- Hey everybody, this is Sam Machkovech, Tech Culture editor at Ars Technica and today, I am here to review the highly-anticipated Steam Deck, a portable PC that looks a whole lot like a Nintendo Switch. It's creators at Valve insist that it is the most gaming power you have ever held. Does it live up to that kind of hype? And is it worth the price? Let's go [videogame music] Behold Steam Deck. Is Steam Deck really a viable alternative to Nintendo Switch? That's the crux of this review, and the answer is kind of yes, kind of no. Nintendo Switch is designed to be a battery-efficient gaming-first machine, and that means when you get a game for Switch, it'll generally just work. Although, sometimes it'll be a little weak. Conversely, Steam Deck has more power and offers you more options to access that power. So that means certain games can run faster, more beautifully or offer more options, but the catch with so much openness is sometimes all that access runs you into certain walls and makes things really awkward. What are Nintendo Switche's problems that Steam Deck attempts to solve. In a word, openness. Nintendo doesn't want you tinkering around on the insides and doing things that it doesn't intend. It would much rather you hang out with Mario and Zelda with its own rules and limitations, but Steam Deck, essentially, says, do you wanna run games faster? Do you wanna wear out the battery faster? Do you wanna load a desktop environment that lets you do things like play your favorite videos or music? Or load your favorite things on a web browser? or even load applications in Linux like image manipulation? You can't really do that stuff on a stock Nintendo Switch, but Valve is very happy to say, "this is a PC." Use it how you want. What video games show off the strengths of Steam Deck? The best stuff is the kind of 3D worlds that even Nintendo Switch can't handle. Interestingly, Nintendo Switch offers these cloud-streamed versions of very good 3D games. Control by the company Remedy is a particular example. So you can buy it on Switch, but it's actually streaming from a server in the cloud but on Steam Deck, you just install it locally, and it works. You may have heard of a certain massive adventure game called Skyrim. It's probably been released 27 times since it launched about a decade ago and now, you can play it for your or 28th time on a portable system in ways that absolutely exceed what it does on Nintendo Switch 'cause there's a version on there. What games on steam deck show its weaknesses? [gasps] This is the thing that we're gonna be talking about for months to come. Steam Deck is not ready for every single one of the thousands and thousands of games that work Steam. So what you might expect to just work on a Windows PC with Steam installed doesn't necessarily work on Steam Deck. In the case of some of my favorite games, which range from a twins-stick shooter called Next Machina to the massive one-more-turn strategy of Civilization VI, the games currently don't load. Now, this may change by the time Steam Deck reaches your hands. I received pre-release hardware, meaning the actual thing in my hands was done, but the operating system was not. How does Steam Deck work as a PC? In short, it's Linux. The longer answer is it's Linux with some limitations. So if I want to take a mouse and a keyboard and boot into a desktop, there's a little function inside of Steam's power menu that lets me do just that, and then it's got a whole GUI that looks kind of like Windows called KDE. It lets me load a web browser or a notepad or other basic software that's already built in. From there, I can go and install specific packages that work within Steam OS's kind of sandbox, meaning you can't just freely use command line and install anything you want, but if you really just wanna take Steam Deck and no other device on a trip, you can prop it up, use an external hub, attach a mouse and a keyboard or even use Bluetooth to attach mouse and keyboard. What hardware specs to it out when we're talking about Steam Deck and why? When you look at the hard stats of this device, just that tail of the tape may imply that this thing is an absolute beast. This custom AMD and Valve chip hits four cores and eight threads at pretty high speeds, has a 1.6 gigahertz video processor, 16 gigs of combined RAM, a bunch of other good stuff, but we're only talking about a 15-watt power maximum because it's designed to work whether it's plugged in or not You take a gaming laptop and you unplug it from the wall. Its power is gonna dip. It doesn't work as well on a plane, but Steam Deck is designed for you to get off of the grid and play just with battery power, but that's a 40-watt-hour battery, and that means we're looking at a pretty low battery life when it's running at max. In terms of its screen, that seven-inch display is pretty great just to be able to see a lot of what's going on in your hands. The only other comparable screen out there is the new Nintendo Switch OLED variant. When you put those two together, that's when you see a bit of an issue with the Steam Deck screen, which is that it's running on older LCD technology, and that means you're not gonna get as deep of blacks and bright of bright colors as you are on the newest Nintendo Switch variant, What are Steam Deck's gaming party tricks? On a base level, when you hold Steam Deck, you have an Xbox or PlayStation controller in your hands or even a Switch. You have an D-pad, a couple of joysticks, A, B, X, Y as action buttons and what are known as triggers and bumpers, and then you also have some pretty cool party tricks that I've not seen on systems like this. One of these is gyro control, meaning when I wave this thing around in the air, I can tell a game, move my camera in kind. If you need more buttons, you get four more buttons. They're on the back of the system. They're called grip buttons, the idea being if you would prefer to have your thumb free to touch a joystick, and your extra fingers go down and tap extra button commands, you can do that, and you can customize how they work in every single game. The other party trick that I really like is that there's two touchpads built in. They're right beneath each joystick, and the idea is, well, you want to use Steam Deck for PC games, specifically ones that work with a mouse. So if you don't want to just tap with your finger on the touchscreen, you can put your thumb on this little pad, and it has a rumble to it, and it feels like a trackball. What is audio like on Steam Deck? In terms of sounds coming from your favorite video games, there may not be a better pair of speakers on a portable gaming platform, and they're using 3D-projection technology. I tested this by grabbing a 5.1 audio mix and running it in the desktop environment, and it worked. Things sounded like they were coming from behind me or in front of me, just by testing that way. The catch is there's not a lot of base on this thing. So if you really want some good oomph, and in some videogames, lots of explosions and gun blasts can be about that oomph, you're not gonna get them from these speakers. One of the best parts about Steam Deck is that it is very good at resuming from frozen states, meaning I can just hit Suspend, put it back in my bag go out and do things for a couple of hours, pick Steam Deck back up, and it's right back to where I left the game. What triple-A games can't we play on Steam Deck? Currently, quite a few. In particular, trying to run other companies' storefronts requires figuring out how to fit them in through the armor in the Steam-OS version of Arch Linux. Is battery life an issue on Steam Deck? Yes, battery life right now is a real pain point on Steam Deck because sometimes, you can expect a fully-blown 3D game to burn through the battery in less than two hours, and that can even happen if you just tap Pause or a menu button in the hopes that you've left a screen on but maybe, it's not running as hard in the background while you quickly get up to answer a phone call or deal with an errand. So you can at least put the system into full sleep, and that will truly freeze the system in a very low power drain, but it can really crank through battery. Does Steam Deck run quietly? No! Steam Deck is nowhere near the decibel level of an Nintendo Switch. Let's be clear. It's fans will turn on, and it'll make a little noise, but Steam Deck gets above 30 decibels, in terms of very loud fans blowing out a lot of heat as it reaches that 15-watt maximum of power. It's not the biggest a deal if you're in a noisy environment or if you've got headphones on or anything of a sort, but if you wanna play this in bed with a loving partner next to you, let them know that they're about to hear a noise machine that might lull them to sleep. How can Steam Deck be better? Honestly, waiting. Waiting to buy this thing until the operating system and game compatibility is ironed out. What can we expect as far as updates? Valve, to their credit, is a data-driven company. They look at who's playing which games, how many people are playing them and how many people are returning to play them. So it's in their best interest to have that first wave of Steam Deck buyers feel like their favorite games are working butter smooth and then edge cases getting built up over time. What is the right model of Steam Deck for you? There are three versions you can buy, which range from $399 to $649. They are mostly identical, same processor, same RAM, same buttons. The biggest difference is the onboard storage. The base $399 version comes with only 64 gigs of storage. The most expensive $649 model comes with 512 gigs of storage. Would I recommend Steam Deck to you, the interested PC gamer on the go? Kind of. You've heard me talk a lot about the things that do and do not work, and I'm the kind of player who will jump through hoops, go through settings menus and tweak a game to my perfect liking, and I like that Steam lets me do that, but this is really difficult to recommend to someone who is unfamiliar with the Steam video-gaming landscape. Is Steam Deck worth the money? At this price point, yeah. I'm not sure that a $400 base unit with this many limitations can be beat by anybody else. I'm not seeing anybody else come out with this much software flexibility at a $400 price point, but that price adds up once you say, "well, I want Windows on it, and I want more memory, and I want other ways to guarantee that this is just gonna work." [videogame music] All right, well, I've been Sam Machkovech, Tech Culture editor at Ars Technica, and I wanna thank you for hanging out for a review of a really interesting device, but whatever I've missed is probably over at arstechnica.com where my feature-length review really dives in further on specs, tests and a bunch of other stuff. So thanks a are hanging out. [videogame music]