Everything you ever wanted to know about Valve’s Steam Deck
Valve’s Steam Deck is finally here. If you’re still on the fence or wondering what all the fuss is about, we’ve corralled just about everything you could possibly want to know about the hottest PC game machine of 2022.
WHAT IS THE STEAM DECK?
The Steam Deck is Valve’s foray into the world of portable gaming, a machine broadly modeled after Nintendo’s excellent Switch console design, but running on conventional PC hardware. That means it runs a full desktop operating system and in theory can play more games than any portable game machine ever built.
This is far from the first portable game machine with full PC parts. But with Valve baking the incredibly popular Steam platform right into the hardware, and introducing it at an unprecedented low price, its introduction might just be the biggest shift in the PC gaming market in years.
HOW POWERFUL IS THE STEAM DECK?
The Steam Deck uses a custom-designed APU, a combination CPU-GPU architecture built by AMD. The CPU is the equivalent of a Zen 2 laptop processor with a 4/8 core setup of primary and secondary cores maxing out at 3.5GHz. The GPU is an integrated , some of the same architecture used in the latest consoles like the PS5 and , but here implemented for operating on the low power requirements of a portable machine.
