okay they said they wouldn't do this right but there was the hardware
certification in South Korea right then follow me here fonx caught valve
sneaking codeen names into the Linux kernel Final Fantasy 7 fans know that
Sethro and AIS had a bit of a runin and
then we all know aith was a valve code name for
the okay fine valve just launched an
OLED steam deck and I know what you guys are thinking that sounds great but
didn't they say not to expect a new steam deck for years well that's what we
heard but it's not actually what they said we can talk about that later for
now this thing is freaking awesome I am
talking larger incredible HDR screen
massively better battery life three times faster game downloads more
included storage and get this you guys without raising the price take that Sony
so get your pre-order order in now obviously but also stay tuned because on
top of all the improvements that they highlighted for us to talk about in our
review there's more that they wanted us to discover on our own and those turned
out to be very interesting like our
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link below there's no other way to put it this thing is beautiful this is not
just a steam Deck with an OLED display this is a steam Deck with a custom HDR
OLED display the first we've ever seen in a handheld with a rated Peak
brightness of 1,000 nits in HDR a rated
million to1 contrast ratio and 110%
coverage of the DCI P3 color space it is even bigger than the original coming in
at 7.4 in rather than the original 7
which they pulled off by rinking the bezels rather than by increasing the
size of the unit making it feel even more immersive oh and did I mention that
it now does 90 HZ refresh rate for smoother animations and more responsive
inputs I mean after the mildly disappointing screen in the original
deck this is everything that I could have asked for well almost everything
we're still stuck at 800p resolution but
what blew my mind about that was how hard it was to tell I mean I could have
sworn that it was higher but I guess that just goes to show you how much our
perception is impacted by other factors like brightness contrast and color
reproduction valve nailed this thing
like the color in srgb mode is dead on
with even more impressive saturation in HDR it's easier on the eyes in low light
conditions and the contrast ratio is functionally infinite so let me just put
it this way this thing pops the only
thing I could ask for would be support for variable refresh rate on the
built-in screen but valve says that this just wasn't possible not because they
didn't do the software work it'll work on an external display but because the
internal display uses a mppy interface
when I pressed them on why they didn't use EDP which would support vrr they
were actually kind of evasive so what we
suspect is that valve is still not shipping the kinds of volumes that would
justify a completely custom screen putting them at the mercy of what's kind
of available in the market and by that I mean that based on the identical
subpixel layout we suspect that they're using the same source that Nintendo does
for the switch OLED which is important because most sources that we can find
suspect that Nintendo is using a mppy derivative for their displays now to be
clear we don't have any proof of this but if we're right it's probably a
really good thing based on that recent video looking looking at OLED switch
burning yeah it will eventually but only
if abused so fingers crossed that's not
but now I'm sure you're practically yelling at your screen by now hey valve
said they weren't going to make a new steam deck not for years what gives with
this but that's not quite how it went
down there were a bunch of Articles earlier this year after veteran valve
programmer Pierre lugay discussed how valve would need to do a ton of work to
re-engineer the internals to make an OLED screen work and then another round
more recently of him saying n he doesn't foresee the performance Target for steam
deck changing for the next couple of years which we interpreted to mean that
no new hardware was coming but if you read the actual quotes from him rather
than skimming the headlines he never actually said we wouldn't get a mid
generation upgrade we just assumed that and we all know what happens when we do
that and and get this not only is the
new screen better it's thinner which carves out some precious space behind it
for a larger battery steam dech OLED I'm
not sure if valve calls it that but we're going to call it that boasts a 50w
hour battery which valve says should charge faster and last up to 50% longer
than the old one which seems like some
pretty questionable math on the surface especially given that the included
charging brick has identical specs but our results on both of these counts were
right in line with their claims and the why of that was one of the things that
we got to investigate on our own you see
some of these gains come from the size of the battery some from a newer
chemistry some come from the more efficient screen and some come from the
new silicon that AMD spun for this
version now before you get too excited valve was very clear that the new 6
nanometer D Shunk processor is intended to perform form just like the previous 7
nanm version their exact words were often equivalent never worse but that
doesn't sound like not better and as
we've learned there's as much to be gleaned in what valve doesn't say as
there is in what they do say now it's beyond the scope of this video but I
would be particularly interested to see what kind of results the hyper Ming
Community can get from this new die alongside valve's new underclocking
features we're going to talk about out of the box performance though starting
with returnal running the built-in Benchmark at 1280 x800 on the low preset
we got virtually identical performance with only the maximum FPS being
significantly different from the original deck same story going out for a
rip on our favorite kakistan track in f123 similar enough that most people
wouldn't notice it day today but an improvement that is well beyond our
margin of error in our measurements I'll take it or at least I would until
something weird happened in cyberpunk 2077 we saw a significant performance
drop using the steam deck preset in both
cases our minimum FPS was quite a bit
lower than the original deck the good news however is that average FPS wasn't
impacted so what we suspect is that the new Apu was stuck in a lower power State
at the start of the Benchmark and then ramped up which is good because that
should be easy enough to fix in the coming weeks or I mean probably days at the rate that
valve has been pushing out patches to take the steam deck from The Unfinished
state that it was in when I first reviewed it to the polished experience
that it is today now given that our focus is on the new hardware we aren't
going to get into a ton of depth about what valves done with Steam OS lately
but the incredible work that they've done on HDR and color Management in
Linux is just the tip of the iceberg
once you manage to drag your eyes away from the new screen you might notice the
thumbsticks before you ask no they're not hall effect but there's a new
texture and a slightly different profile that most people around the office
seemed to prefer when they were asked well why didn't you go with Hall sticks
seems like such a no-brainer upgrade valve said that ultimately they were
unsatisfied with their reliability at this time so fingers crossed for the
future but not today other tweaks to the outside uh colors of the button labels
and the bases of the thumb sticks are different power button is now a nice
almost LT Orange the power LED is a WR wrgb diode to give you more feedback
about your charge State and the screws on the back of the deck are torqux
rather than Phillips very nice but that's about it for the exterior changes
and it looks like the dimensions are identical which raises a big question
for me will your OG deck accessories
still fit now dbrand was desperate to
know which makes sense give them their line of work and we thought about just
Landing them a unit but then I was all like hey I have the power in this
relationship for a change why don't we charge them to test it and then do it on
camera where everyone can see it I actually don't know the correct way
to put this on so I'm just going to go for it doesn't seem like anything is
different but just CU it doesn't seem different doesn't mean it's exactly
right necessarily micro SD slot perfect
rear buttons perfect top buttons LEDs
all visible all accessible looks good to me obious viously if the kill switch
goes on then their other accessories will fit but what the heck if you don't
need the kickstand there's also their Universal Mount go ahead and pop that on kind of looks like valves valve lots of
people use these for external battery Banks but you can mount pretty much
anything to your steam Deck with it I mean look at that wow
screwdriver now one thing that's not going to go as smoothly is the screen
protector do they has a bigger one
because it's only a bezel reduction the
actual piece of glass is the the same size and I'm sure you will do a really
really good job of applying it instead of just doing it in a hurry like I'm doing cuz I'm on camera oh man that's
way off uh just just don't look that close they include two though because
they assume you'll screw one up I I guess oh this is hilarious the notes
from dbrand say don't need to actually install probably because they knew that
I would screw it up if I did it in a hurry anyway the point is thanks dbrand
for sending this stuff over we'll have links in the description along with the new steam deck and everything else we
feature now at this point you know everything you need to know about this
thing as a consumer but the tinkerers
you're going to want to stay tuned because internally a lot more has
changed than you would probably think starting with something that would be
really easy to overlook these screws now go into metal screw bosses rather than
just into the plastic housing which is great if you want to get into or out of
your deck multiple times say for example to upgrade your storage and speaking of
valve has made a sincere effort to reduce the number of different types of
screw screws involved making repairs and modifications a much more pleasant task
that doesn't mean however that intergenerational compatibility is going
to be perfect the motherboard has changed and the daughter boards on both
sides of the unit have been reshaped and redesigned with the thumbstick boards
now having these little wings not sure exactly what to call them but they're a
mounting point for the switches for the shoulder buttons which means that any
third-party replacement joysticks are going to have to be redesigned before
they're going to work in the new deck the battery is still glued in place but
valve says that they didn't go Hog Wild with the glue this time so battery
Replacements should be a little less terrible and a dedicated DSP is present
now to take some load off of the Apu for audio processing with valve claiming
that the new unit delivers refined haptics cleaner audio improved base
response and better stereo separation we didn't really find any of these to be
gamechanging but they are certainly welcome improvements superficially the
new cooling setup looks quite a lot like what we saw in the refreshed steam Decks
that they've been shipping in recent months but on closer inspection the
mounting points are actually different and there's a lot more open space under
the Shroud with far fewer components on the main board getting in the way of
airf flow our acoustic chamber is still in the works but even without it we
observed a noticeable reduction in fan noise and that's with the system running
cooler overall under that cooling system we have some more big spec upgrades like
the original our new Apu comes with 16 gigs of
lpddr5 but this time it's 6,400 megat
transfer per second compared to the 5500
of the original that is a huge increase
and explains a significant amount of the performance uplift and there's a new
custom Wi-Fi module that had us peing in the real world at around 650 megabits
per second when downloading games on our Wi-Fi 6E Network here at the lab that is
outstanding and a huge difference maker if you've ever downloaded a big game on
your deck you're going to know what I'm talking about now the wireless module is
still soldered down which is a bit of a bummer especially because looking back
at the original and seeing what a big Improvement this is wouldn't it have been nice if that one hadn't been
soldered but according to valve this was for good reason and allowed them to
create a specialized interface between the Wi-Fi module and the Apu which has
the benefit of moving the power circuitry onto the main board rather
than the Wi-Fi card and of allowing them to run a dedicated antenna for Bluetooth
5.3 also to its credit the new Wi-Fi chip is at least soldered further away
from the m.2 slot for the SSD which should hopefully result in less
interference and speaking of storage let's talk about the updated lineup for
a moment here the new topof the line includes 1 tbte of NVMe storage and has
the same anti-glare etching on the glass as the original it also includes
includes this new two-part case that will help save some room in your
backpack if you don't happen to have a nice Tech focused bag that has room for
multiple laptops and a steam deck like ours does LTT Store.com the base model
is now 256 GB for the same price as before a
quadrupling of storage not to mention the speed upgrade but this one has a
catch it's the old LCD version and not
just with the same screen without any of the new upgrades at least that's
the case for now so um I would probably
avoid that one and I'd be looking at the mid tier it's $20 more than last gen but
it gets double the storage at that price and has all the new goodies all it lacks
are the anti-glare coating which to me is not the end of the world and a
two-part case it's a smoking deal
there's also a fourth member of the family the limited edition of the one tab that has an exclusive transparent
shell but that thing is so limited that valve wouldn't even let us borrow one
even though they totally took our color scheme we had to drive all the way down
to Seattle to get this footage of it in person it's like you know guys you can
just tell me if you want to hang out and I'll say sure as long as you support our
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our old video hot roding a bigger cooler onto the original deck we actually got a
lot of the way to this new performance tier which uh raises some interesting
questions like could the new one go even further