12100KF may only have four processing cores, but that's actually on par with the Steam Deck and the cooler it comes with weighs almost as much as the Steam Deck. So I consider that a win. It's reassuringly heavy. Ba-doing. Important note, because this is a SATA M.2 SSD, it actually won't even work in this top slot that uses the PCI Express lanes up the CPU, but it will work in this bottom slot. Yes. This is really not a great case, but sometimes compromises must be made. Cyber brawn, more like cyber brawn. We overlooked something. We don't have audio. Crap. That's gonna cost us what, like 10 bucks, five bucks dollar store earbuds? Buy some earbuds. Yeah, sure. Add that to the budget. Come on, buddy. Hey! There it is. Okay, look. It's not gonna wow your bougie friends, but I'm actually pretty happy with this. Our motherboard gives us a decent upgrade path and most of the parts in here are new with warranty. That's usable. That's usable. We don't have to cheat on audio, which is good because we ended up cheating on a controller. I'm pretty sure I told Plouffe that a controller had to be part of the budget of a computer that competes with the Steam Deck, but here we are. Secondhand Xbox 360 controller, let's go. We don't need no stinkin' frame rate counter. This has gotta be near 60 FPS though. As bad as the speakers might be, this is 100% playable, like smooth. And not only that, but our system manages to comfortably game at 1080p Ultra on our Scepter 22 inch monitor pretty much across the board. We're talking 60 FPS or better in multiple AAA games that we tested. Plus, it's a freaking computer. You can use it for all sorts of tasks, like sending email, editing video, or browsing the web. It's not really all that portable though, is it? Obviously, we're not gonna be gaming on this thing unless we're plugged into the wall or we happened to bring a Jackery Power Station with us on the family camping trip. And even if we just wanna pick it up and bring it to our friend's house, I would say you could pick up a high quality tech backpack at lttstore.com, but I think you're actually gonna need something bigger. We also built this PC without factoring in the cost of Windows. To be clear, you can indefinitely run Windows without a license key, but if you're daily driving this machine, you might want to remove the pesky watermark and get full access to system personalization at some point. But laptops come with Windows licenses. Unfortunately, after checking to see if you can find any brand new gaming laptop at this price, we concluded that no, you cannot. Thankfully, one of the first things that showed up on eBay, oh, it's fine, was this, the Dell G515. It's heavier than I was expecting, but it's got a Core i5-10300H and a GTX 1660 Ti outputting to a 1080p display. It's not nearly as upgradable as our cobbled together desktop, but it actually came in slightly cheaper, has a proper Windows license, and only fell behind our desktop by about five to 10 FPS. It might get a little hot, it might get a little loud, but it's a perfectly viable option if you're looking to game. Besides, a little TLC is all this needs, isn't it? Maybe some repasting, a battery swap, pop in a bigger drive so you've actually got some room for games, and you're laughing all the way to the bank. Like I'm laughing thanks to our sponsor, Jackery. Thanks to Jackery for sponsoring this video. From November 24th to 28th, Jackery is offering up to $1,080 US dollars off of some of their products for their Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale. Popular products like their Solar Generator 2000 Pro, 1000 Pro, and 1000 will be eligible for solid discounts. The ST2000 Pro has a huge 2160 watt hour capacity for all your camping appliances. The 1000 Pro can be charged to 100% in just 1.8 hours using either a wall plug or solar, and the normal 1000 weighs only 22 pounds, making it carry friendly with an easy carry handle. Jackery and Black Series will also be giving away a travel trailer during their $250,000 giveaway during their Cyber Monday live stream. Click the link below and keep a close eye on Jackery's website and social handles to make sure you don't miss anything. This is not bad. I mean, it's hard to compare the portability of a laptop to the Steam Deck. I mean, obviously it's easier to go from desk to couch than it is with our desktop PC without shelling out for our long HDMI and USB cable or something like that. But you're stuck with either a track pad or trying to use a mouse on an uneven surface like a couch cushion or a younger sibling. You can plug in a controller for gaming, but that's a whole other peripheral that you need to carry with you alongside your beefy power brick. Also, you don't wanna be that guy trying to chat on a terrible integrated laptop mic, so you'll probably need to carry around a decent headset, something you won't have to worry about with the Steam Deck whose integrated microphone is shockingly good. Trying to game on the train or a bus during your morning commute? We've made fun of how big the Steam Deck is compared to smaller handhelds like the GPD Win Max 2 and the IONIO Air, but let's be real, it's a lot easier to whip this out on transit than this honking thing. I mean, imagine sitting on a packed bus and trying to make enough space for this thing so you can spend 15 minutes to the next stop killing demons in Doom Eternal. And those other handhelds that I just mentioned, as much as I adore those, they've got their own problems too that completely disqualified them from this video. For one, they just outright cannot compete on price, with most of them costing at least a few hundred dollars more than the Steam Deck. And secondly, the performance on them? Kind of hit or miss actually. I mean, sure, the GPD Win Max 2 actually can outperform the Steam Deck at certain wattages, but it's almost $400 more than our 256 gig model here for their base model. And the entire IONIO lineup, at least at the time of filming, still isn't shipping with RDNA2 graphics, meaning that you could struggle to play modern AAA games. So Steam Deck then, there is a lot to like here. Still, for starters, since it's brand spanking new, we're getting a warranty with our purchase. If that GTX 1070 or that entire laptop kicks the bucket, that's it, time to go buy a new one. As for performance, it does fall short of the competition, but honestly, not by as much as you might expect. We tested everything at 720p to make it fair, because that's the resolution of the integrated display. And while we're consistently getting around or over 60 FPS on our alternative machines, our Steam Deck performs admirably, reaching playable frame rates, usually in the low 30s. Remember guys, we're testing at ultra or high settings too, except for Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, which crashed on ultra. Though in fairness, it's not officially supported on the Steam Deck anyway. More on that later. The point is that all of this means that even though the Steam Deck has no real upgrade path, it's a fraction of the size, and you can easily turn down the settings to something more reasonable, like high, medium, or even low to keep gaming as new titles get more demanding in the years to come. But there is a big caveat. I just mentioned the lack of support for Wonderlands. And while this little device has been a major boon to Linux gamers, with ProtonDB currently listing over 6,000 verified or playable games, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. We actually wanted to use F1 2022 instead of Forza Horizon 5 for our racing game, because Forza takes up nearly half of the entire drive of all of these computers. But unfortunately, despite being a verified game on deck, F1 simply refused to launch at the time of testing. The reality of it is then, you're not guaranteed that the game you wanna play is gonna work on Valve's shiny new toy. However, and it might be exceptionally rare, but this is a two-way street. The person who won our Space Cadet Table Challenge at Whaleland did so on a Steam Deck, running a ported Linux version of this 1995 classic. And not only was the frame rate buttery smooth, but the controller is actually mapped properly. For whatever reason, I was not able to achieve the same thing on an IONEO device running Windows when I tried. Of course, while the portability of the Steam Deck is its biggest strength, it also contributes to its biggest weakness. Not everybody wants to game on a tiny low-resolution seven-inch display. Thankfully, that gives us a perfect opportunity to test out the Steam Deck dock. Those guys, right? It puts significant strain on our limited budget at $90, plus obviously all the peripherals we're going to need now. But this little guy right here turns the Steam Deck into a full fat desktop with display port out, HDMI out, USB-C for power, ethernet, and three USB type-A ports. Let's give it a shot. Inside, desktop. Ha ha. Now, because of Valve's awkward positioning of the USB-C port on the Steam Deck, it's got this kind of flopsy-doodly cable hanging out of it, and then it just kind of sits in here. It doesn't actually dock to it like the Nintendo Switch. But I mean, I guess that was easy enough, that process. All right. Docking station update a bit. Oh, updating dock firmware. One moment, please. That was actually surprisingly seamless. After the firmware update, it went straight from the integrated display to the external one, and my controller, keyboard, and mouse are immediately working. Kind of sick. Oh, what just happened? Oh, I went off course. I mean, there's nothing it can do to make you a better gamer. Oh, wow, this is the most pathetic big air jump ever. Graphics, oh yes. Why don't we just turn that down to medium then? Oh, oh, she needs a minute here. She needs a minute. Buddy, the walkway works. Oh, wow. We just crashed this boy. Yikes. Well, that's a little awkward. My keyboard doesn't work to enter my pin. Let's see if I can at least use this. Okay, I'm at least able to use the controller, but that was not optimal. You know what though? This gives us a perfect opportunity to check out the desktop experience. Switch to desktop. Wait, what the? That's my primary display? Okay, got some feedback for valves so far. That should not be, but we'll get that addressed. Hey, there we go. We can just disable the Steam Deck screen. Hey, look at that. Keep this configuration. Boom, look at that. We are on the web. Okay, it's not the world's fastest computer, but I can get tech tips. Look at this, tech tips. Who needs Nvidia GPUs? Boom, at 4K. Not bad, not bad. I don't see any like bit rate disadvantage or anything like that, that's obvious. I don't know if there's much else I would wanna do from here, but hey, if you wanna be able to just have one computer and all you really do is game handheld or... Switching back to gaming mode, let's see if it handles it a little more gracefully this time. Oh boy. Oh, okay, okay. That was not an actual crash, are you sure? Uh-huh, okay. Well, at any rate, it may not be perfect yet, but the Steam Deck dock is a viable way to take your portable only Steam Deck experience and use it for browsing the web or just basic desktop use. And you've got to give it credit with or without the dock. It's a pretty convincing little package. We definitely bent the rules a little bit today, but I think we were able to draw some pretty solid conclusions. If you want to buy all new, no laptop can come even close to standing up to the Steam Deck. And even a desktop might have to make some pretty uncomfortable compromises, like settling for a slow cashless SSD or choosing a GPU from a brand you've never heard of. Not to mention that you will need to assemble the whole thing yourself, and you might end up spending a bit more. Valve's portable gaming machine, almost, is the one that makes the most sense here then, at least until you want to use a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, at which point the price starts to get a little less attractive. And I got to say, the performance and lower details hit a little harder on the bigger screen. Also, the Steam Deck has some pitfalls that you simply won't encounter on either of our other machines, like imperfect game compatibility, especially in cases where Windows-specific anti-cheat is required for multiplayer. Whatever route you go, we're going to have everything that we talked about today linked in the video description. And if you're looking for something else to watch, maybe try out some of our other handheld videos. How about this review of the IONEO AIR?