Valve’s anticipated Steam Deck portable PC won’t arrive in players’ hands for a couple of months yet, but you can get a first peek at the system’s internal hardware via a new official teardown video. Interestingly, Valve spends a lot of the teardown video warning future owners not to do this, as the Steam Deck has really been designed as a closed console rather than a fully customizable PC.
A lot of the Deck’s parts have been specifically designed or tested for the system, and doing something like swapping in an off-the-shelf SSD could really mess up the fine balance Valve has achieved with the system. Thankfully, Valve does hint that certain proprietary parts, like the Deck’s thumb sticks, will be swappable eventually with third-party companies providing replacement parts. That’s certainly welcome news considering the ever-present concern of analog stick drift. You can check out the Steam Deck teardown for yourself, below.
Haven’t been keeping up with the Steam Deck? You can check out some early benchmarks here. The system sells in $399, $529, and $649 configurations, with the only difference being the amount of on-board storage. Here are the system’s basic specs:
The Steam Deck offers an AMD Van Gogh APU with 4 cores and 8 threads. The CPU will operate at a base clock speed of 2.4 GHz and will turbo up to 3.5 GHz. As for the GPU, you are getting the AMD RDNA 2 architecture with 8 Compute Units for a total of 512 stream processors which will clock up to 1600 MHz. The CPU will offer 448 GFlops while the GPU will offer 1.6 TFLOPs of FP32 horsepower for a total of over 2 TFLOPs performance, making it faster than the original Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles.
The Steam Deck begins shipping sometime in December. Don’t expect to grab one for Christmas now though, as the system is back-ordered well into 2022.
