Steam Deck

We revisit and trick out the Valve Steam Deck a year on from release.

The year 2022 will go down as the year of the Linux Deck-top. A typo in Linux Format, you cheer, but for once, ’tis deliberate. Valve released its Linuxpowered Steam Deck, driven by an abundance of cutting-edge open source technology that at least in part was backed and developed by Valve itself.

Back at the start of 2022, we covered the prerelease build-up and launch of the Steam Deck – see our preview and review in LXF287 and LXF288, and our getting started guide in LXF289. While some reviewers had misgivings about a Linux-powered handheld gaming device, the world didn’t. A year on, the Steam Deck is a smash hit. Valve can’t make them fast enough and it’s the biggest grossing product on Steam – with new games costing £60, that’s a bigger deal than you might at first think.

So, here we are, a year on, a few Hardware of the Year awards under the Steam Deck’s belt, along with plenty of software updates – see news (page 6) for how Valve is funding connected open source projects – and we’re taking time to look at the Steam Deck once again to see what the latest developments are, what you can do with it and how its performance can be tweaked. One of the important improvements over its launch is that you can actually buy the Steam Deck now. Originally, Valve was having issues fulfilling pre-orders – due to the post-pandemic chip shortage – but it seems orders are now being sent out within two weeks.

The Steam Deck has become renowned as an awesome retro gaming platform.

Image credit: Samsung

If you’re considering buying a Steam Deck, bear in mind that storage is really easily expanded with its SD slot. This makes the less-attractive 64GB base model very appealing, as you can trick it out with a reasonably fast 256GB microSD card for as little as £18 or 128GB for just £11, and this can be bigname cards such as Samsung. The sudden drop (at the start of 2023) is due to the introduction of 1TB microSD cards pushing down prices of what you might have previously considered large capacity models. The Steam Deck currently has a 2TB maximum microSD card capacity, but that shouldn’t be an issue right now. Running from an SD card is slower than internal options, but our testing of the NMVe model put loading Valve’s Help Desk after a cold reboot at 19 seconds from SD card and 12 seconds from the NMVe.