Okay
They said they wouldn't do this right, but there was the hardware certification in South Korea, right?
Then follow me here. Phoronix caught Valve sneaking codenames into the Linux kernel. Final Fantasy VII fans know that
Sephiroth and Aeris had a bit of a run-in and then we all know Aerith was a Valve codename for the
Just tell them already!
Okay, fine. Valve
Just launched an OLED Steam Deck and I know what you guys are thinking. That sounds great!
But didn't they say not to expect a new Steam Deck for years?
Well, that's what we heard, but it's not actually what they said. We can talk about that later. For now,
this thing is freaking awesome! I am talking larger, incredible HDR screen,
massively better battery life, three times faster game downloads, more included storage, and get this you guys, without
Raising the price. Take that, Sony. So get your pre-order in now, obviously,
but also stay tuned because on top of all the improvements that they highlighted for us to talk about in our review,
there's more that they wanted us to discover on our own and those turned out to be
very interesting, like our sponsor. Origin PC! Configure your next-gen gaming desktop or laptop and save
big! Save up to $900 off select laptops and up to
$275 off select desktops at the link below. There's no other way to put it. This thing is
beautiful. This is not just a Steam Deck with an OLED display.
This is a Steam Deck with a custom HDR OLED display. The first we've ever seen in a handheld with a rated peak brightness of
1,000 nits in HDR, a rated million-to-one contrast ratio, and
110% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. It is even bigger than the original, coming in at
7.4 inches rather than the original 7, which they pulled off by shrinking the bezels rather than by increasing the size of the unit,
making it feel even more immersive.
Oh, and did I mention that it now does 90 Hertz refresh rate for smoother animations and more responsive inputs?
I mean, after the mildly disappointing screen in the original deck, this is everything that I could have asked for.
Well, almost everything. We're still stuck at 800p resolution,
but what blew my mind about that was how hard it was to tell. I mean, I could have sworn that it was higher,
but I guess that just goes to show you how much our perception is impacted by other factors like brightness,
contrast, and color reproduction.
Valve nailed this thing. Like, the color in sRGB mode is dead-on
with even more impressive saturation in HDR. It's easier on the eyes in low-light conditions, and the contrast ratio is
functionally infinite. So, let me just put it this way. This thing pops.
The only thing I could ask for would be support for variable refresh rate on the built-in screen,
but Valve says that this just wasn't possible. Not because they didn't do the software work,
it'll work on an external display,
but because the internal display uses a MIPI interface. When I press them on why they didn't use
EDP, which would support VRR, they were actually kind of evasive.
So, what we suspect is that Valve is still not shipping the kinds of volumes that would justify a
completely custom screen, putting them at the mercy of what's kind of available in the market. And by that
I mean that, based on the identical sub-pixel layout,
we suspect that they're using the same source that Nintendo does for the Switch OLED.
Which is important, because most sources that we can find suspect that Nintendo is using a MIPI derivative for their displays.
Now, to be clear, we don't have any proof of this, but if we're right,
it's probably a really good thing, based on that recent video looking at OLED Switch burn-in.
Yeah, it will eventually, but only if abused.
So, fingers crossed.
Now, I'm sure you're practically yelling at your screen by now.
Hey, Valve said they weren't gonna make a new Steam Deck, not for years! What gives with this?
But that's not quite how it went down.
There were a bunch of articles earlier this year, after veteran Valve programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais discussed how Valve
would need to do a ton of work to re-engineer the internals to make an OLED screen work.
And then another round more recently of him saying,
he doesn't foresee the performance target for Steam Deck changing for the next couple of years.
Which we interpreted to mean that no new hardware was coming.
But, if you read the actual quotes from him, rather than skimming the headlines,
he never actually said we wouldn't get a mid-generation upgrade.
We just assumed that, and we all know what happens when we do that.
And get this, not only is the new screen better,
it's thinner, which carves out some precious space behind it for a larger battery.
Steam Deck OLED, I'm not sure if Valve calls it that, but we're gonna call it that,
boasts a 50 watt-hour battery, which Valve says should charge faster and last up to 50% longer than the old one.
Which seems like some pretty questionable math on the surface,
especially given that the included charging brick has identical specs.
But our results on both of these counts were right in line with their claims.
And the why of that was one of the things that we got to investigate on our own.
You see, some of these gains come from the size of the battery, some from a newer chemistry,
some come from the more efficient screen, and some come from the new silicon that AMD spun for this version.
Now before you get too excited, Valve was very clear that the new 6 nanometer die-shrunk processor is
intended to perform just like the previous 7 nanometer version.
Their exact words were, often equivalent, never worse.
But, that doesn't sound like not better.
And as we've learned, there's as much to be gleaned in what Valve doesn't say as there is in what they do say.
Now, it's beyond the scope of this video,
but I would be particularly interested to see what kind of results the hyper-miling community can get from this new die,
alongside Valve's new underclocking features.
We're gonna talk about out-of-the-box performance though, starting with Returnal.
Running the built-in benchmark at 1280x800 on the low preset,
we got virtually identical performance, with only the maximum FPS being significantly different from the original deck.
Same story going out for a rip on our favorite Kanakistan track in F123.
Similar enough that most people wouldn't notice it day-to-day,
but an improvement that is well beyond our margin of error in our measurements.
I'll take it, or at least I would until something weird happened.
In Cyberpunk 2077, we saw a significant performance drop.
Using the Steam Deck preset in both cases, our minimum FPS was quite a bit lower than the original deck.
The good news, however, is that average FPS wasn't impacted.
So, what we suspect is that the new APU was stuck in a lower power state at the start of the benchmark, and then ramped up.
Which is good, because that should be easy enough to fix in the coming weeks.
Or, I mean, probably days at the rate that Valve has been pushing out patches to take the Steam Deck from the
unfinished state that it was in when I first reviewed it, to the polished experience that it is today.
Now, given that our focus is on the new hardware,
we aren't gonna get into a ton of depth about what Valve's done with SteamOS lately,
but the incredible work that they've done on HDR and color management in Linux is just the tip of the iceberg.
Once you manage to drag your eyes away from the new screen, you might notice the thumbsticks. Before you ask, no,
they're not Hall Effect.
But, there's a new texture and a slightly different profile that most people around the office seemed to prefer.
When they were asked, well, why didn't you go with Hall Effect sticks?
It seems like such a no-brainer upgrade. Valve said that, ultimately, they were unsatisfied with their reliability at this time.
So, fingers crossed for the future, but not today. Other tweaks to the outside,
colors of the button labels and the bases of the thumbsticks are different. Power button is now a nice, almost LTT orange.
The power LED is a WRGB diode to give you more feedback about your charge state, and the screws on the back of the deck
are Torx rather than Phillips. Very nice.
But, that's about it for the exterior changes, and it looks like the dimensions are identical,
which raises a big question for me. Will your OG deck accessories still fit?
Now, dbrand was desperate to know, which makes sense given their line of work, and we thought about just lending them a unit,
but I was all like, hey, I have the power in this relationship for a change.
Why don't we charge them to test it, and then do it on camera, where everyone can see it?
I actually don't know the correct way to put this on, so I'm just gonna go for it.
Doesn't seem like anything is different, but just because it doesn't seem different doesn't mean it's exactly right, necessarily.
MicroSD slot?
Perfect. Rear buttons?
Perfect. Top buttons, LEDs, all visible, all accessible, looks good to me.
Obviously, if the kill switch goes on, then their other accessories will fit, but what the hey.
If you don't need the kickstand, there's also their universal mount. Go ahead and pop that on.
Kind of looks like Valve's Valve. Lots of people use these for external battery banks,
but you can mount pretty much anything to your Steam Deck with it. I mean, look at that. Wow.
Screwdriver.
Now, one thing that's not gonna go as smoothly is the screen protector.
Do they has a bigger one?
Because
it's only a bezel reduction, the actual piece of glass is the same size,
and I'm sure you will do a really, really good job of applying it instead of just doing it in a hurry like I'm doing
because I'm on camera. Oh, man, that's way off.
Just, just don't look that close.
They include two, though, because they assume you'll screw one up, I, I guess.
Oh, this is hilarious.
The notes from dbrand say, don't need to actually install.
Probably because they knew that I would screw it up if I did it in a hurry.
Anyway, the point is, thanks dbrand for sending this stuff over.
We'll have links in the description along with the new Steam Deck and everything else we feature. Now, at this point,
you know everything you need to know about this thing as a consumer.
But the tinkerers, you're gonna want to stay tuned, because internally, a lot more has changed than you would probably think.
Starting with something that would be really easy to overlook.
These screws now go into metal screw bosses rather than just into the plastic housing,
which is great if you want to get into or out of your deck multiple times, say, for example, to upgrade your storage.
And, speaking of, Valve has made a sincere effort to reduce the number of different types of screws involved,
making repairs and modifications a much more pleasant task.
That doesn't mean, however, that intergenerational compatibility is going to be perfect.
The motherboard has changed, and the daughter boards on both sides of the unit have been reshaped and redesigned,
with the thumbstick boards now having these little... wings?
Not sure exactly what to call them, but they're a mounting point for the switches for the shoulder buttons,
which means that any third-party replacement joysticks are gonna have to be redesigned before they're gonna work in the new deck.
The battery is still glued in place, but Valve says that they didn't go hog-wild with the glue this time,
so battery replacements should be a little less terrible, and a
dedicated DSP is present now to take some load off of the APU for audio processing,
with Valve claiming that the new unit delivers refined haptics, cleaner audio, improved bass response, and better stereo separation.
We didn't really find any of these to be game-changing, but they are certainly welcome improvements.
Superficially, the new cooling setup looks quite a lot like what we saw in the refreshed Steam Decks that they've been shipping in recent months,
but on closer inspection, the mounting points are actually different, and
there's a lot more open space under the shroud, with far fewer components on the main board getting in the way of airflow.
Our acoustic chamber is still in the works, but even without it,
we observed a noticeable reduction in fan noise, and that's with the system running cooler overall. Under that cooling system,
we have some more big spec upgrades.
Like the original, our new APU comes with 16 gigs of LPDDR5,
but this time, it's 6,400 megatransfer per second compared to the
5,500 of the original. That is a huge increase and explains a significant amount of the performance uplift, and
there's a new custom Wi-Fi module that had us peaking in the real world at around
650 megabits per second when downloading games on our Wi-Fi 6e network here at the lab. That is
outstanding and a huge difference maker. If you've ever downloaded a big game on your deck,
you're gonna know what I'm talking about. Now, the wireless module is still soldered down, which is a bit of a bummer,
especially because, looking back at the original and seeing what a big improvement
this is, wouldn't it have been nice if that one hadn't been soldered? But according to Valve,
this was for good reason, and allowed them to create a specialized interface between the Wi-Fi module and the APU,
which has the benefit of moving the power circuitry onto the main board, rather than the Wi-Fi card, and
of allowing them to run a dedicated antenna for Bluetooth 5.3.
Also, to its credit, the new Wi-Fi chip is at least soldered further away from the M.2 slot for the SSD,
which should hopefully result in less interference. And speaking of storage,
let's talk about the updated lineup for a moment here. The new top-of-the-line includes one terabyte of NVMe storage and
has the same anti-glare etching on the glass as the original.
It also includes this new two-part case that will help save some room in your backpack,
if you don't happen to have a nice, tech-focused bag that has room for multiple laptops and a Steam Deck, like ours does,
lttstore.com. The base model is now
256 gigabytes for the same price as before, a
quadrupling of storage, not to mention the speed upgrade, but this one has a catch.
It's the old LCD version, and not just with the same screen, without any of the new upgrades.
At least, that's the case for now. So,
I would probably avoid that one, and I'd be looking at the mid-tier.
It's $20 more than last gen,
but it gets double the storage at that price, and has all the new goodies. All it lacks are the anti-glare coating,
which, to me, is not the end of the world, and a two-part case.
It's a smokin' deal.
There's also a fourth member of the family, the limited edition of the 1 terabyte that has an exclusive transparent shell,
but that thing is so limited that Valve wouldn't even let us borrow one, even though they totally took our color scheme.
We had to drive all the way down to Seattle to get this footage of it in person.
It's like, you know guys, you can just tell me if you want to hang out, and I'll say sure,
as long as you support our team making great videos, kind of like our sponsor.
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If you enjoyed this video, watch our old video, Hot Rodding a bigger cooler, onto the original deck.
We actually got a lot the way to this new performance tier, which
raises some interesting questions. Like, could the new one go even further?