Steam Deck
Nintendo Switch has reigned the handheld gaming device segment for an unusually long time since its release in 2016. Nintendo Switch helped gamers revisit handheld gaming in the modern era with an improvement in the graphics and a slowly expanding game library. It is all set to change now as Steam, the popular video game distribution service that houses thousands of games now.
Steam just announced the Steam Deck, a handled gaming device capable of running every game available on the Steam store without any compromise in playability, whatsoever. Steam Deck is announced to come in three versions and the cheapest of the lot starts at a price of just 399 USD.
To meet the handheld gaming requirements, the Stream Deck is designed to come with a seven inches touch display that will pack a resolution of 1280 * 800 pixels, a standard resolution for 7-inch devices. It is a 720-pixel display and while it might sound outdated to some users, keep in mind that an OLED display or higher resolution display will drain the battery in an hour as Steam Deck is fitted with a powerful CPU and GPU as well. The display will bear a refresh rate of 60 Hz and a 16:10 aspect ratio for a slight increase in height. The display brightness peaks at 400 nits which is admissible for a handheld designed to be used mostly indoors.
Steam Deck is powered by an AMD APU that includes a Zen 2 based 4-core 8-thread CPU with clock speed ranging from 2.4GHz to 3.5GHz. It uses a GPU with 8 RDNA 2 compute units (CUs) that range from 1.0GHz to 1.6GHz. Steam Deck is probably the only handheld gaming device to come with 16 GB of the latest, blazing-fast LPDDR5 memory with maximum bandwidth that you can imagine. The storage options range from 64 GB eMMC storage on the base variant to 256 GB and 512 GB NVMe SSD storage. We would advise you to go for the high-end storage variant as it packs the maximum size for memory-hogging games such as GTA5, RDR2, Control, etc. So, you can be completely confident of it running almost any game without breaking a sweat.
Steam Deck packs the latest connectivity options that include dual-band Wi-Fi support, Bluetooth version 5, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack for silent gaming. It also packs a USB Type-C port that extends the display to other devices and can manage 8K at 60 Hz and 4K at 120 Hz for any external monitor or TV. For controlling the Steam Deck, you get a console-like gamepad design with Dpad, analog sticks, and triggers with four additional buttons as well. There are two touchpads, one on each side that can be used to perform mouse and selection-related functions with ease.
Steam Deck is priced at 399 USD for the base 64 GB variant, and 529 USD and 649 USD for the 256 GB and 512 GB variants respectively.