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Valve has been selling discount Steam Decks left and right. They ran a big

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sale and they launched their certified refurbished program making their

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handheld gaming PC more affordable than ever. But what they haven't done is make

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it better, which is fine because the TechTip man is here to do it for them.

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With some of the money that we saved buying a refurbished Steam Deck, we've

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put together an absolutely delicious menu of upgrades. [music]

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There's the obvious ones like taking out the stock 256 gig SSD and putting in one

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of these rocket drives from Sabrin or throwing in some Hall effect joysticks

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from Gilly [music] Kit to shrink the dead zones and reduce the risk of stick

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drift. But if you're adventurous,

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you can go a lot deeper.

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Higher resolution screen, anyone?

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Oo, an upgraded cooling system. Let's keep going. Let's have a look at what

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showed up in the mail. Our 256 gig model

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is packed pretty much identically to a

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brand new unit with the only exception being these little tags that are printed

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on the packaging that say refurbished. And while the case has a couple marks

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and scuffs on it, notably a little dent right here, the Steam Deck itself is I

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mean immaculate. It even has that new Steam Deck smell. [snorts]

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[cough and clears throat] Maybe that's the cleaning products.

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Either way, it's oh, it's great. So, while your mileage may vary, we're

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really happy with our purchase, and the only thing suggesting that this has been

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used before are some faint little lines on the D-pad, which we aren't stuck

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with. Take a look at this. While we were performing our two basic upgrades, we

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also replaced our buttons with this set from deckbuttons.com. They're textured

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to match the shell of the deck, so there's a bit of extra grip to them

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compared to the stock buttons. And the menu buttons are just a little bit more

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proud to the surface, so you can be more sure that you're actually hitting the

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right spot. At 50 bucks a set, or 25 for

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just [music] the D-pad, they are pretty

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expensive for plastic parts, but also reasonably affordable. Just note that

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they require fairly deep disassembly, so there's some risk of damage if you're

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not careful. And uh [clears throat] the same goes for [music] our next product

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here. This mono block is from Poseidon's

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three rings. And this is a super cool idea. Basically, it's a drop-in

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replacement for the stock cooler that in addition to the APU, also cools the VRM,

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the RAM, and the PIMC chips. They sent

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us both a wave 1 version of the product to show you guys and a warning that

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performance varied quite a lot in their first production run. As it turns out,

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at least part of the problem is that the heights of all the components isn't

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uniform between all steam decks. So, they've seen results all the way from

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20° cooler than stock to 10° warmer than

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stock. So, I'll be interested to see how exactly ours performs. Before we get to

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that though, these buttons look flipping awesome. I'm not 100% on the difference

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in feel. I think that's going to be very personal preference. Pretty subtle,

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but they look amazing. I love that

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installation of the monolock isn't hard, per se, but after you've opened up the

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deck and removed the old cooling assembly, you've got about 20 different

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components that either need thermal paste or a specific thickness of thermal

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pad applied to them. So, I also wouldn't call it easy. The monolock you see here

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is designed for steam decks with the silver motherboard cover. If your deck

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has the black cover, you would want a mono block 2, which is also available

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for pre-order and is expected to ship early next year. Once you have your pads

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and paste in place, there's just three screws to hold the block in place and

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this little bit of tape to replace. I mean, this looks very promising, sitting

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around 40, 45, 67.

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This doesn't seem right. The CPU is

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running 20° hotter than the [music] GPU.

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They're both on the same die. 85, 86,

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87.

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It's definitely not quieter. Nope. I think we better send this over to Labs.

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As it turns out, my gut feel was bang on. The GPU managed to run about the

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same, but the CPU was running 20°

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hotter, which is going to increase noise and hurt performance.

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And honestly, I got to say, I'm not that surprised. I walked by while Jordan was

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putting the thing together and I went, "Hold on a second, dude. What are you doing? you're putting thermal compound

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on ran and on VRM components. You can't do that. And he goes, "Well, that's what

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it says in the instructions." And he's right. But the problem with this is that

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only the dye is going to have enough consistency from one steam deck to the

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next for the tolerances to be tight enough that you can count on thermal

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compound. For stuff like this, they can be off by a fraction of a millimeter up

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or down. And that's why we use thermal pads, not because they perform better,

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because we have to account for that inconsistency and then mush these down a

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little bit to get good contact here. If you're relying on thermal compound for

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all these different components, no wonder you're going to have a bad time.

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Now, as we're shooting this, P3R is taking pre-orders for a Wave 2, which

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upgrades the fin count from 23 to 60 and aims to improve mounting consistency,

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hopefully by addressing this. They're aiming to ship later this year for a

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little under 100 bucks and we'll have a link in the description for that and

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everything else we show off in this video. Honestly, I feel like we should

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just remove our cooling upgrade. The good news is we're going to get an

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opportunity because we are about to install the most exciting upgrade that

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we've got. Check this out. [music] This is the Deck HD from FX Technology.

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It's a $100 replacement screen for the

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Steam Deck that boasts a higher resolution 1920 x 1200 versus the stock

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1280 by 800, better though still in

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complete coverage of the sRGB color space and an anti-glare coating,

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something that you would only find on the 512 gig version of the Steam Deck,

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which sounds great for a hundred bucks.

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So, uh, why are you making this face,

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Lionus? Well, I'm a little wary about

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some of the trade-offs. First, there's the performance hit. FX reports a 20%

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drop in frame rates at 1200p, which sounds pretty optimistic. I would expect

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it to be a little bit more. And then there's the battery life impact. With

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the Deck HD gobbling up as much as 5 watts of extra power at 1200p, you can

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expect to be making much more frequent trips back to the wall. Now, both of

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these issues can be mitigated by running your higher res display in 800p mode,

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but I'm doubtful that most of you are going to want to put in the work just

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for the color gamut improvement. Oh, yeah. Right. That's uh trade-off number

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three. This is going to be a pretty invasive operation with FX estimating

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that it will take longer than 2 and 1/2 hours to get this screen out and this

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one in. The good news is that's a one-time thing and you can use that

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opportunity to install this awesome

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freaking purple translucent case for the Steam Deck. The bad news is that

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trade-off number four is even worse than trade-off number three and has no upside

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whatsoever. Deck HD also requires the

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user to flash their Steam Deck BIOS with their custom firmware, which [music]

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needs to be reflashed every time Valve pushes a new version of Steam OS. FX

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says they are optimistic about having the opportunity to work together with

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Valve to get support in the official BIOS, but I could also say that I'm

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optimistic that Dbrand is going to stop mocking my height in their advertising.

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It could happen. It could, but it's not a guarantee. Let's see if this is worth

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it. FX Technology provides excellent instructions on their website, which is

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a really good thing because replacing the screen requires us to dig further

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into the Steam Deck than ever before. After removing our monob block, we

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disconnect the battery, remove our upgraded SSD, and unplug the fan. Our

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order of operations here may have been non ideal. Next, we disconnect the

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speakers, and then hang a left and disconnect the button board before we

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unscrew and remove the motherboard. Watch out, by the way, for the audio

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cable on the back. Now, we disconnect the display cable from the screen and

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carefully remove it. This is where things start to get a little sketchy.

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Using a heat gun or a hair dryer, we need to loosen the adhesive strips that

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hold the stock screen in place. Then, when that doesn't work, we need to break

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out the tin foil to use as a makeshift heat shield and crank up the

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temperature. We don't want to push the picss in too far here, especially at the

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top of the screen as there are some delicate circuits there. We just

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carefully work our way around the screen and it should come out without too much

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of a fight. Now we take a detour from the deck HD instructions because we want

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to replace the entire chassis as well. So we remove all the controls and start

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transplanting them into our purple case. At first we were really impressed that

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extreme rate supplied us with replacement screws and springs. But then

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upon further inspection it turned out that they just couldn't be bothered to

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use the same threading as the genuine deck chassis. So we had no choice but to

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use the new fasteners or things would have started bouncing around inside our

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steam deck. With everything physically installed, we just need to flash the

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BIOS and we should be off to the races. This is amazing. How'd the screen

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install go? Uh, the screen install itself was pretty

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good. The uh body swap was interesting.

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It looks awesome though. It looks awesome. Oh, I see in the notes things got a

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little melty on the right thumb stick. Just a little tiny bit here.

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It's not bad. No. No. Oh, I can feel it.

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It's not bad though. It's not bad. And like I haven't even seen this side of it

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yet, man. This makes the regular Steam Deck

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look downright freaking boring.

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Okay. Okay. But the screen though, the screen screen. This is immediately noticeable.

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Even if you're on like the homepage, the number of games you see on the list is

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so much more by default. Wow. Okay. Uh what is installed?

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Uh F1's installed. Uh, tiny tin is

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installed. Anti-glare coating. Yep. Not bad. It's about the same as the as the 512

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official. Oh, yeah. Is this the 512? Yeah. I can't say for Oh my god, that looks so

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much sharper. 720p is fine for 6 in.

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By the time you get up to 7, you can tell.

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The problem you're going to see though is you can also tell the performance hit.

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Well, yeah. I told you before I thought their estimate of 20% was very

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optimistic. Yeah, definitely. We found there's like

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a quality difference in the the plastic. We think

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the openings are slightly different. So, these ones feel a little bit Yeah, the joystick doesn't feel as good,

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especially down down to the right side there. Some people say that can be

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a factor of how much you tighten the screws inside.

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Okay. But there aren't like torque settings or anything, so you just kind of do what

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you can. She's a little sticky. I think if I was going to do this myself, I would keep

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the stock front. Yeah. And then I would just change out the

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back just to make sure that I'm not giving up anything in terms of the the

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face, the interaction. It's a lot less work that way, too.

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Does look so cool, though. Yeah. You know what? In person, I would say

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the colors are more saturated. Not in a bad way, in an inaccurate way, but in a

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greater color gamut way on the replaced screen. It's also

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It's about a 20% increase according to them for the RGB coverage.

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What is it with them in the number 20? With that said, man, 720p is not that

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bad, especially if you apply FSR or anything like that.

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And then compare the frame rates. Yeah, we're getting a locked 60 FPS

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here. We're getting a locked 37 FPS over

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here. That's better than it was doing before. We put the stock cooler back in though,

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right? Yeah. So, that's not because our cooler is bad. This GPU is drawing six

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more watts than this one and we are getting

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about 66% the frame rate if we're lucky.

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Yeah. And they said 3 to 5 watts for their screen for extra draw.

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So that's so that's also kind of optimistic. A lot regarding the BIOS update issues.

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It has to be done in desktop mode and it would have been nice if they at least

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told us to download the script before we swap the screen. Then you have to

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manually set the resolution in Steam properties for each game or the higher

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res isn't even available once you get in

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game

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like UI scaling. Okay. It's going to get a little bit more difficult to press

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things with your fingers cuz it's not really

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hands. Yeah, especially with your fingers. Uh you can change the UI scale.

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Okay. But this is another little thing that

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adds up. You have to um go into

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developer mode. Yeah. You have to enable remote debugging.

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Okay. You then have to install Chrome. Okay. This is already a nightmare.

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And then you get to go to a URL they gave you. Okay. So, basically it's super cool, but

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they have a little bit of work to do before it's ready for prime time. Exactly.

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Okay. It's awesome, but it's not a consumer

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product at this point. How about we show you guys a noninvasive

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upgrade option? Sabrin just released this. It's a dock for the Steam Deck

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with a built-in M.2 slot for $80. That

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is $10 less than the official dock from Valve. And you won't even need our

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stubby screwdriver available now, ltstore.com, to turn a spare NVMe drive

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into an external Steam library drive.

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Now, obviously, this 8 terbte drive that

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Cyber sent us to try this out is probably not the sort of thing most

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people would have lying around, but they have more affordable options starting

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from around $40 for a 500 gig NVMe SSD.

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So with just this for [laughter]

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so with this setup process which is basic basically as simple as popping off

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the bottom, chucking in an SSD, closing the toolless

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lock and then popping it back on.

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You can be ready to access a much larger library of games on your Steam Deck and

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have a built-in USB hub. Ooh, including power delivery so it can charge the deck

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through the hub and HDMI output. So, if you're the kind of person like we saw so

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many of these folks at Whaland who are using a Steam Deck as their only PC and

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they just carry it around when they're gaming on the go and then dock it when

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they're sitting at their monitor. This is all you need to have all of that and

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extra storage. I mean, I guess nothing would prevent you from gaming not on the

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go while docked. Uh, or would it? Let's

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see. Okay. What's a game you have launched? How about Crab Champions? Is

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that installed on the dock? Oh, nope. Missing executable. Oh, did I take the

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wrong drive? This seems like a good time to talk about how the setup could be a

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little smoother. [laughter] You see, if you install an uninitialized

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drive on the Steam Deck, nothing happens. So, either you need to switch

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to desktop mode, make sure you have a password set, and then use the KDE

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partition manager to initialize the drive and then format a partition, or

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you need to plug the dock into a separate computer and go through similar

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steps there. Then you've got to mount the drive in the Steam OS desktop

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interface. Make sure the permissions are set right. And finally, add it as a

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Steam drive via the desktop Steam client

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on the deck. And that's just to make it work one time. If you reboot the deck,

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you need to remount the drive.

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There are some ways around that, but one of the easiest we found is using this

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script from GitHub user squal.

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Cool. Whatever. We're going to have it linked in the description. Insert

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standard disclaimer about always reading through a script before running it in a shell. And then from then on, it should

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just work like a reasonable person would expect it would. I should be clear that

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this is a valve problem, not a sabrant

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problem. So, be sure to direct your complaints to the right department over there. For now, Jordan has done what

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exactly? I just double checked to make sure the drive was recognized and uh yeah, you're

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good to go. Oh, okay. So, it just magically worked this time.

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Yeah, it looks me better. Oh, no. No. Please don't eat me. Don't

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eat me, bats. Yeah, this left joystick

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is not great. Yeah, sorry, dude. Found treasure. Sorry. Am I

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supposed to be doing something right now? Right. Probably. Given the steps required to get this

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dock working, I don't think we can say that it's really any easier than in

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replacing the internal drive. But it is nice to be able to use a a cheap or even

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a highcapacity 80mimeter M.2. And it's

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nice to have a separate place to store your best enjoyed on the big screen

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games, leaving your internal SSD free for your onthe-go games. With that said,

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let's take a look at our final result.

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I'd say the thumb sticks are the easiest upgrade that we showed today, and they

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are, simply put, an absolute no-brainer. They are much better than the stock

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ones, and very affordable. Upgrading the internal storage, that's nearly as easy,

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and the price point is whatever you're comfortable with from $40 to, I don't

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know, $1,000. If you need more storage,

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I say do it. The replacement buttons. These feel great and aren't too

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expensive considering that they're a low volume part, but they are not as easy to

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swap in as the thumb sticks, and they don't offer as clear a benefit. As for

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the Monolock and the Deck HD, I don't

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think either of those is going to catch on for the casual users, but for the

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tinkerers out there, they're both at least interesting projects with

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potential for real improvements down the road, either in new hardware designs or

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improvements to firmware and integration. It's the kind of thing that

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I would consider doing on my own Steam Deck, but not the kind of thing that I

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would recommend, if you know what I mean. And I'd say the same goes for the

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replacement case, especially the front one, given that not only is it difficult

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to install, but we could end up going back in multiple times to play around

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with the torque on the screws to ensure that we get the feel of the thumb sticks right.

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As for the dock, that's one that I personally wouldn't get much use out of

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given that I have a desktop computer that I would just use when I want to sit

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at the desktop, but I couldn't believe how many people were using them at

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Whaleand. A nonzero number of people said that they've switched to a Steam

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Deck or an ROG Ally for that matter for their primary computer and they just use

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it in docked mode at their station and then handheld mode to game on the go.

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For anyone like that then the dock is a great value because you're comparing the

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price to I mean buying a second computer

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basically. And we've shown in the past that the Steam Deck is a pretty darn

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good value compared to a PC. So adding a

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little bit of cost for the dock ah seems to make sense. As for the refurbished

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deck itself, I mean, if every refurbished unit is even close to the

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condition of ours, it's an absolute steal. And you don't have to spend your

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savings on upgrades. Maybe you'd rather enjoy a nice dinner or a product or

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service from our sponsor. If you guys like this video, maybe check out the

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time we tried Windows on a Steam Deck. [music] That was a thing that happened

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and apparently it's better now.