Valve Steam Deck: Powerful Handheld Gaming

A beefy but quirky portable gaming PC

- By Will Greenwald

Valve has an uneven hardware track record. The Index is an excellent VR headset with revolutionary controllers. Steam Machines and the Steam Controller completely fizzled in the face of conventional gaming PCs and gamepads. The Steam Link enabled surprisingly functional local game streaming, but it was eventually replaced by an app.

Now, there’s the Steam Deck gaming handheld. It’s built on the bones of the Steam Machine but with a much more focused, singular concept that doesn’t try to replace gaming PCs. It’s a Nintendo Switch alternative more than anything else, only bigger, more powerful, and without a dock (one should arrive in late spring). The Steam Deck runs on Linux, but the SteamOS front end is incredibly simple to use, and it lets you easily install and play many Windows games via Proton. The Linux backbone includes a full desktop environment, which leaves lots of room for tinkering and classic game emulation.

The Steam Deck is a lot of machine in a portable (albeit clunky) package. It has a reasonable starting price, at $399, but we recommend spending the extra $130 for the mid-tier model that features four times the amount onboard storage. (Note that all three Steam Deck models house the same CPU, GPU, and RAM power; only the display and storage type/capacity differ.) That said, despite promising first impressions, Valve’s handheld has a fair amount of quirks that need to be addressed, especially if you want to connect it to your TV or monitor.

A BIG PORTABLE