Valve has been selling discount Steam Decks left and right. They ran a big
sale and they launched their certified refurbished program making their
handheld gaming PC more affordable than ever. But what they haven't done is make
it better, which is fine because the TechTip man is here to do it for them.
With some of the money that we saved buying a refurbished Steam Deck, we've
put together an absolutely delicious menu of upgrades. [music]
There's the obvious ones like taking out the stock 256 gig SSD and putting in one
of these rocket drives from Sabrin or throwing in some Hall effect joysticks
from Gilly [music] Kit to shrink the dead zones and reduce the risk of stick
drift. But if you're adventurous,
you can go a lot deeper.
Higher resolution screen, anyone?
Oo, an upgraded cooling system. Let's keep going. Let's have a look at what
showed up in the mail. Our 256 gig model
is packed pretty much identically to a
brand new unit with the only exception being these little tags that are printed
on the packaging that say refurbished. And while the case has a couple marks
and scuffs on it, notably a little dent right here, the Steam Deck itself is I
mean immaculate. It even has that new Steam Deck smell. [snorts]
[cough and clears throat] Maybe that's the cleaning products.
Either way, it's oh, it's great. So, while your mileage may vary, we're
really happy with our purchase, and the only thing suggesting that this has been
used before are some faint little lines on the D-pad, which we aren't stuck
with. Take a look at this. While we were performing our two basic upgrades, we
also replaced our buttons with this set from deckbuttons.com. They're textured
to match the shell of the deck, so there's a bit of extra grip to them
compared to the stock buttons. And the menu buttons are just a little bit more
proud to the surface, so you can be more sure that you're actually hitting the
right spot. At 50 bucks a set, or 25 for
just [music] the D-pad, they are pretty
expensive for plastic parts, but also reasonably affordable. Just note that
they require fairly deep disassembly, so there's some risk of damage if you're
not careful. And uh [clears throat] the same goes for [music] our next product
here. This mono block is from Poseidon's
three rings. And this is a super cool idea. Basically, it's a drop-in
replacement for the stock cooler that in addition to the APU, also cools the VRM,
the RAM, and the PIMC chips. They sent
us both a wave 1 version of the product to show you guys and a warning that
performance varied quite a lot in their first production run. As it turns out,
at least part of the problem is that the heights of all the components isn't
uniform between all steam decks. So, they've seen results all the way from
20° cooler than stock to 10° warmer than
stock. So, I'll be interested to see how exactly ours performs. Before we get to
that though, these buttons look flipping awesome. I'm not 100% on the difference
in feel. I think that's going to be very personal preference. Pretty subtle,
but they look amazing. I love that
installation of the monolock isn't hard, per se, but after you've opened up the
deck and removed the old cooling assembly, you've got about 20 different
components that either need thermal paste or a specific thickness of thermal
pad applied to them. So, I also wouldn't call it easy. The monolock you see here
is designed for steam decks with the silver motherboard cover. If your deck
has the black cover, you would want a mono block 2, which is also available
for pre-order and is expected to ship early next year. Once you have your pads
and paste in place, there's just three screws to hold the block in place and
this little bit of tape to replace. I mean, this looks very promising, sitting
around 40, 45, 67.
This doesn't seem right. The CPU is
running 20° hotter than the [music] GPU.
They're both on the same die. 85, 86,
87.
It's definitely not quieter. Nope. I think we better send this over to Labs.
As it turns out, my gut feel was bang on. The GPU managed to run about the
same, but the CPU was running 20°
hotter, which is going to increase noise and hurt performance.
And honestly, I got to say, I'm not that surprised. I walked by while Jordan was
putting the thing together and I went, "Hold on a second, dude. What are you doing? you're putting thermal compound
on ran and on VRM components. You can't do that. And he goes, "Well, that's what
it says in the instructions." And he's right. But the problem with this is that
only the dye is going to have enough consistency from one steam deck to the
next for the tolerances to be tight enough that you can count on thermal
compound. For stuff like this, they can be off by a fraction of a millimeter up
or down. And that's why we use thermal pads, not because they perform better,
because we have to account for that inconsistency and then mush these down a
little bit to get good contact here. If you're relying on thermal compound for
all these different components, no wonder you're going to have a bad time.
Now, as we're shooting this, P3R is taking pre-orders for a Wave 2, which
upgrades the fin count from 23 to 60 and aims to improve mounting consistency,
hopefully by addressing this. They're aiming to ship later this year for a
little under 100 bucks and we'll have a link in the description for that and
everything else we show off in this video. Honestly, I feel like we should
just remove our cooling upgrade. The good news is we're going to get an
opportunity because we are about to install the most exciting upgrade that
we've got. Check this out. [music] This is the Deck HD from FX Technology.
It's a $100 replacement screen for the
Steam Deck that boasts a higher resolution 1920 x 1200 versus the stock
1280 by 800, better though still in
complete coverage of the sRGB color space and an anti-glare coating,
something that you would only find on the 512 gig version of the Steam Deck,
which sounds great for a hundred bucks.
So, uh, why are you making this face,
Lionus? Well, I'm a little wary about
some of the trade-offs. First, there's the performance hit. FX reports a 20%
drop in frame rates at 1200p, which sounds pretty optimistic. I would expect
it to be a little bit more. And then there's the battery life impact. With
the Deck HD gobbling up as much as 5 watts of extra power at 1200p, you can
expect to be making much more frequent trips back to the wall. Now, both of
these issues can be mitigated by running your higher res display in 800p mode,
but I'm doubtful that most of you are going to want to put in the work just
for the color gamut improvement. Oh, yeah. Right. That's uh trade-off number
three. This is going to be a pretty invasive operation with FX estimating
that it will take longer than 2 and 1/2 hours to get this screen out and this
one in. The good news is that's a one-time thing and you can use that
opportunity to install this awesome
freaking purple translucent case for the Steam Deck. The bad news is that
trade-off number four is even worse than trade-off number three and has no upside
whatsoever. Deck HD also requires the
user to flash their Steam Deck BIOS with their custom firmware, which [music]
needs to be reflashed every time Valve pushes a new version of Steam OS. FX
says they are optimistic about having the opportunity to work together with
Valve to get support in the official BIOS, but I could also say that I'm
optimistic that Dbrand is going to stop mocking my height in their advertising.
It could happen. It could, but it's not a guarantee. Let's see if this is worth
it. FX Technology provides excellent instructions on their website, which is
a really good thing because replacing the screen requires us to dig further
into the Steam Deck than ever before. After removing our monob block, we
disconnect the battery, remove our upgraded SSD, and unplug the fan. Our
order of operations here may have been non ideal. Next, we disconnect the
speakers, and then hang a left and disconnect the button board before we
unscrew and remove the motherboard. Watch out, by the way, for the audio
cable on the back. Now, we disconnect the display cable from the screen and
carefully remove it. This is where things start to get a little sketchy.
Using a heat gun or a hair dryer, we need to loosen the adhesive strips that
hold the stock screen in place. Then, when that doesn't work, we need to break
out the tin foil to use as a makeshift heat shield and crank up the
temperature. We don't want to push the picss in too far here, especially at the
top of the screen as there are some delicate circuits there. We just
carefully work our way around the screen and it should come out without too much
of a fight. Now we take a detour from the deck HD instructions because we want
to replace the entire chassis as well. So we remove all the controls and start
transplanting them into our purple case. At first we were really impressed that
extreme rate supplied us with replacement screws and springs. But then
upon further inspection it turned out that they just couldn't be bothered to
use the same threading as the genuine deck chassis. So we had no choice but to
use the new fasteners or things would have started bouncing around inside our
steam deck. With everything physically installed, we just need to flash the
BIOS and we should be off to the races. This is amazing. How'd the screen
install go? Uh, the screen install itself was pretty
good. The uh body swap was interesting.
It looks awesome though. It looks awesome. Oh, I see in the notes things got a
little melty on the right thumb stick. Just a little tiny bit here.
It's not bad. No. No. Oh, I can feel it.
It's not bad though. It's not bad. And like I haven't even seen this side of it
yet, man. This makes the regular Steam Deck
look downright freaking boring.
Okay. Okay. But the screen though, the screen screen. This is immediately noticeable.
Even if you're on like the homepage, the number of games you see on the list is
so much more by default. Wow. Okay. Uh what is installed?
Uh F1's installed. Uh, tiny tin is
installed. Anti-glare coating. Yep. Not bad. It's about the same as the as the 512
official. Oh, yeah. Is this the 512? Yeah. I can't say for Oh my god, that looks so
much sharper. 720p is fine for 6 in.
By the time you get up to 7, you can tell.
The problem you're going to see though is you can also tell the performance hit.
Well, yeah. I told you before I thought their estimate of 20% was very
optimistic. Yeah, definitely. We found there's like
a quality difference in the the plastic. We think
the openings are slightly different. So, these ones feel a little bit Yeah, the joystick doesn't feel as good,
especially down down to the right side there. Some people say that can be
a factor of how much you tighten the screws inside.
Okay. But there aren't like torque settings or anything, so you just kind of do what
you can. She's a little sticky. I think if I was going to do this myself, I would keep
the stock front. Yeah. And then I would just change out the
back just to make sure that I'm not giving up anything in terms of the the
face, the interaction. It's a lot less work that way, too.
Does look so cool, though. Yeah. You know what? In person, I would say
the colors are more saturated. Not in a bad way, in an inaccurate way, but in a
greater color gamut way on the replaced screen. It's also
It's about a 20% increase according to them for the RGB coverage.
What is it with them in the number 20? With that said, man, 720p is not that
bad, especially if you apply FSR or anything like that.
And then compare the frame rates. Yeah, we're getting a locked 60 FPS
here. We're getting a locked 37 FPS over
here. That's better than it was doing before. We put the stock cooler back in though,
right? Yeah. So, that's not because our cooler is bad. This GPU is drawing six
more watts than this one and we are getting
about 66% the frame rate if we're lucky.
Yeah. And they said 3 to 5 watts for their screen for extra draw.
So that's so that's also kind of optimistic. A lot regarding the BIOS update issues.
It has to be done in desktop mode and it would have been nice if they at least
told us to download the script before we swap the screen. Then you have to
manually set the resolution in Steam properties for each game or the higher
res isn't even available once you get in
game
like UI scaling. Okay. It's going to get a little bit more difficult to press
things with your fingers cuz it's not really
hands. Yeah, especially with your fingers. Uh you can change the UI scale.
Okay. But this is another little thing that
adds up. You have to um go into
developer mode. Yeah. You have to enable remote debugging.
Okay. You then have to install Chrome. Okay. This is already a nightmare.
And then you get to go to a URL they gave you. Okay. So, basically it's super cool, but
they have a little bit of work to do before it's ready for prime time. Exactly.
Okay. It's awesome, but it's not a consumer
product at this point. How about we show you guys a noninvasive
upgrade option? Sabrin just released this. It's a dock for the Steam Deck
with a built-in M.2 slot for $80. That
is $10 less than the official dock from Valve. And you won't even need our
stubby screwdriver available now, ltstore.com, to turn a spare NVMe drive
into an external Steam library drive.
Now, obviously, this 8 terbte drive that
Cyber sent us to try this out is probably not the sort of thing most
people would have lying around, but they have more affordable options starting
from around $40 for a 500 gig NVMe SSD.
So with just this for [laughter]
so with this setup process which is basic basically as simple as popping off
the bottom, chucking in an SSD, closing the toolless
lock and then popping it back on.
You can be ready to access a much larger library of games on your Steam Deck and
have a built-in USB hub. Ooh, including power delivery so it can charge the deck
through the hub and HDMI output. So, if you're the kind of person like we saw so
many of these folks at Whaland who are using a Steam Deck as their only PC and
they just carry it around when they're gaming on the go and then dock it when
they're sitting at their monitor. This is all you need to have all of that and
extra storage. I mean, I guess nothing would prevent you from gaming not on the
go while docked. Uh, or would it? Let's
see. Okay. What's a game you have launched? How about Crab Champions? Is
that installed on the dock? Oh, nope. Missing executable. Oh, did I take the
wrong drive? This seems like a good time to talk about how the setup could be a
little smoother. [laughter] You see, if you install an uninitialized
drive on the Steam Deck, nothing happens. So, either you need to switch
to desktop mode, make sure you have a password set, and then use the KDE
partition manager to initialize the drive and then format a partition, or
you need to plug the dock into a separate computer and go through similar
steps there. Then you've got to mount the drive in the Steam OS desktop
interface. Make sure the permissions are set right. And finally, add it as a
Steam drive via the desktop Steam client
on the deck. And that's just to make it work one time. If you reboot the deck,
you need to remount the drive.
There are some ways around that, but one of the easiest we found is using this
script from GitHub user squal.
Cool. Whatever. We're going to have it linked in the description. Insert
standard disclaimer about always reading through a script before running it in a shell. And then from then on, it should
just work like a reasonable person would expect it would. I should be clear that
this is a valve problem, not a sabrant
problem. So, be sure to direct your complaints to the right department over there. For now, Jordan has done what
exactly? I just double checked to make sure the drive was recognized and uh yeah, you're
good to go. Oh, okay. So, it just magically worked this time.
Yeah, it looks me better. Oh, no. No. Please don't eat me. Don't
eat me, bats. Yeah, this left joystick
is not great. Yeah, sorry, dude. Found treasure. Sorry. Am I
supposed to be doing something right now? Right. Probably. Given the steps required to get this
dock working, I don't think we can say that it's really any easier than in
replacing the internal drive. But it is nice to be able to use a a cheap or even
a highcapacity 80mimeter M.2. And it's
nice to have a separate place to store your best enjoyed on the big screen
games, leaving your internal SSD free for your onthe-go games. With that said,
let's take a look at our final result.
I'd say the thumb sticks are the easiest upgrade that we showed today, and they
are, simply put, an absolute no-brainer. They are much better than the stock
ones, and very affordable. Upgrading the internal storage, that's nearly as easy,
and the price point is whatever you're comfortable with from $40 to, I don't
know, $1,000. If you need more storage,
I say do it. The replacement buttons. These feel great and aren't too
expensive considering that they're a low volume part, but they are not as easy to
swap in as the thumb sticks, and they don't offer as clear a benefit. As for
the Monolock and the Deck HD, I don't
think either of those is going to catch on for the casual users, but for the
tinkerers out there, they're both at least interesting projects with
potential for real improvements down the road, either in new hardware designs or
improvements to firmware and integration. It's the kind of thing that
I would consider doing on my own Steam Deck, but not the kind of thing that I
would recommend, if you know what I mean. And I'd say the same goes for the
replacement case, especially the front one, given that not only is it difficult
to install, but we could end up going back in multiple times to play around
with the torque on the screws to ensure that we get the feel of the thumb sticks right.
As for the dock, that's one that I personally wouldn't get much use out of
given that I have a desktop computer that I would just use when I want to sit
at the desktop, but I couldn't believe how many people were using them at
Whaleand. A nonzero number of people said that they've switched to a Steam
Deck or an ROG Ally for that matter for their primary computer and they just use
it in docked mode at their station and then handheld mode to game on the go.
For anyone like that then the dock is a great value because you're comparing the
price to I mean buying a second computer
basically. And we've shown in the past that the Steam Deck is a pretty darn
good value compared to a PC. So adding a
little bit of cost for the dock ah seems to make sense. As for the refurbished
deck itself, I mean, if every refurbished unit is even close to the
condition of ours, it's an absolute steal. And you don't have to spend your
savings on upgrades. Maybe you'd rather enjoy a nice dinner or a product or
service from our sponsor. If you guys like this video, maybe check out the
time we tried Windows on a Steam Deck. [music] That was a thing that happened
and apparently it's better now.