Valve has just announced a new Switch-like handheld gaming console called the Steam Deck. It will arrive in the US, Canada, the European Union, and the UK in December, and reservations opened earlier today at 1pm ET (1am Malaysian Time). It starts at US$399 (~RM1,676).
The Steam Deck runs on a custom AMD APU. The APU has a power envelope of 4-15 W. It features a 2.4-3.5 GHz Zen 2 processor and 1.0-1.6 GHz graphics with eight RDNA 2 compute units. The model comes with three different storage tiers: 64 GB eMMC storage, 256 GB NVMe SSD storage, and 512 GB of high-speed NVMe SSD storage. The storage is also expandable with a microSD card slot. According to Valve, the device can play between two and eight hours on a single charge with its 40 Wh battery. However, the battery life will vary depending on how resource-intensive are the games that are played.
The console features a 7-inch touchscreen with a 1280 x 800 resolution IPS LCD panel and a 16:10 aspect ratio. It has 400 nits of brightness and a refresh rate of 60 Hz. It comes with two thumbsticks, two 32.5 mm trackpads, an analog directional pad, four main face buttons, shoulder triggers on each side and a quartet of grip buttons, as well as gyro controls.
It has a built-in quick suspend and resume feature. Users can pause their games and send the device into Sleep Mode simply by pressing the power button, and resume playing when they hit the button again. The Steam Deck supports various Bluetooth and USB-C peripherals too. Users can connect it to an external display and play games at up to 8K at 60 Hz or 4K at 120 Hz.
The Steam Deck runs on Valve’s SteamOS 3.0 designed for handheld use. Valve says it uses a compatibility layer called Proton that lets Windows-based games run without developers having to do any porting work. The device has a custom Steam store that lets users access their Steam library. Users can expect to have access to many Steam features, including chat, remote play, and cloud saves (Steam sales too!)
In addition, Valve is also producing a dock with a DisplayPort 1.4 port, HDMI 2.0 and Ethernet ports, as well as a USB 3.1 connection and two USB 2.0 sockets. Users will then be able to use the device like an actual PC.
The base version of the Steam Deck with 64 GB of eMMC storage is priced at US$399 (~RM1,676). An upgraded version of it with a 256 GB NVMe SSD is priced at US$529 (~RM2,222). At US$649 (~RM2,726), users can get the console with 512 GB of high-speed NVME SSD storage. However, the dock will be sold separately.
