 Whoa, I'm using gyro control. I've got an hour and a half hands-on with the Valve Steam Deck, and I'm gonna be plugging as many dongles in and running as many games as they're gonna let me run. I brought everything I need to answer as many of your questions as I can, including a Nintendo Switch as well as an Aionio so I can compare ergonomics, as well as a thermal camera. They won't let me open it, even though I did bring my iFixit kit, just in case they were gonna allow it. They didn't, they didn't. I'm putting it away, I'm sorry. Okay, so at least maybe I can show you guys, you know, hey, where's the cooling system? Where are the hot zones? These are early units, these are engineering units, so these are gonna be far from the final experience, but I mean, I'm gonna be one of the first in the world to even touch RDNA2 hardware running on an APU. This is a game changer. Just like our sponsor. Thanks to SignalRGB for sponsoring this video. Signal is a free application that syncs RGB lighting across your entire setup and works for brands like Corsair, Razer, Logitech, and more. Check it out at the link in the video description. ["Dreams of a New World"] First things first, they are not going to let me directly capture off the device today. Hopefully that, along with the disassembly, is something that we can follow up on for you guys in the future. But what we can do is we can record the gaming experience. This, this is it. This is me picking it up. Immediate impressions, absolutely raw. Ergonomics of the handles of the controller itself. I think they've actually done a really outstanding job. I mean, it shouldn't be a surprise. The ill-fated Steam controller for all of its quirks was absolutely a comfortable controller to hold. And in spite of the fact that my hands are pretty small, like I am easily able to reach everything from these thumb pads to the joysticks, the D-pad and ABXY. I mean, if you're a retro gamer, if you want to play, you know, emulated SNES games or anything like that, this is what you're going to be into. And ooh, the feeling is actually pretty good considering how early these units are. D-pad is smooth to roll that has a good click for each individual direction. The ABXY, I can tell these are a little bit early. You can see, you can actually feel it. The B is a little bit different. It's a little bit wobblier. You can see it's actually a little bit of a different shape compared to the other ones. It looks weird, but it actually feels exactly like the other ones to the thumb. So no problem there. I like these valve guys. I walked in and they said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And then all of a sudden they were like, okay, well, you can try your monitor. And they're saying you can try to capture. It's not going to work on this unit, but we might actually be able to do it on the desktop docked one over there. These are in sandbox mode. So we can't have the desktop experience. So that's the thing you guys got to understand. This is not a game console like a Nintendo Switch where it's this completely locked down thing. It's going to run a custom version of Linux. So all these games are going to be running through the proton compatibility layer, but fundamentally this is just a PC. It's a Zen 2 CPU with four cores, eight threads at anywhere from, I believe it's 2.4 to 3.5 gigahertz. It's going to have some kind of RDNA 2 based GPU integrated into it. 16 gigs of LPDDR5 memory. And that bit is critical because it's actually running at 5,500 megatransfer per second quad channel. That's insane. We've actually never seen to my knowledge outside of bespoke console chips. We've never seen any kind of PC built with that kind of memory bandwidth to an integrated GPU. And you got to remember an integrated GPU has to share bandwidth with the CPU. So the more you can have the absolute better. Now in terms of storage, they're going to have 64 gigs of EMMC on the 399 unit. That is not going to be enough. Thankfully the micro SD expansion card, yes, right there, you can actually see we're using it on these demo units is going to allow you to install a much larger game library than that. I mean, in the terabytes, but micro SD, I mean, especially when you consider the way the game development is going, relying on these super fast SSDs and the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox series is, it doesn't feel very future-proof. If I were you, I'd go for the 256, which is going to be $529 or the 128, which is going to be 649. Now that SSD is not upgradable, but I can pretty much guarantee that the good folks that I fix it will find a way. A couple more housekeeping items. It's got a 40 watt hour battery, which is fairly comparable to devices like the ANEO. And this USB-C port, which is used for charging is a bog standard USB-C port. So that means you could use it with standard peripherals. Like check this out. Here's a random five-year-old USB hub. I'm gonna plug it in and boom. I am using my mouse, which is important. And I will show you guys why this mouse is so important later. I mean, really a huge part of the story here for me is the sheer choice available to the gamer. Even before I plug in a mouse and navigate the interface using that, I have three different options for navigation. I can use the D-pad. I can use the thumb stick. I can use the touch pad, which I think they've still got a little bit of tuning to do on the haptics, but it is a very interesting feel. Definitely a step forward from the Steam Controller of Yore. Yeah, it's got a little bit too much like kind of vibration and not haptics right now. We're gonna tune it, he says. Yeah, I bet they will. Turning around to the back, we find a little confusing thing that may or may not get changed with the final units. Our whopping four buttons on both the right and left sides. So you got your L1, L2. This is an analog trigger. So it's gonna be great for throttle control and things like racing games, as well as L4 and L5 here. Is L3 bound to something else? It's bound to pressing down the stick. There you go. So it's just a little bit of a weird numbering thing. There are in fact four buttons down to each side, and it's kind of up to you to decide how you wanna use them. After all that, I forgot about a control scheme. Touch, you can scroll through your game library, click on it, and boom, why don't we play some Doom Eternal? Now Valve has taken some criticism for this move, with some people saying that 1280 by 800 is not enough resolution in the year 2021, but I'm gonna defend them here, just like I did with the Aionio, and just like I did with the Nintendo Switch OLED edition. At this screen size, it is enough. And from my perspective, I would much rather be running at 60 frames per second more often, it's a 60 Hertz display, compared to running at 30 frames per second and 1080p. And we are still limited by, you know, what is fundamentally an ultrabook crammed into a handheld gaming console. How awesome is this? They're at exactly the same spot as my save game on the Aionio, which is just right near the beginning of the game. This is cool, this gives us a look at the pause menu, so we can adjust screen brightness, audio. Oh, that's right, it does have built-in microphones, at least two of them. I can't remember if there are more than that for noise cancellation, I do not see any others, but it does at least have a two mic array, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. There is an advantage over the Nintendo Switch. Can you even believe the new OLED one is not gonna support Bluetooth headphones still? I mean, talk about things that make no sense in 2021. That, that right there. We can turn haptics on it, well, I want haptics on. Okay, now something that is built into this game conveniently that they didn't tell me I'm not allowed to turn on is performance metrics. Oh, hold on a second, we gotta tune this first though. This is an ugly default setup here. You know what, let's tune them both at the same time. Okay, yeah, running at native resolution, that is not gonna be a thing. Do, do, do, overall quality medium, apply changes. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and roll, I mean, this is the experience, Ed. This is what the people want to see. Okay, so we're getting anywhere from around 40, we're seeing some dips down to like 20. That's pretty much to be expected. I'm actually gonna turn these speakers down. They do sound great though. I mean, you do end up with a much larger face than something like the Aionio, but the speakers are pointed at you. So it kind of comes back to the old HTC One like experience, is it worth it to you to have a big speaker girl looking at you and actually be able to hear what you're listening to or do you want a kind of a sleeker looking device? The weight is good. It's got a good size to weight ratio. It doesn't feel cheap, but it also doesn't feel too heavy. I have not like compared the FPS numbers looking at exactly the same thing yet, but running almost all medium. I turned off motion blur because it's for plebs and like tuned a couple of other little things, but mostly medium and I locked it at native resolution. Valve had it set to dynamic resolution, which doesn't tell us anything about the performance. It is a way smoother experience. So if your question was, does RDNA2 run better than Vega? The answer is yes. Even if you have to sacrifice a couple of CPU cores in order to get there. Ooh, Valve also has a significant advantage in terms of joystick. Although to the Aionio's credit, it's a little bit more pocketable or like sleeveable if you wanna slide it into a little pouch in your backpack. You can see the profile, especially if we account for the height of the joysticks is at least twice as deep for the Steam Deck compared to, well, really I would say this is the most comparable handheld on the market right now. Looking out into the sky box, I don't have a lot of character models on screen or anything like that, but based on this very early hardware running very early software, I would be surprised if we don't see somewhere in the neighborhood of a 50% performance uplift over a similarly equipped device. And what we know based on what Valve has told us about the internal battery and the estimated battery run time is that the power envelope of these two chips is fairly similar. Not bad. Something I noticed holding them side by side like this is that there's a much more muted glare on the Steam Deck compared to the A and Neo, especially off axis. Okay, but this shouldn't be a huge mystery because they've actually, look at this, they did R and D. Check this out. So they've got different types of glass over here that they're showing us so that we can compare what happens with an anti-glare etched glass versus just a regular glass that is gonna be like, hey, where's my camera lens? Hi Ed, can you see me? Can you see me in the glass, Ed? Okay, how about this one? Can you see me? Yeah, but you're not as clear. Right? You only get the premium etched glass on the 512 gig model, but at $649, that's starting to look like a good deal just for the glass. I mean, Apple wouldn't even give you a stand for their etched glass monitor at that price. Now that we've got the game running well, it's time to try some alternate control schemes. These are touch sensitive joysticks. So as soon as I put my finger on it, whoa, I'm using gyro control. Now Valve's had support for gyro control with PlayStation controllers for some time now, but having it integrated into the device rather than something that you need to plug in a third party controller in order to use is pretty freaking sick. Now it's more for fine control, I guess. Let's see. Yeah, it's more for fine tuning your aim. So you get there with the stick and then you fine tune with the gyro. That is pretty awesome. It's a good way to hold on target while an opponent is moving around or whatever. Whoops. It's gonna take me a little while to get used to it for sure. The fact that I have to touch this in order for it to work. Oh, you can also touch this pad. So you can just be touching this pad and you can look with this as well. So more like a touch pad, but less horrendous. What happens if the meat of your thumb touches the touch pad along the music? Hmm, I think you just shouldn't do that. Honestly, it'd be very hard to do that ergonomically. I don't see it as a problem. Now that both of these have been running Doom Eternal for about 15 minutes, I'm ready to talk about noise and thermals. Now, when it comes to fan noise, there's the volume, the sound pressure level, but there's also the quality of the noise. And the AYA Neo, though my understanding is after the first 500 units, they're getting a different fan, along with analog triggers and a couple of other little upgrades. Definitely has a higher pitch to it, but I would say both of them are similar in terms of their volume, which makes sense given that we've already inferred that the power envelope of these chips is quite similar. Now I wanna pull up the thermal camera. I've been really looking forward to this. There's two main reasons I wanna look at the thermals. One is I wanna see if it will give me any hints as to the internal layout of the device. And two is I wanna know how comfortable the touch surfaces are gonna be when you've been sitting gaming on this thing for half an hour, an hour, two hours, five hours. Who knows? Valve says it can go up to eight hours if you're running light loads. Although it should be noted, it won't get nearly as hot when you're running those kinds of applications. Curiously, both the AYA Neo, which we're looking at right now, and the Steam Deck have their hotspots on the right. So maybe there's a good reason that it was done that way. Both of them manage to maintain very reasonable grip temperatures, but you can see the AYA Neo is notably hotter. So it's sitting at around 35 degrees around the left thumb stick there. While the Steam Deck, probably thanks to the fact that it's larger, is more in the neighborhood of 27. The touch pad is 29, just shy of 30 on the right and very similar over on the left-hand side. Let's flip them over. There's the AYA Neo. Conveniently, AYA shipped me a clear unit so we can actually see everything. CPU's here, SSD's here, battery's here, and then the actual heat sink is here. So that gives us a really kind of good idea of what these heat signatures might look like. Okay, well, let's see how we do here. Oh, okay. There might actually be some insights here. This is almost definitely our CPU slash GPU. This could be memory or storage. This big block here, I'd be surprised if it's not a battery or something like that. It does have a little bit of heat output to it. And this right here, now that's interesting. That's our intake, but there's quite a lot of thermal activity right around it. You know what, maybe we can peek through this grill and find out what that thing, you can see there's a little outline here. Let's see if we can figure out what that is. Nope, the answer's a big fat no. To my eyes, that is completely impenetrable. Um, since we're back here though, once again, grip temperature is advantage valve with the AYA Neo being as high as 35 degrees where your index fingers might rest around the back of the grip. And valve is sitting, I mean, maximum 28 degrees. So they did go big. They lost that compactness. But what they gained is a more enjoyable thermal experience for the user. You guys are doing great in terms of grip temperatures. That's our goal, keep it away from the hands. See that? Oh nice. So it's like night and day. So there's too much, you can see there's too much kind of leaked heat from this heat sink here. So the intake's here and there's too much kind of spreading out in this direction. And then you guys have basically kicked it all straight out. It looks like you've got pretty good kind of shrouding. It looks like we could probably use a longer intake if I was to kind of just look at this and say, you know, hey, what would I do? Not that you guys care. But it looks like there's a little bit more cooling needed here from the intake because there's still a pretty significant heat signature here. Even though there's nice fresh air coming in, it looks like you guys have some kind of shroud covering whatever this is. If I had to guess, I'd say maybe SSD or something like that. But I don't know for sure, obviously. There's some kind of chip set there maybe. There's a micro SD reader. I don't know. I don't know. Only you can know. Yeah, well, there you go. Apparently we're not getting any answers today. Now one point of contention for some users is the top location of the charging slash USB-C port. I can understand it both ways. On the one hand, it's a little bit more ergonomic to have something hanging down while you're sitting like this. But on the other hand, if you are, you know, lying in bed or something like that, that's gonna put a lot of strain on a bottom mounted port. Now, A obviously worked around this by just having them on the top and the bottom, but Valve for whatever reason didn't seem to feel it was necessary to add more. So when you're charging or when you wanna dock and plug into a wired ethernet connection, you're gonna have something hanging off of the top of the device. The good news is that as I mentioned before, the weight is very comfortable. So even having this dongle hanging off of it, it's not bad. It's not bad. Now it's time for the next act. Valve was very particular about which games were running. I'm installing CSGO. You know, the developer has to give permission. So they didn't have CSGO on these devices. We had to get special permission from the developer in order to run it. In all seriousness, that is fairly standard practice that hardware launches. But the reason I want CSGO is because the M4 has a really bright muzzle flash that I can use for the Nvidia LDAT. Here we go. Now I pre-tested the AYA Neo and what we're looking at with the LDAT is the total latency from click to photon. So what kind of internal input lag the Steam Deck might have. So far, it's felt really good, but feelings are just feelings and numbers are better. So we're gonna go ahead and strap this on. I pre-adjusted it. Kind of expecting it to be a little bit smaller in person, but that's okay. This is quite an unusual control scheme. I wouldn't expect most people to prefer it, but hey, there you go. What's interesting is even though we've loaded up a few games now, whether we're coming off of the internal SSD or the micro SD expansion card, it's been fine. But then direct storage also, you know, isn't a thing yet. So we'll see. Then again, direct storage on Linux. Will that even be a thing? It's hard to play with the LDAT covering the screen. The game is running really smoothly though. I've been extremely pleased with the gaming experience and everything I've tried so far. Okay. I wanna get about 20 if I can. You got 40 seconds till the bomb goes off. Okay, good enough. On average, it is measurably better than the AYA Neo and this is even in its early state right now. What they're showing here is a functionality called bookmarks, where, I mean, if you've been paying attention to Steam for the last 15 years, it's got a built-in web browser, right? So essentially what you're doing is you're just bookmarking a webpage, whether it's something like Twitch or Netflix, and you're able to use it to consume content on them. That's pretty cool. I could see people hacking all kinds of fascinating functionality into this. And just like that, eh? Let's go ahead and pick something people won't judge me for. Responsive. Man, I wish it had an OLED display. I truly do. And this is an area where the 720p resolution does hurt it more, in my opinion, than in gaming. Something where you're supposed to have that super sharp cinematic look versus a game where, you know, honestly, you're moving around so much all the time that your eye's natural motion blur is going to fill in a lot of the gaps. 1080p would have been nice for content consumption. Credit to Valve for their tuning of the display out of the box, by the way. At least at this early stage of development, they haven't put it in any kind of gross, vivid profile. Everything looks, to my eye, accurate to what I would expect from a color-accurate display, so that's awesome. Scott insisted I show this one. This is a mind-blowing demonstration. This, my friends, is online multiplayer. That's right. We've got one PC here, and over the power of the internet, Scott, look at this. We are playing a co-op game. He's on his Steam Deck. You guys are super tech savvy. You guys know what's up. This thing is a full-fledged gaming PC, so if it wasn't already clear, that's it. It's one of those, but smaller. Hey, I just got permission to try my own monitor. Let's see what happens. I would like to try USB-C DisplayPort in. Is it worth a shot? All right. Hey, should be fine. That's famous last words right there, hey? If it doesn't work, if this even makes it into the video, we're not, just like that. So if you weren't already convinced that this is a full-fat PC, just in a handheld form factor, well, this should pretty much do it. So can I just, I'm gonna switch to external screen, right? That sounds right, because it's not a laptop, but the OS for running things is a laptop, and if you were curious if it's gonna run 4K 60 Hertz, that's your answer right there. I think, ooh, it might be at 30 right now. It's hard to tell, I'm so used to, no, it's at 60 Hertz. Freaking awesome, just like that. How relieved are you guys right now? Pleasantly surprised. We're gonna go for full completion here. Extend to right. Oh, yeah, so it's just we plug and unplug, or we plug and plug, right? This is down. Honestly, the fact that it's working this well already is mind blowing to me. So we can even use this display as a secondary display. I mean, imagine that, right? You're gaming on your Steam Deck, you've got your Twitch chat up on your actual Steam Deck while you're using your monitor to play your game or whatever, like, I'll take it. By the way, they're working on their own dock. This is a daisy chain of right angle type C connectors indicates that Valve has in fact noticed that the top mounted type C is something that does need to be overcome, but that's okay. They have very skilled engineers and I'm sure they're gonna sort it out. Ha ha, first time LTTstore.com's been fired up on Valve's campus, actually, probably not. There's enough nerds that work here. Any Valve employees out there already got this shirt? It's the new color of our Do Not Drop shirt. Oh yeah, mouse pads are in stock, like for the first time in a very long time. Valve's making me pack up and get out before I can test all my controllers, but I'm sure they'll have that compatibility pretty much sorted out. One thing I do wanna squeeze in before we go is a quick size comparison with the original Nintendo Switch. This is not the upcoming OLED one. You can see it can basically dock under the Steam Deck, but okay, yeah, it's got a size advantage, but that's to be expected given that it's kinda like comparing a full blown, you know, APU equipped ultrabook PC with, you know, a four or five year old mid-tier smartphone in terms of hardware. And I've got one more thing to squeeze in. This message from our sponsor, Ting Mobile. Ting Mobile has new rates that make it easier than ever to see how much you can save by switching. Their unlimited talk and text is $10, with data plans starting at $15 a month, with their new Set 12 plan with 12 gigs of data for $35 and unlimited for $45 a month. And if you liked their previous pay for only what you use plans, they're still around. They're called Ting Mobile's Flex plans now, and they charge just $5 a gig. Data can even be shared across devices if you have a family plan. So connect more phones to save more. You'll get the same nationwide coverage in the US and award winning customer service and pretty much any phone works with Ting. So go check them out. They've got the perfect plan for everybody at linus.ting.com and you'll get a $25 credit. If you guys enjoyed this video, check out our full review of the AN Neo, which is the closest thing that the Steam Deck has to a competitor. The Steam Deck is expected to be shipping sometime in December of this year, with orders placed now already somewhere in the middle part of next year. So what that's gonna mean for the competitive landscape, well, with our DNA to APU is probably coming around that time. It's gonna be very interesting. I'm excited.