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Steam Deck

madman

madman

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Anyone have one? still on the waiting list?
store.steampowered.com

Steam Deck™

Steam Deck™ is the most powerful, full-featured gaming handheld in the world.
store.steampowered.com store.steampowered.com

Im supposed to get it delivered tomorrow. Only 64gig

I'll mostly use it to emulate old arcade/console games and some Switch games.
 
I have one. Got the 512gb because when I reserved it it wasn’t clear if you could upgrade the internal storage or not. Knowing what I do now I’d have gotten the 64gb and bought a nice big SD card.

That said, it’s an amazing device that’s gotten me to feel the same excitement about playing games as I did when I was little. It can run modern AAA titles like control at medium/high settings at 30 FPS or low settings 60 FPS. Performance is stellar for what is essentially a cut down gaming laptop with controllers. The OS is great and brings more to the device than I thought. The Steam deck would be unusable if SteamOS was not as good as it is. Build quality is good, and the device is easily repairable. It can so many controls you can map you really can play just about any game on it, no matter how much it was meant to be played on a mouse/keyboard.

For negatives, the battery life sucks. You can kill it in just under 2h. While I rarely have 2 straight hours to play a game while I’m out and about, it is annoying because you really must be at 100% battery before taking it anywhere depending on what you want to play. You can easily get 5-8h of battery in less demanding or older games. The screen also has poor SRGB color coverage and could be more vibrant; it also has large bezels. Hopefully the second one has an OLED display. It is also frustratingly CPU limited in a few select titles. For example, no matter how low you put the graphics in elden ring it has trouble staying above 40 FPS, so I have to lock it to 30 FPS.

Other than that I have no complaints. It’s an amazing device and the fact that a $400 handheld can play modern games like Cyberpunk (on Linux on top of everything!) amazes me every time I power it on.
 
Nomad4Ever said:
I have one. Got the 512gb because when I reserved it it wasn’t clear if you could upgrade the internal storage or not. Knowing what I do now I’d have gotten the 64gb and bought a nice big SD card.

That said, it’s an amazing device that’s gotten me to feel the same excitement about playing games as I did when I was little. It can run modern AAA titles like control at medium/high settings at 30 FPS or low settings 60 FPS. Performance is stellar for what is essentially a cut down gaming laptop with controllers. The OS is great and brings more to the device than I thought. The Steam deck would be unusable if SteamOS was not as good as it is. Build quality is good, and the device is easily repairable. It can so many controls you can map you really can play just about any game on it, no matter how much it was meant to be played on a mouse/keyboard.

For negatives, the battery life sucks. You can kill it in just under 2h. While I rarely have 2 straight hours to play a game while I’m out and about, it is annoying because you really must be at 100% battery before taking it anywhere depending on what you want to play. You can easily get 5-8h of battery in less demanding or older games. The screen also has poor SRGB color coverage and could be more vibrant; it also has large bezels. Hopefully the second one has an OLED display. It is also frustratingly CPU limited in a few select titles. For example, no matter how low you put the graphics in elden ring it has trouble staying above 40 FPS, so I have to lock it to 30 FPS.

Other than that I have no complaints. It’s an amazing device and the fact that a $400 handheld can play modern games like Cyberpunk (on Linux on top of everything!) amazes me every time I power it on.
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Battery life shouldnt be too much of an issue for me because i prefer to play on my big 70". They dont have a dock yet, but i can 3D print on and get the HDMI/USB/power hub on Amazon.

I love the flexibility with this thing especially with emulation.
 
I got one last week and a dock for it came in today.

It’s rather nice but it can get a little warm.
 
Got me the base model steam deck, it runs elden ring flawlessly, and it runs skyrim and fallout 4 very well with some slight tweaking(no voices glitch unless you mod it through desktop mode with protontricks)

The battery life on skyrim is amazing, elden ring though I can run on pretty high settings with solid fps, but 2 hours life is on a lucky day, most of the time I need to have it plugged in.

Docked I do not have the official dock but an aftermarket one, desktop mode is glitchy as hell and requires tweaking to work right when docked because when does linux ever work right out f the box. One thing to notice elden ring ran faster and the steam deck cooler when docked, for some reason when running at 720p or even fsr 720p upscaled to 4k it runs more efficient than on the steam decks native screen. However if you try and push true 4k out of it while docked it will run slow as it struggles with most modern triple a titles at true 4k but runs super fast at upscaled 4k in games that use fsr.
 
beerftw said:
The battery life on skyrim is amazing, elden ring though I can run on pretty high settings with solid fps, but 2 hours life is on a lucky day, most of the time I need to have it plugged in.
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I usually run elden ring capped at 30 FPS medium for this reason. Using that you can get as much as 3 hours depending on screen brightness.
 
I don't know what you all mean by the Steam Deck. I will say that I hate the Steam platform. I don't really care anymore about Steam since I play all my games on my Xbox One console. Saying goodbye to Steam forever was nice.
 
bicycleman said:
I don't know what you all mean by the Steam Deck. I will say that I hate the Steam platform. I don't really care anymore about Steam since I play all my games on my Xbox One console. Saying goodbye to Steam forever was nice.
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Steam deck is a nintendo switch on steroids. You can play emulated retro games, steam games, switch games, PSP, basically almost all games. And it runs on Linux, too
 
madman said:
Steam deck is a nintendo switch on steroids. You can play emulated retro games, steam games, switch games, PSP, basically almost all games. And it runs on Linux, too
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Thanks for the info Since I could play any games, does that include old DOS games as well? I guess when you say emulated retro games, you are probably talking the old dos games. I tried doing that with some old Elder Scrolls games, but it wouldn't work for me on my PC.
 
bicycleman said:
Thanks for the info Since I could play any games, does that include old DOS games as well? I guess when you say emulated retro games, you are probably talking the old dos games. I tried doing that with some old Elder Scrolls games, but it wouldn't work for me on my PC.
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The deck is considered the holy grail of handhelds.

DOS on the Deck
viewsink.com

Ditch the headache. Play your favorite DOS games on the Steam Deck with DOSBox!

Are you a sucker for classic 90s games but struggling to get them to work on your Steam Deck? This guide will show you how to get them up and running in just a few minutes. First, if you own a DOS game through Steam, there are a few options
viewsink.com viewsink.com

and can emulate the old Arcade games as well
 
madman said:
The deck is considered the holy grail of handhelds.

DOS on the Deck
viewsink.com

Ditch the headache. Play your favorite DOS games on the Steam Deck with DOSBox!

Are you a sucker for classic 90s games but struggling to get them to work on your Steam Deck? This guide will show you how to get them up and running in just a few minutes. First, if you own a DOS game through Steam, there are a few options
viewsink.com viewsink.com

and can emulate the old Arcade games as well
Click to expand...
Oh handheld. Well, that kills that sale I like big screens to play my games.
 
A friend of mine is a sucker for old dos games. I will tell him about the steam deck. He still wants to play games with an old joy stick. I keep telling him to go buy an Xbox controller that will work with Microsoft. It will take him awhile to get used to it, but after he does, he will never want to go back to a mouse and keyboard.
 
bicycleman said:
I don't know what you all mean by the Steam Deck. I will say that I hate the Steam platform. I don't really care anymore about Steam since I play all my games on my Xbox One console. Saying goodbye to Steam forever was nice.
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Gross. PC gaming is the superior gaming.
 
Fishking said:
Gross. PC gaming is the superior gaming.
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I agree with you, but with the Steam platform forcing me to download every update and PC games going to nothing but downloads and empty boxes, I knew I had to do something. I exist with a satellite ISP that limits my downloads to 12 gigs per month. Yeah, Xbox will make me update, but I know how to get around Xbox forcing me to update, though sometimes the games start crashing so much that I have to suck it up and take the update.
 
bicycleman said:
Oh handheld. Well, that kills that sale I like big screens to play my games.
Click to expand...
there is a dock in which you can connect it to your big screen. I agree with you, i prefer the big screen.
 
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