beneath this protective trout is the world's ultimate the greatest steam deck
or at least it will be by the time we're done we will have replaced the
inherently flawed analog sticks with hall effect sticks we will have added
tempered glass protection to the screen we will have upgraded both the cooling
and the battery allowing us to run faster longer and quieter and we will
have upgraded it to a staggering three
terabytes of storage that's without
violating valve's guidance on aftermarket SSD upgrades probably the
biggest change though is to the protection this video is
brought to you by dbrand who is showing off their kill switch steam deck
protector it's both a carrying case slash grip complete with kickstand and a
protective cover so you can huck your steam deck into your bag preferably one
from lttstore.com
and you're off to the races linode linode is a powerful affordable and easy
to use Linux based cloud computing service that has one click apps for
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what qualifies a steam deck as the ultimate steam deck well there's kind of
two routes that you can go down i want to come over here brandon one route is
the ultimate dock station so like here we have the
jsox i don't know if that's actually how you say it but they're dock so you're
able to come in you know set your steam deck down
keyboard mouse have Ethernet you could even plug it
into a whole display with HDMI port i
don't really like that because kind of the logical extreme of that is this is
the ultimate steam deck and it's just a gaming computer instead what we want to
do is work on everything that's inside of it and then makes it better as like a
portable gaming station the first thing we're going to do then is upgrade the
storage a really easy way to upgrade it
is a one terabyte sd card now one
terabyte's fine but we want to go even further which is why we have this right
here it's only 30 millimeters long but
inside of this is two terabytes of storage it's an engineering sample for
micron they're not totally sure that it's going to work in the steam deck
they send it over to us and we're just like hey guys can you test if this works
if it does we'll go and sell it to people we can even see like
a little connector here for debugging to make opening up our steam deck a
little bit easier we have this 3d print right here it's from ma strong bad mac
whatever they give you the 3d print you can pop it out pretty
simply there we go getting in the steam deck is pretty simple now there have
been modifications to put a 45
millimeter drive into the steam deck but that causes quite a few issues this
is the charging ic it kind of handles
all of your battery management and crap and even from the factory it gets over
90 degrees celsius so if you're putting you know an SSD over top of it you're
gonna have a really bad time now we did add a heatsink to it and i need to
upgrade that later but fortunately by putting our 30 millimeter one in here we
don't have to worry about you know valve getting super mad at us
once the SSD is installed it's very simple to get steam os back onto here so
you just go to this steam support page and download the recovery image use
rufus to check it on a usb like this one right here
and then very simply plug that in when you boot up you hold
volume down and power at the same time until you hear a chime
i think it chimed there we go and you end up in the boot
manager okay it's just working um i lied earlier i tested this yesterday the SSD
is fine storage yep 1.6 free of 1.8 terabytes we also
going to be able to add this one terabyte right here and then boom three
terabytes of storage that's freaking sweet now this is not
the most storage that's ever been on a steam deck bret from ufd tech was able
to do 20 terabytes it was ridiculous the stuff that he did we could try and do
that but uh it looked like just one of the most painful things ever and a bunch
of Linux if you want to see that watch his video i'm not doing it the next
thing on our list is the upgraded joystick so these are electromagnetic
joysticks from ghoulie kit freaking sweet because they replace our
potentiometer based joysticks in here which are
you know they can cause joystick drifting and stuff like that
look at these brandon
okay let's get the old guys out now why would you want to replace this
joystick as you move it around a wiper is on a resistive layer
and that's what gives you the output i've got one right here
this right here is the resistive layer and as you turn it the amount of
resistance changes these joysticks from ghoulie kit work a little bit different
they have a magnet and as the magnet moves the electromagnetic field changes
and then that gives you your output normally the amount of error in a
joystick with a potentiometer is like five to ten percent so you just need a
dead zone that's five to ten percent on this right here it can be less than one
percent one thing you might have noticed is that uh this is not the most satisfying of
joystick toppers ever so we need to take it off of here now
the problem is that this right here senses when you're touching it and we
need to get rid of a little lead and solder it back on
well that was easy just chuck her in like that
the factory joysticks would have had a calibration in them so that you know
from the factory you don't have joystick drift in order to change that we need to
first turn it on with the back off
and then press this tiny little button that's right there once we do that it
should all be fine we'll verify that later though
okay yeah the joysticks are absolutely dead on i even have the dead zone cause
like why not next thing we need to do is add
an external fan now if you haven't watched it already you should definitely
watch the video where me and Linus made this steam deck cooler but the problem
is is that we thought that it would just cool everything passively but after
about half an hour of gameplay or so it ends up just getting to the same
temperature and this thing is scalding hot what we did find out is that it
works incredibly well if you just add a fan who would have thought problem is is
that i need somewhere to attach this fan
i don't know where though and it's going to involve cutting a hole
in our steam deck ask you how you are you just after an
in-depth pondering with the creator warehouse actual electrical engineers we
decided that the best course of action is to just say
and not make it removable when this is on here if the heatsink's on there you
can very easily put the back on take the back off if you want to remove the fan
and the heat sink you have to remove both fans and heat sinks this way we can
just do it in a couple minutes and it's going to be functionally just the same
bye oh this is going to be terrible look at
how small those wires are like that's my fingernail compared to it
well it's the point no return right here
there it is unsurprisingly we don't have wire strippers that are this small i
don't really trust myself to just like take a flush cutter and get that off so
uh that's what we're gonna do yeah i was really dumb cutting this
nine out of ten electrical engineers recommend you do your very small
soldering exactly like this the only unfortunate thing is that Linus
is going to open up the back of this and immediately make fun of us
oh no i've never been made fun of on the internet for my soldering skills thank
you commenters for saying how great my soldering job was
we did it let's wait for this one to turn off
maybe it's not turning off oh we're running down oh we're running doom that
would do it oh and our ground wire
of course all right got the fan working total pain
in the butt really wish we had a data sheet for this but uh for everyone
that's going to be modifying the fans of this and probably mostly for future alex
it goes ground pwm
sense and then 5 volt it turns out that if you connect a pwm signal for your
other fan to a sense wire it makes them kind of invert each other so when the
one spins up the other one spins down as you can see they are both running and
when this one turns off they both should turn off
there we go perfect works great the final thing we need to do in here is fix
this tiny little battery management chip
it gets super hot and so the last time
we put this very tiny heat sink on it problem is is that the thermal adhesive
that we used on it was not very great so it came loose and
made a bunch of sparks when it moved around we're going to use some proper
thermal epoxy to attach it this time i'm also going to conformal coat everything
around it just to be sure
to attach it we're just using thermal conductive adhesive from mg chemicals
it's a two-part mix and it kind of smells like fish sauce
yeah definitely don't eat it
perfect now we can leave that to dry overnight and it should not come off
again all right so the next day this heat sink is absolutely not coming off
and i believe we are good with the internals of the steam deck to protect
our steam deck we're going to be using the d brand kill switch
there's only one problem uh we added a heatsink i just had a
brilliant idea though for how we can cut a nice hole in the back watch this
brandon perfect now we know just where to cut
i'm so happy with myself that i figured that one
out have a bunch of ducks show up outside
i was very concerned that the whole thing would just turn into a real floppy
mess once we removed all that plastic because you know this back bit here is
the hard plastic that kind of holds it all together seems like it's fine though
i need to take off just a tiny bit more but this is going to work great
okay our case is on next thing we want to do is protect our
joysticks and to tell you about that here's past alex to get our joystick
protectors what we want to do is create a mold inside of these 3d printed pieces
now it's pretty simple we take 10 of this
one of this combine them together in here and then stick it into our vacuum
chamber that takes out all the bubbles that we've created when we mix them
together and makes it so you don't have you know well bubbles in your finished
part then you just simply inject it into the
mold piece here until it squirts out of all of the other holes that means that
you don't have any like voids in your mold and then you wait 24 hours see when
they're done why thank you past alex now it's been
it's actually been two days so these should be nice and set
okay look at that even our LTT got in there also you can
see all the lines from the 3d print
okay diy injection molding that worked great does it fit here
just head crabbing my controller yeah
that should prevent it from getting too smashed around in your bag i can dig it
now we need to protect up around this area from scratches and
so on same as this one right here if you guys are paying for this video i even
went ahead and watched the install instructions dbrand be proud of me
to continue protecting this thing we're going to add some tempered glass after
wiping with the cloth we wipe with some liquor
and interestingly i thought these were just stickers and like they are
but their intended use case is actually to take it and if you have
like lint or anything on your screen you can just
hear that comes right off all right removing the
backing have to be real careful not to touch this
oh that's pretty cool looking actually
okay that looks really good really this is the cable we're using we
haven't even told the people what we're doing yet we want to upgrade the battery
but you obviously can't do that inside so you know this
okay it's a bit of a hack hey speaking of hacks really
that's the mounting mechanism for the fan still do you have a better idea
yes i do have a better idea we could drill through the heat sink this way
put a bolt and then a nut on the end and it could be held in with like hardware
there's a heat pipe there though you need to have the fan up like a quarter
inch oh so there is oh it just doesn't feel very ultimate
turn it on it has actual pwm it's controlled by the
steam deck yeah that Linus is going to open up the back of this and immediately
make fun of us did you just pigtail it off the stock concept wow
good soldering it was very difficult
oh this is amazing so it's built into it now yeah this is going to be my steam
deck now right sure if you want you see these things yeah the kickstand
thing yeah these right here because their prototypes are just hand assembled
which means this pin comes out super easily do you know it
fits pretty well in this spot a battery
oh that's cool yeah so our battery can be magnetic yeah yeah and this thing
right here is what 36 watt hours that almost doubles your battery life
if that isn't enough you know what you can always do oh my
god are we talking about this again yes it's so good look at this
it's just over nine pounds you can stash it in your backpack
because it's a well-made backpack you know it's not too heavy when you have it
on like this over 10 hours of battery life this is the best i love it but it's
stupid what's your plan for attaching this to
that belt sander off these and double sided tape it on
and this will never come off i do have
to wonder about our total weight now that we've added all of this extra
cooling and battery
i mean given the magnet was designed to hold on a little piece of plastic not a battery
bang i guess that makes sense does this just feel deluxe or what
like oh man it's like gold controller vibes
i definitely
it is a prototype made a second error
it'll be fine it just needs to i just need to put it in the right way
wow that was really not designed to come apart cool hey there we go
nice oh man that looks so clean
i love it all right what you said before though i really want to see what the
weight difference is oh yeah that's so
this is a normal one 677.
whoa 1.1 kilos so we added about what like
half a kilogram yeah over 400 grams
how much is it without this only 874. another point
no that is not an argument in favor of the backpack battery
i mean yeah but you're wearing a backpack all the time you have a
heatsink at the back of your steam deck and this is what you're concerned about
oh oh sick oh sick
who needs a kickstand anymore hey dbrand
hey if you guys are watching this which i know you are you should do a battery
kickstand this is the deluxist steam deck that does exist we
are hitting over two gigahertz on nearly
on every CPU core right now
while gaming with our CPU at 46 usage
this is butter smooth i'm running do maternal at medium at native resolution
and we're getting 60 FPS freaking
locked oh my gosh it's gonna get a little
hotter we know this already but our CPU and GPU are both 50 to 55 degrees right
now that is like nothing
oh yeah if this fan is not turning that fan's not turning
wait have we been gaming all this time
completely fanlessly yeah
wow have you noticed any difference in the joysticks at all
um no
yeah i have to the dead zone and you can probably make it even smaller
wow the dead zone is something that's configurable on the steam deck right
yeah so you can make it probably even smaller than it is right now and the
reason these hall effect joysticks allow you to shrink the dead zone is because
they're so precise so you don't have to have that slop in the middle to account for them
wearing out what are the temps at though still 59
degrees yeah and our external fan hasn't even kicked in yet damn
this is wild like our sponsor dbrand oh those guys
yep they drove a big truck full of money into our office to push their latest
plastic thing project kill switch on pretty much every steam deck video we
have what's project kill switch you might ask what are you some kind of
dbrand shell all right it's kind of cool though it's like they're grip cases for
phones and other devices but it's for your steam deck it's got a rugged
rubberized finish plus a kickstand for when you're out on the go and you want
to pull out your controller and game they've also got their tempered glass
screen protectors for the steam deck which we tested out for them as it turns
out regular tempered glass screen protectors inhibit touch sensitivity
while dbrand screen protectors are super precise and guaranteed to work on your
display so you can think of them kind of like the super thin condom except they
probably won't break you can reserve your project kill switch
now at dbrand.com killswitch or at the link down below
it is a pre-order but to my knowledge they're the only game in town so what
are you gonna do take your business elsewhere also dbrand
give the people the scorpion if you guys enjoyed this check out the full video on
adding extra cooling to the steam deck the results although not as impressive
as we got today yeah obviously were absolutely mind-blowing well the fan
turned on oh there it goes
shut down thank you