Steam Deck, Valve’s All-in-One Portable PC Gaming

Valve has just announced the Steam Deck, a handheld console for PC gaming that, confirming old rumors, has a similar look and feel to the Nintendo Switch — albeit without the detachable controls. The video game will be released in December and will be sold in different models, starting at $399.

The device has an AMD APU with an eight-core quad-core Zen 2 CPU and eight AMD RDNA 2 graphics computing units, along with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Model prices vary by store. The 64GB eMMC ones sell for $399, while the 256GB and 512GB NVMe SSDs are $529 and $649, respectively. It will be possible to expand the storage with a microSD card slot as well.

In terms of the console, the Steam Deck will bring many buttons and options. In the images below, we can see all its features, like two analogs, arrows, buttons, triggers, two trackpads, and quick access buttons to Steam menus, plus four additional rear buttons.

Steam Deck Tech Specs

As for the battery, Valve worked with analogies to explain the console’s capability. For those who only surf the internet, and play 2D games that don’t demand as much from the machine, the battery can last between 7 and 8 hours. But for those who choose to play something newer, like Portal 2 (example of the house) it is possible to run for 4 hours straight at most, or, if limited to 30fps, it can reach 5 or 6 hours.

It will be possible to connect the video game to TVs and it should come with USB-C ports with connectivity to HDMI, Ethernet, and USB, as well as native Bluetooth — this last feature, by the way, is not present in the Switch.

Steam Deck Reservation

Reservations for the three versions of the console begin on Friday afternoon, with a $5 fee to make this separation — which is not yet characterized as a pre-order. At first, this reservation will be exclusive to the Steam account that has already made purchases in the past, in an attempt to avoid reseller bots.

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