when valve invited me down to their headquarters for a preview of the steam
deck they not only refused to allow me to open it but they wouldn't tell me
anything about the internal configuration other than what i was able
to ascertain for myself using a thermal camera well that all changes today valve
published a do as we say not as we do
tear down of the steam deck and i haven't intentionally avoided looking at
it all day and i'm going to be watching it together with my co-host Anthony to
see what we're going to learn and what still
remains to be seen and the whole thing is sponsored by ifixit is your battery
not lasting as long as it used to looking for a new project i fix it's got
you covered stay tuned to the end of this video to learn more about their
battery replacement kits
okay we ready let's do it hi
this is a video about opening up a steam deck to replace one or more of the
components inside it i love the glove specifically we're going to cover the thumb sticks and very interesting the
thumbnail says don't do this and the video opens with
here's how to do this well they gotta cover their butts right they do but i
gotta say i absolutely respect that valve is directly addressing what gamers
have been asking about it because we all know the biggest issues with handheld
consoles which excuse me with handheld consoles that
are to be unnamed is joystick drift and for me personally if i'm investing this
kind of money into a handheld device knowing that it can be quickly and
easily repaired is a big deal the SSD well we'll see how quick and we'll see
how easy it is this is a how-to video but in another way it's a why you really
shouldn't do this that's because even though it's your pc
or will be once you've received your steam deck and you have every right to open it up
and do what you want wow you have every right to open up and do it wow i've only
ever heard that from fairphone what a strong
also framework but what a strong
statement maybe system 76 what a strong statement for a device manufacturer to
make when you buy it it belongs to you how is that controversial
and yet here we are blown away by it it's 20 21. valve really don't recommend
that you ever open it up the steam deck is a very tightly designed system and
the parts are okay i take issue with that don't recommend that you ever open
it up because that's going to suck in some dust you're going to want to clean that out maybe some compressed air will
do it but you'll probably want to clean out the whole thing inside and the thing
is most people are not going to be opening this thing for fun they're going to be opening it because there is an
actual need to do it whether it's to replace a thermal compound or whether
it's to clean it or whether it's to replace a defective component that's why
people are going to open it i mean i could see myself opening it as SSD
capacities get dramatically larger and you can get these tiny little what is it
a 30 millimeter unit they've got in there 40. i think it's 20
i guess we'll see i'm not entirely sure i saw it briefly there yeah we'll we'll
see they're not widely available in the consumer market right now but they may
be coming but the highest cap SSD that you can get your steam deck with today
is one terabyte and we know we're going to get bigger ssds in this form factor
in the future you might wait do they have a one terabyte model i thought it was 64 256 and 512.
m.2 2230 SSD it is 512. wait technically shows steam
deck 64 Gigabyte to be upgradeable to one terabyte of storage for less than
the official 512 Gigabyte version however and then it goes on to say other
things here we go but there is a one terabyte m.2 2230. kiosks makes one but
i think it's oem only apparently there is a dell that you can get for 200
canadian revenues on dell.com i mean the performance of
this thing who knows it's probably the qlc with no dram cash so like yeah it's
more than enough for the steam deck given that it can apparently run on emmc
and memory card like microsd cards yeah and they told me when i was down there
that they couldn't tell me which of the games on my unit were installed on the
internal SSD versus the microsd card but they that i probably wouldn't be able to
tell and i couldn't they've definitely done some optimization there
so they aren't really designed to be user swappable
opening up and replacing parts might mess things up like profoundly yeah for
example if you damage the battery the whole thing could catch fire later which
would be bad yes but there's entire hobbyist
industries that use these batteries i mean not just
exposed but in moving mechanical devices
that literally fly through the air i mean these are these are the same kinds
of cells that you would strap to a drone
ripping around at 100 kilometers an hour so yes it's risky and you do need to be
careful with them but also if consumers can handle that i think they can
probably manage to not puncture this thing opening up their steam deck so be
forewarned and leave this kind of thing to professionals unless you really feel
like taking big risks with your property and with your life which could end if
what okay i mean a fire could kill you if it
caught fire in your pants yeah if it caught fire anywhere while you're
sleeping you could die oh yeah i mean this is this is fair and this is the
kind of device that would be very likely to be stored in your backpack yeah you
know in some kind of combustible material yeah like imagine you're on the
highway on your motorcycle with that in your backpack and it blows up so you
know what i'm a back valve on this don't screw around with it if you don't know
what you're doing but also this is not like opening up a pc power supply where
literally a slip of the hand is the difference between you're alive and
you're dead if you do this wrong just saying
also the warranty doesn't cover any damage that you do fair enough however
they didn't say that the warranty doesn't cover the device if you don't
damage it act of opening it up voids the warranty
yeah so if the act of opening it up doesn't void the warranty that's very
good on valve but we'll find out there was a however here before i paused it
having said all that we also wanted to make this video to simply show you
what's inside the steam deck taking things apart and putting them
back together is cool especially powerful handheld gaming computers that
last part is a really mixed message yeah they spent a minute telling us not to do
this and then they were like but it's cool i think i get it i think they're
trying to be like edgy but it really does actually undermine some of the
legitimate safety warnings that they gave us a little bit yeah please note
the screws that secure the housing are what's called self-tapping screws and
they're embedded in plastic bosses they can be removed and reinstalled but it's
much easier to strip or over torque screws of this type compared to standard
ones so be aware that they're very sensitive and either the screws or the
housing can be damaged that's a really good point and i did notice that they
used two different lengths of screws here so you're going to want to keep
careful track of which ones went where you don't want one poking through the
front of your steam deck when you put it back together and i mean for that matter though
couldn't they have used like uh metal sunk into plastic to prevent this
kind of self-tapping issue they could have it would have increased
cost they probably would have had to press fit some kind of threaded inset
yeah and that not only adds the cost of
the metal pieces which is fairly negligible but it adds the labor
of putting those in that compared to just putting a
self-tapper into a molded piece of plastic very different ball game and given how
aggressive they've gotten on the price i don't even begrudge them something
like that it really isn't intended to be taken apart i say fair play valve yeah
okay that makes sense to me as we've gotten more into manufacturing products
for ourselves i've gained a lot more understanding and respect for the
difficulty that manufacturers go through to make things actually
make any sense at all from a cost perspective
it does help prevent damage a torque wrench okay now hold on a second you
don't need a torque wrench to avoid stripping a self-tapper in plastic you
just need to your fingers are the only torque wrench you really need you go until two fingers
can't get it in anymore and that's it at that point it's not just gonna fall
apart it's in there enough and you're not gonna overdo it um these screws seem
to be sunken into the plastic though so you'll probably need something maybe
three fingers then if you can't tell then
don't take it apart opening the case immediately weaknesses
notice how many times the host has straightened those screwdrivers above
the steam deck yeah and they're still cracking is that a joke
are they meaning and makes the product less drop resistant there's no way to avoid this
so just know that the structural integrity of your deck will be lessened
somewhat by doing any of this interesting static electricity can
easily break your steam deck permanently actually it's harder than you'd think
yeah it's it's okay so it probably won't break it permanently in a fundamental
way but it might cause things like oh well
now voltage regulation isn't quite what it used to be and you're not going to turbo as high and you might lose
performance kind of thing or just might not do anything like we saw in our video
with electroboom okay
here it is that's it backs off this is it he did show taking
the back off that's um that's not very um satisfying yeah i was expecting a
reveal shot i guess what that tells us is there's no ribbon cables attached to
the backing or anything like that probably if the if their goal is to show
that they're taking this apart and you can take it apart the other thing is too
one of the joysticks is missing oh wait yeah so this is pretty far in they
pulled the oh no you can see the daughter board for it in the top of the frame yeah i think that's it
it's packed tight it is cooler there's all kinds of boards
cooler right dead center yep i see what appears to be
actually no i'm a little confused through the right hand what are we
looking at there it kind of looks like a grill or something but it can't be because that's the front of the unit oh
is it speaker chrome that might be a speaker
yeah cause i think we're seeing the table below it so where's the speaker
then is it just below his hand or hold on move it a little bit spark jumps from
you to one of the integrated circuits on the board it'll probably fry some of the
parts forever i mean yes but also if you're unfamiliar wait what
with preventing malaria static discharge you should probably stop doing this and
turn it over to a pro yes yeah that is right yeah but why
didn't they just shoot a quick pick up man why like this the production values
on this video i'm sending an email to my valve rep because
this is the kind of thing that would have been completely preventable
if they had just worked with us on this maybe they wanted it to look really
amateurish so like anybody can get into it and anybody can do it valve is known
for doing things for a reason first remove these four screws
wait we just did that we just did that they're literally out
so start keeping your screws organized to help you okay it comes time to
reassemble everything okay this is good advice after the screws are out you just
need to pry the case there we go yeah yeah try not to break what is that do
they have a special jig for assembling these things is that what i was looking
at oh oh that's cool that is so cool so it
doesn't put any pressure on the screen you don't scratch the screen it doesn't
put any pressure on the joysticks yeah it keeps it nice and flat flush with the
table i like it yeah your fingernail that hurts
okay there here it is our first unobstructed
look so that was a battery a bit of writing on the battery that we were
seeing got it look at all the ribbon cables and daughter boards
so many pcbs this is some pcb next level
pcb tetris right here i'm surprised because given how big it is compared to
the a neo which didn't need this many daughter
boards if i recall correctly i would have thought it would have a bit
more of a kind of contiguous internal layout but then valve also did
squeeze in more i o or okay i shouldn't say more i o the
aneo has like dual USB-C ports but but more buttons which take up a huge amount
of internal space the other thing is that could be good for repairability
because then you could just get a module to replace out if like one of the
buttons was decided like there was a broken trace or something that's true
which may not be a thing that'll happen often but if you drop this thing a lot of
things can go wrong it looks like a combination some kind of
heat shield slash emi shield that's over top of the CPU or i guess i should call
it an apu that's going to help keep skin
temperature down on the back of the device you actually have to do that for
regulatory reasons i wonder if that's also providing an air path for that fan
because the uh the intake and the exhaust are up there
on that on that entire plane i think note that this video shows
pre-production hardware and there will be some differences between what you see
here and the steam deck that you own
this is the battery points to the stairs
this is the battery okay before proceeding it's important to disconnect
it do that by unplugging these wires here disconnect it with okay the first
component we're going to replace is the thumb stick this part is easy to remove oh wow this
that was very jarring yeah he didn't actually show well we see it here
there's three screws maybe we're gonna go back in time be aware that the whole
assembly is custom the stick the board and the cap
replacing these will require matching the custom parts exactly stay tuned in
the coming months for a source for replacement parts thumbsticks ssds and
possibly more what
wow
we're in sync here but i mean i think that reflects how
strongly we agree that this is a good guy move
that shouldn't be a good guy move but it is
valve should not stand out in the industry for providing easy access to
resources and replacement components and
yet here they are a multi-billion dollar corporation that
doesn't have to give to us about what you think because you'll
buy it anyway and they're doing it well the other thing is too like these parts
if they manufacture more of them so they have spares and they can sell those
spares that's going to drive down the cost due to economy of scale
it'll be a little bit more in terms of logistics yes but it's
it should probably just work out and you get good guy points because nobody else
is doing this for some reason okay
lift this left there the clothes are back on unplugged
they did it they went back in time again these are much better instructions for
how to remove this ribbon cable than what they provided for removing the
battery connector which by the way is connected again well here
remove these three screws and then take the stick assembly out to
be clear i don't want to hate on the host here no it's just an amateur video
that's all well okay be nice no i'm sorry i'm i'm that's what i mean
that's no that's not what i mean what i mean is that it's it's intentionally
designed like from the perspective of somebody who's just like hey i'm going to show
you how to take this apart now here's how it goes
not like welcome to the valve steam deck disassembly
more like light light-hearted like casual tone
yeah yeah okay i thought you were calling them amateurs no
amateur means for the love of okay all right all right that's it
now just reverse all that to put another one back in
let's move on to the SSD we don't recommend replacing the
included drive yeah what we do recommend for increasing your storage capacity is
the handy microsd card slot so much easier and plenty fast that's fair and
there's already like cad files floating around in various
subreddits of people designing like external usbc storage packs that would
like clip on the back and plug into the usbc port there's gonna be lots of
options to expand your storage if it was me man
i'd upgrade the internal SSD but i'm also just
a big nerd and i can afford to break my steam deck that's the question you have
to ask yourself i'm not sure if they mentioned in this video but i heard
somebody saying that there's actually like an emi reason for why
you shouldn't replace that SSD um just vaguely when i saw it going
through on my twitter feed okay so let's have a look maybe it has a custom shield
on it or something please note before attempting
an SSD replacement an off-the-shelf SSD could cause problems okay one power
consumption yep an off-the-shelf SSD can draw more power than the original drive
which could cause overheating and reduce battery life two electromagnetic
interference yeah our SSD is located very close to our wireless module and
was specifically chosen and tested to not interfere with wi-fi and bluetooth
an off-the-shelf SSD might have a different emissions pattern and could
compromise wireless performance okay three mechanical that's fair we place
components on the motherboard underneath the SSD and a different one might
mechanically interfere with these components so the main reason that might happen is
if you have nand packages on both sides
of the SSD which could be a very legit strategy for boosting up the capacity of
an extremely small 30 millimeter long
m.2 yeah i think it's actually pretty common
especially during vibration four assembly
at least one screw which holds down the thermal module onto the apu is also used
to hold down the shield can removing this screw can impact the
thermal performance of the thermal module
here we go first we're working on removing this outer sheet now that's an area where i
could see them bringing out their torque wrench again you want to make sure that
if you are installing a cooler you are screwing it in evenly on both or all
four sides and the reason for that is if you got your CPU die or apu and you've
got your cooler on top of it and it's sitting crooked one side of it could get
less cooling or even in some cases if you have an air gap which is effectively
an insulator no cooling that's a big problem yeah and if you've
ever at home you've probably not done this but if you've ever tried to install a
threadripper CPU without their torque wrench um that's real difficult too because you
can either over tighten it and like flatten out the um the lga pins so that
it doesn't make contact anymore or under tighten it
uh and not make contact that way like it's it's actually just actually a
really good idea to have a torque wrench for this kind of thing if it's a well-designed cooler it'll probably have
stoppers and you just go until it stops but this is valve's first attempt so
depending on the oem they're working with
shield as you've just seen these two screws come first two more screws under
here okay now you can actually remove the
shield but be super careful to not disturb the whole thermal setup
very important to make doubly sure that the battery is disconnected before
proceeding so the battery was under that can yeah
so this whole time pull it out to the side yeah to the side yeah
okay okay yeah that is very close to the wi-fi module look at those antennas
they're right there they're right freaking there
boy is packed there's your dram yeah the
fat boy heat pipe one heat pipe yep now disconnect the drive
note that all steam deck models use the m.2 connector for internal storage only
2230 and size will fit yep that's correct yeah
give the community time
uh yeah i mean there's no reason yeah you there's no reason you couldn't have
an extension ribbon extension man do you guys want to see it on lttstore.com okay
steam deck m.2 ribbon extension we find some other place to jam a 2280. i
honestly don't know i don't think we'd be able to probably have to do it externally yeah
including the 64 Gigabyte model to actually remove the SSD so the 64
Gigabyte emmc is a NVMe okay module so interesting that
was not what i expected we knew the 64 gig emmc model wasn't going to have the
same performance as a full-fledged SSD
using the NVMe protocol also the flash is just not as fast if i
recall correctly no but what we didn't know was if it would plug into the m.2
interface or if it would be soldered to the board or something and then you
could expand that with an m.2 SSD it looks like it is either emmc
or an SSD you can't stack them because it was looking like the the smart play
assuming that you didn't need i think it's the better screen that comes with the 512 gig or something yeah it's got
the uh laser etched yeah screen if you didn't need that it was looking like the
smart play was to take the emmc model and then upgrade it so you'd get even
more storage but it looks like that's not a thing
here that's it
cute we haven't filmed the entire reassembly process but as we mentioned
with the thumbsticks that's the whole thing it's basically doing this whole thing again but backwards
remember if you have followed these directions correctly you've done
absolutely that was it that's as far as they're gonna go like i kind of expected
to see a little bit more um not only that but i did notice that the SSD had
cans on both sides for emi so they're very very concerned about emi
on that SSD now what we don't know is if
we could reuse that emi shield as long as whatever SSD we get is in a similar
kind of form factor and it wouldn't surprise me to see someone like uh
kyocio who already works in within these kinds of constraints to bring out an SSD
that's specifically compatible with the steam deck i mean we're already seeing it with the playstation 5. it's not like
SSD manufacturers aren't on this you know oh yeah game consoles
getting SSD upgrades that's a thing i think it's i think it's a matter of time
or maybe even with you know a pre-installed shield or doing their own
validation or whatever now the question there becomes
if other companies are doing their own validation and their own ssds how long
before valve actually has an official support list i don't think they'll do it
no i think it's just more hassle than it's worth i guess yeah why are they
taking on that responsibility there's literally no money in it for them and
it's in their best interest for people to not break these things and even
though i think at least for our users the vast majority are not going to break
their steam deck by opening it the odds are definitely greater of breaking it if
you open it versus if you just don't well by that same token why would they
say that it's yours to open is it just that they're very libertarian about it
or yeah it's just that you can but clearly the odds of it generating a
return or some kind of false warranty claim from someone who accidentally
damaged something are definitely greater if people open them people make mistakes
happens to the best of us i remember an incident with an imac probe once a very
long time ago yeah but the difference here is that
you'd actually be able to buy these spare parts that you need to repair it
yes that's that's something that valve has just said well they just came out and said just now they haven't committed
to every spare part joysticks yes what
else did they actually commit to providing i don't know that they're
going to provide main boards they may not so if you spill your coffee while
you're working on an SSD upgrade that's going to generate a support
ticket to valve which even if they don't cover it because it's not covered by
warranty does add cost i could see batteries i could see maybe maybe
displays maybe but probably not motherboards probably not personally i'd
like to see valve go the whole mile
and make it so that for it would cost more obviously because
you'd have all this extra packaging and extra logistics cost but you i would
like them to make the entire steam deck available in
exploded form to build one so you could just buy every part and put it together
yourself if you like were a masochist and you really wanted
to i challenge you valve take it one step further it would cost more to put
it together yourself with no warranty that is an interesting concept yeah i
mean i don't think many people would take them up on it but it would mean
that literally everything is available as a replacement part if you needed it
yeah i'd be down for that no of course you would well yeah i mean i'm gonna
take this thing apart i don't care hashtag biased did you pre-order one i
did yeah me too oh wait hold on i heard back from
valve uh full teardown and additional content make sure you're subscribed guys
i heard back from valve and we are definitely gonna have some interesting
stuff going on once they jump through some internal hoops but you're more
informed now about what's inside your steam deck that we are anyway thanks for
watching and that's fair we are and so are you
and you're informed about our sponsor ifixit ifixit wants to help you keep
your devices powered like they are brand
new they have a wide range of products including their battery replacement kits
for your mobile devices they've got kits for laptops cell phones tablets smart
watches and even nintendo switches you
don't even need to be an expert to repair your devices with ifixit they've
got beautiful step-by-step guides with tons of photos to walk you through your
replacement and of course the kit includes everything you need so why pay
for someone else to do it when you can pay to learn a new hobby while also
saving yourself some time and money and i really do mean saving yourself time
the time it takes to coordinate with a repair shop and like drop stuff off and
go pick it up unless it's a very simple fix
honestly could in many cases be better spent just doing it yourself so don't
wait check out ifixit.com LTT to find
the fix kits for your devices today hope you guys enjoyed this video if you're
looking for another one maybe check out our preview of the steam deck if you
haven't already seen it we got to play games we even did a little bit of casual
benchmarking thermal camera it's a pretty good video