Just a little more no, we are finally ready to fully explore the hardware of the steam deck that includes thermals battery life and even performance guys. This is exactly the way that i thought it was going to look and i like it, but it looks a little tacky, but who cares about how it looks? So it's it's what it runs and it's an assortment of valve approved titles. It's a little tactical. This is a great experience to.

I am really surprised they wanted us to talk about this. I could not be more excited the seeds of the steam deck were planted over a decade ago with the announcement of steam big picture. I love that this page and with all the innovations packed into it, whether you realize it yet or not. You are looking at what is arguably the most innovative gaming pc in 20 years.

More maybe now a lot of the secret sauce is software, but, given its current rough edges, we're not going to be showing that until val lifts, a separate embargo, but there's still a lot to jump into here. Starting with this message from our sponsor project, kill switch very punny named brand by the way, but there's nothing funny about dbrand's upcoming case for the steam deck. It kind of looks like their grip phone cases and their horrible attitude had a baby and then gave it a cheesy game. You can check it out.

You guys know this looks like chat guys. This looks like that. The one kid the one kid that would go around was like translucent, pink or blue handheld for the gameboy advance or or sp. Look like little bunk.

Look like he's bringing a mad cat controller or some horrible attitude page at the link down below. While i can assume that most of you have watched our previous steam debt coverage leading up till now, i can't assume that you remember all the details. So, let's splits through the basics, three configs, with identical key specs, very strong, that valve ceo, gabe newell, described as painful wait that is so cheap, ah 400, bucks on the bus, 350 bucks, that's really good storage and aggressive console like prices that valve ceo, gabe newell, Described as painful to hit yeah, that is cheap. What the is onto you do you know dude, you know what kind of hardware it is in there for to run all that.

You guys know men, twitch, streamers, yeah, the people that talk about tech are so out of touch you guys say: oh because you're a male in there, you guys you guys are so out of touch you're thinking, i'm gon na touch you're gon na touch the highlights You know the that's in there the what it runs, what it can do guys. This is like 16 times in the switch literally, it's very in every possible way. You could imagine, and it's what is it uh way more storage, it's barely a device that valve described as painful to hit the highlights are the custom amd soc, featuring four's, n2 processing cores and rd and a2 graphics mobile ddr people still argue. That consoles are too expensive when they're sold at a loss, they literally lose money selling the consoles.

They make the money back through licensing and what is wrong with you and what essentially amounts to an integrated steam controller, giving gamers a whopping five z inputs per side, including the joystick clicks and remappable rear paddles. That are, in my opinion, perfectly tuned to be easy to press, but nearly impossible to accidentally mash in games. You're going to have the choice between analog sticks, a d-pad, a haptically, enhanced, dual touch pad thing and even onboard gyro controls that by default are activated by placing a finger on the capacitive surface of the right joystick. It is an impressive arsenal of input options that promises to make everything from shooters to mouse dependent games like sieve, enjoyable with a little bit of kajiggeri.

Of course promises mean nothing if the hardware doesn't live up to the hype, and i want to start with the controller. I know it's optional, it's my rushed hands-on and my initial unboxing on short circuit. I have logged hours of gaming time on the steam deck and while i can reach every button comfortably from a neutral relaxed position, i do find a number of them a little awkward to use, and i don't really know how to describe this other than to say It's kind of like spooning someone taller than you cuddling is fine, but don't try and do anything too ambitious or you might strain a muscle if you have larger hands. You might not share these concerns, but my wife and i both had similar issues, albeit with different buttons.

For example, you can replicate that feeling and you can relate to that. If you've ever used mad cats dude, they always have this the same thing where it feels like a controller. The buns are at the same place, kind of whenever you use them. You feel like you're, using different type of muscles in your fingers, and it just feels awesome i struggled with.

I don't really know what the shoulders that's without shifting my grip a little and she found the abxy was a little bit awkward for her, but jake had no issues at all, so your mileage may vary and even for myself, i think it's a small price to Pay for the unprecedented input flexibility afforded by valve's design, and did i even mention the touchscreen yet did i even mention lttstore.com yet get a water bottle and it gets even better. The feel of the sticks, buttons triggers, and even the d-pad, which i am very particular about - are all right up there. With my favorite console controllers, the joysticks in particular are miles ahead of every other handheld that i have touched with the exception of the ineo next and valve's repair friendly approach to the joysticks promises a long gaming life for your deck. Of course, a big part of hardware - longevity is cooling and i'm extremely pleased to say that temperatures were well under control in all of our test scenarios.

The thoughtful design of the deck keeps touch surfaces at or near skin temperature, even during an extended gaming session, which is a big advantage over more compact, portable gaming, pcs, like the io neo, 2021 pro and the 1x player mini, and even though the fan looked kind Of wimpy and valve's official teardown video gets subbed by the way because our own teardown is coming. No, there have been some testing on how hard it is against molding. It's actually pretty good if you uh for a long time, and it is only five hundred dollars. Only five hundred dollars and look what is inside it? No, no! No, he does not know left is on our head man, and this is the name of some some spoiled cuddled andy, who got a new brain alien aware for christmas from his mom, even in even in the most aggressive soc power profile, which allows it to draw Its full 25 watts we saw both cpu and gpu temps that were well within the range that we'd consider safe all, while remaining at the reasonable noise levels that we recorded in our tests.

One oddity we observed, though, the steam deck ran at its peak clock rate, for about 15 minutes, after which it appeared to settle into a ever so slightly lower clock, speed like on the order of 10 to 20 megahertz slower. Now at this time we don't have a tool to measure fan rpm, but one theory we came up with just now. We have not verified. This is that we might have reached valve's target gpu temperature and then, when the fan ramped up, maybe the system was left with slightly less power budget for the soc.

Hopefully, we can dig into this in more depth in our full review, but even if we don't i'm comfortable saying that it's a non-concern, because performance was nearly identical after it settled in okay. Also, this difference was not nearly as significant as what we saw on the ineo 2021 pro, and that is just the tip of the exciteberg when it comes to thermal and power management, valve's promised tdp and clock controls mean that, while you the reason, thank you guys, I i used to have a radeon reference card and the bearing in the in this in in the fan was broken. Okay and i had my case open on the ground and then um. Sometimes it would start to lag i'm dead about this okay.

It was not the light like it was lagging and what i did is i i pulled my i'm not kidding. I put my foot up and i would press my big toe against against the fan right and the fan would realign itself and then it would cool itself down to a good temperatures and it would stop lagging and i took i had to take the toe off. I'm not getting just not getting the soc on it. I would actually we'd recommend doing just physically and using who's the bailout to extend your battery life while offering predictable the radion.

You can also expect to be able to fine-tune your power profile to optimize for your exact use case. You want to emulate ps3 games and need your cpu going hard, for example, you'll be able to, and i'm really excited to see what the community comes up with. Here and the community for this thing, do not kid yourself is gon na be enormous, like i've seen haters out there that are like your thing is not gon na take off. You are wrong and now that i can show you these performance numbers, you're gon na see just how guys are handheld or kind of they're kind of the future.

I think people people got ta handle that whenever we got the switch wrong, you were it's important to keep the problem with the resolve, lack of flexibility and limitations. That's the problem with the console and having this concept of the games for our preview embargo today. But i also haven't seen anything to make. You believe that their goal was to mislead us about the deck's capabilities, so kicking things off.

Control is a directx game with no native linux port, but a platinum rating on proton db, meaning that it should run perfectly on linux out of the box cutie, and that's exactly what we saw more than perfect i'd say given that the steam deck absolutely ran away With the performance crown here another well, the numbers, 1x player, perfect i'd, say given that the steam deck absolutely ran away with the performance crown here. Another worth mentioning side note is that on a screen this size, even at the low preset control, looks absolutely amazing. What a time to be alive right, continuing on devil may cry! 5 is arguably an even bigger win for the steam deck which basically never dipped under 70 fps on medium settings with anti-aliasing enabled okay, it's cheapo basic anti-aliasing, but come on, and it looks great ghost runner continues. Valve's dominance here with the steam deck, putting up a clear win in directx 11 and creating a new standard for mobile gaming performance in directx 12.

xps managed to nearly outstrip the average frame rates of competing devices powered by intel, xc, graphics and amd's. Last gen vega architecture gpus, but it also isn't a completely one-sided fight here. Dead cells is the first of our. I don't want us to look at this beautiful on the surface.

It actually seems like the steam deck puts up an embankment who cares to run 320, though? Do you even want that erasing fight here coming in dead last, but we also observed that, even though we unlocked the frame rate, soc power consumption was quite low in this game. We've got a couple of theories about this, maybe around optimization or valve, doing something like that. If your frames are stable, if they're stable, so they don't go with under which which, with the frame rate, if you, if you have a measure of like 140 and there's that average 140, you would never see the difference background to save power rather than pushing 150 Fps but we're not sure at this time - and we have no reassuring explanation for this next one massive credit to valve, first and foremost forgetting forza horizon 5, a microsoft game running at all. But while the in-game benchmark reports industry-leading performance here, the gameplay experience does not hold up both jake and i experienced what i would describe kind of lagging physics true to the frame rate report.

But the experience of playing the game dude. I did not play a game and a half okay guys, you guys this is the worst of a flag. You can ever see in the game. All of that dude.

The experience of playing the game is uneven and jarring. It kind of reminds me of when a video call gets buffered and then the speaker's voice goes slow and it goes fast to catch up and then slowly, oh dude stop, but i'm actually using this aside. Two things are clear: one is that the hardware is damn impressive. I mean i'm sure that if we had a working windows, gpu driver in time for this preview, the steam deck would have peeled away from the competition in forza as well.

And the second is that valve software team and the open source community are just s tier. There's no other way to put it. The fact that any of this works at all is a modern technological miracle. There's a lot more to gaming than fps.

However, and honestly, this is where the steam deck both shines, uses and loses some of its luster. I mean it speaks volume about the efficiency of the apu that amd's custom soc division put together that, in spite of its mere 40 watt-hour battery, that's almost 20 lower than the competition. The steam deck puts up better battery longevity numbers than its competitors that eight plus hours under light loads is particularly interesting to me as a retro emulation enthusiast, i'm going to put a lot of hours on this thing, but it's not even playing all the time is Really good compared to the one x player mini and everything that i've seen from aya, including the limited edition next preview unit that they sent me the screen on the steam deck stands out, no joke this might sound kind of nerdy and weird, but i hope they Come up with a janky ass, a battery pack right and you could you could smash that ass on it dude and you got like eight hour battery pack dude as just plain like a chunker, shockingly vibrant, like the switch oled. Nor does its 1280 by 800 resolution.

Give it the sharpness of the 1x player mini, but it's a very complete package, deep enough blacks that you won't find the glow of black bars, distracting, indiscernible input, lag and motion blur and out of the box color performance that isn't going to win any awards. But didn't look off either until we'd run diagnostic tests in a controlled environment. The best thing about it to me, though, was the excellent, exemplary job that valve has done of making the display usable under any conditions. The anti-glare coating on the 512 gig version that doesn't take a deal good job of minimizing reflections, guys we all had a game boy advanced or sp, yes, and whatever bad lane.

Did you go like this? You go like that or you go like this. Oh dude, i'm actually triggered without having any noticeable in my experience effect on sharpness, but i should make it clear that i don't think i would personally spend the extra if i didn't need more storage. Since i find myself doing the vast majority of my gaming at night and regardless of screen finish, the steam deck is by far the most comfortable handheld that i own to look at in a dimly lit environment. It just gets so much dimmer than anything else, and details like that really illustrate the care and attention that valve has poured into this project.

Do not underestimate the difficulty of producing a screen that manages acceptable performance across not a wide range of brightness settings and believe it or not chat. You can change those manually if you're gon na be a like. You want your eyes to burn in the morning dude. What is wrong with you guys it's like your phone when it dims with the it's auto lighting or whatever, as it just better dude.

What's wrong with you guys, man screen pales in comparison to the speakers. I was able to use bluetooth or three and a half a light mode and light motions. Did it oh guys, i'm gon na go right after oh? This is fine, oh my god, but the speakers, the other devices that i'm reminded of when gaming on the steam deck are the original htc one and the latest generation m1 macbook like to be clear, they're still tiny speakers valve can't bend the laws of physics, but I was genuinely surprised that a pair of drivers, this small, could create a sound stage this wide as i've have cars ripping past me and forza horizon 5.. I mean, i guess, given the performance of both the near field, speakers and the microphone array on the index.

Vr headset, i shouldn't be that surprised so valve. Can you hurry up and make a gaming headset already? I promise you. It would immediately obsolete most of the other crap that exists and you would sell millions seriously. I promise, but i said it was just like they did it with uh with vr literally made.

Well, it's all good right. I want to talk about wave. Everybody came out by valve's own admission. Rumble was an afterthought on the steam deck compared to the space real power and cost downsides.

They felt that the benefit was too small and respectfully i disagree. Even if i hadn't already experienced the tight responsive linear motors in the ineo pro 2021, i would have immediately noticed the loose cheap toy feel of the touch pads, both when using them as a mousing surface and when they're providing pseudo haptic feedback. For the rest, i don't know what the vibration no nice way to put this at the moment. Haptics on this device are a poo stain on an otherwise crisp white sheet.

Your mom doesn't know valve, says they're gon na fix it with software, but we're gon na have to wait for the full review embargo to find out. If i need to stop mashing x for doubt over here. Sorry, here's my x button, though valve, hasn't given me much reason to doubt them. Yet they claimed at the hands-on that both the internal ssd and the microsd card would manage similar load times, and i didn't believe them, but so far it appears as though i was wrong.

I still do need to get more detail from them about whether this involves some kind of fancy trickery or if you can actually just copy paste the game folder off of your other desktop onto the steam deck, and i also need to find out what's going to Happen as game titles that are optimized for the blazing fast storage of the ps5 and the xbox series is start to arrive. But for the time being i can say this - you can expect to slot a terabyte of storage into your steam deck, with very little compromise. To the experience and what that means is that, if you're brave enough to tear down your deck and upgrade it with the latest from micron, you could rock as much as three terabytes of storage. In this thing, it's not as much as the one terabytes that i have in my io next right now, oh good one support for full save branded, who uses this dude full size 2280m.2 drives, but that kind of brings up an option.

They go way too hard. We needed to have at some point. I have spent a lot of this video talking about the steam deck compared to competing handheld gaming, pcs, but the truth is that there aren't any competing handheld gaming. Pcs i mean.

Obviously there are other handheld gaming, pcs. We showed them in the video it's just that they don't compete with the steam deck in the same way that a bmw, m5 doesn't compete with a tesla model 3. sure they both have four wheels and they get you from point a to point b and quickly. But those vehicles are built for very different customers and at very different price points.

That's the bottom line here, starting at 400 us dollars the steam deck, is less than half the price of anything else. In this video now look at the people that said millionaire take out of touch, look, look at look at these price gaps and these margins. It's not incomparable. Dude dude, it's a third, a third.

Is it a millionaire? You know, i think i can't take it. Let's get a job taken, let's get a job or that the width of the deck means that playing in unusual positions like lying on. My side in bed is a little uncomfortable because my top arm is up and the blood drains out of it. But i'm not going to complain about those things because it is half the price and even the top spec one has a pretty compelling value proposition with the anti-glare screen and the surprisingly nice included carrying case and guys.

This is, i think this is very disintended of him. I think it's dishonest that he didn't compare this to the soldier console everybody knows it's a leader in gaming in the gaming industry and it needs to be compared. It's the real case and he's not going to bring it of their game compatibility promises. The steam deck is protected, more titles available at launch than any other game console in history.

So it's time to order a steam deck. Ladies and gentlemen, that's first is what i would say if i was irresponsible, because the software is still make or break for this puppy and valve has some big questions to answer about funky stuff, like the game engine rubber banding, that we saw in forza horizon 5 Game compatibility across the steam library and things like their auto resuming gameplay. Let's say your steam deck wasn't online. The last time you were playing.

Are you going to overwrite a bunch of your progress when you switch to your desktop we're going to have a lot to talk about next time and just get to look at that? I mean he's, probably got some sort of cloud right. It's probably the same thing as like some some cloud or oh, but it wouldn't be the same instance of the game. I don't know if where and i have a lot to tell you about project, kill switch, that's right made a case for the steam deck. I have no idea how they got their hands on one to prototype this thing, but it looks like kind of like their grip case.

It's got this sort of ruggedized rubberized finish to it, looks like it's going to be extremely comfortable, and one of the features i'm really looking forward to is the kickstand in the back, because that is one thing valve did not include that. I think nintendo made pretty clear, is a good feature to have having a little kickstand. You can plug in your dongle, get a wireless controller plugged into this thing, and that is going to be a freaking awesome. Experience on the plane that valve just doesn't really have shows you out of the box, so guys you can.

I i actually hope it runs ggs. I play rp on the fly and i can get dongles, but we're gon na hit the vaulters check out the product. Page on this website, we're gon na have that link down below they're bad people that make it crackers jk jk love you d brand and lots of love to valve for sending this over for the preview i look forward to coming in. I didn't think i was watching that video anything about watch the whole thing and uh half the that he talks about.

I really don't give a about it, but when it's, when lions talks about it, i'm interested right like the colors yeah. Let's be honest, chat 98 of his zero base has no clue what the any of this means or or this nobody knows. But it's interesting, though man, what is it? It's just a bunch of numbers. It's like hieroglyphs, egypt,.