The Steam Deck is INCREDIBLE! (2023) – My Steam Deck 64GB Review 6 Months Later

this right here is the steam deck I've had it now for about six months and it's honestly changed the  way I gained this thing really got me back into gaming so let's talk about it I've taken the steam  Deck with me on two trips abroad first to Egypt a few months ago and very recently to Jordan and  I love this thing man I really do uh on my trip to Egypt I played Limbo to completion  and then on my trip recently to Jordan I just played Vampire Survivors non-stop it  was it was it was Bliss pure Bliss and this is such a great machine such a great machine  so let's talk about a bit more so this thing has a custom AMD AP on the CPU side it's a Zen 2 chip  with four cores and 8 threads with a base clock of 2.4 gigahertz and it can boost all the way up to  3.5 and on the GPU side it has 8 RDNA 2 CUs with a base clock of 1 gigahertz and it can  boost all the way up to 1.6 so that means that this thing has roughly 1.6 teraflops of compute  in this in this package which is pretty incredible so to put this in perspective the steam deck has  1.6 teraflops of compute and if you compare that to the previous generation of consoles so say the  PS4 for instance that has about 1.86 teraflops and the Xbox One S is roughly about the same I think  it's slightly higher but that puts this portable PC on par with the previous gen of consoles which  is just incredible genuinely very very impressive it also comes with 16GB of RAM across all the  different models and speaking of the models there's three different ones depending on how  much storage you want on your steam deck so the base model has 64GB of eMMC storage one tier  off from that is a 256 and one here off from that is a 512. both the 256 and 512GB have nvme ssds  so they are faster than the the base model and the 512GB model also comes with an anti-glass screen  that being said it's easy enough to literally just flip this around take out the screws on  the back pop it open and then within maybe like 10 minutes you can just unscrew the SSD pop in a  new one a new and you're good to go and also the difference in load times between the internal SSD  and a good high quality SD card is really not much so personally I'd say the base model is  more than enough for most people but we'll come on to that later all right so let's talk about  the screen this is a big device and accordingly it has a big screen so this is a 7 inch display  with a resolution of 1200 by 800 pixels and the aspect ratio of the screen is 16 by 10.  so what that means is really this has has a fairly low pixel density screen especially compared to  something like a phone right most phones tend to come with fairly High pixel density displays  just because you're using it so close to your face but on on the steam deck it's essentially a 1080p  display stretched across seven inches and you'd assume that because you know you're holding it  fairly close to your face you'd be able to pixel peep but not really I mean it's you're holding  it far enough from yourself most of the time you know compared to like a phone that it's not too  bad and genuinely I really like this display it's an LCD panel not an OLED unfortunately  but the the colors are vibrant and you know if you want to bump up the saturation a bit more  you can view some some tweaks that you know like I can get into in the in a future video  but obviously you don't really have the the Deep blacks of an outlet so that's a bit of a  shame but regardless the display is fantastic and I love it very good so the battery life  as I mentioned before so far I've only really played indie games on on this thing so I pay  I played limbo two completion and then I played well I've I'm currently playing Vampire survivors  quite a lot so in my experience when you're playing indie games or like something that  has like a fairly low barrier to entry something that isn't too demanding to play the steam deck  has a surprisingly good battery life personally I think it normally lasts me around say say five to  six hours of screen on time it charges up fairly quickly as well you know it comes with a fairly  High wattage charger so that's good so if you were to play more demanding games like say most AAA  titles you could probably cut that quite easily in half so it depends on what you're playing it  depends on how you're gonna use the steam deck but generally speaking battery life is somewhere in  the region of three hours up to like say six three to six which I think is good it's very rare that  you'd go say five to six hours without really having access to a charger so it's not too bad  obviously more battery life is always better but before the performance you get out of the steam  deck and all its capabilities the the battery life is good okay so let's talk about games so  the steam store the steam storefront is the I guess the the biggest storefront in the world  with regards to games it has the largest amount of games and I guess the widest variety of games  as well generally speaking you know if you buy something on Steam it tends to be the cheapest  place that you'll find here as well just because of the way that the the sole front works I would  assume that steam takes a slightly lower cut than say Sony and Microsoft or Nintendo and also they  don't really have to deal with physical games as such well at all really so generally steam tends  to be quite cheap another great thing about the steam deck is because it's basically just  a PC you can access other storefronts like say the epic game store or Gog or you know a bunch  of others if you configure it correctly in the in the desktop mode which is something I'll get  to in a future video as well just showing you how to set up and configure all of these all of these  different launches and all of that I haven't done it yet to be honest and it's something I'm looking  forward to getting set up and probably the thing I love most about this thing is you know because  it's a portable gaming console um it's just the accessibility of being able to play my favourite  games both indie games and AAA titles essentially whenever and wherever I want it's it's similar to  the switch in that in that regard in the sense that you know when Nintendo first released the  switch it was such a I don't know I don't want to say groundbreaking idea but it was such a clever  play to have a significantly more powerful handheld console than normal and having the  ability to play Massive open world games like you know like breath of the wild or like Mario  Odyssey or you know all of the games on the switch having the ability to play that wherever you want  and obviously the exact same thing can be said about the steam deck night mode just turned on  you know just the I guess just the the ease of access of being able to play you know small indie  games like vampire survivors or like you know Hades up to massive AAA titles like Elden ring  Hogwarts Legacy and you know stuff like that right it's just the the sheer variety and sheer depth of  games that you can play on this thing is is just incredible and also because this is linked to your  Steam account there's Cloud saves available so you know if you were to play say I don't know  Elden ring on your steam deck and you put it down and you pick it back up on your PC you should you  know theoretically at least most of the time be able to seamlessly pick up where you left off on  the steam deck just on your gaming PC and another great thing is all the different streaming options  available uh I mean specifically game streaming obviously right so there's for example Xbox game  pass you know if you have Xbox game pass ultimate then you can essentially it's a bit of a hacky way  to do it but you know there's instructions up on the official Xbox website on how to get it set up  on your steam deck you know you can set up um Xbox cloud gaming xCloud as it's called on your steam  deck you can set up remote play as well from both your PS5 and your Xbox series S and X and  also you can set up Moonlight game streaming so Moonlight is essentially a game streaming  service that streams from your I guess main gaming PC to other Hardware so you could set this up with  moonlight connected to your main gaming rig and just stream games across that way and you know  at least at least with remote play and moonlight because you're not streaming over the internet you  should have fairly low latency and you know pretty good solid connection so that should be something  that works pretty seamlessly and that's actually another thing I'm looking forward to setting up  and trying out and in terms of comfort this thing is very ergonomic it's very comfortable  to hold so it really reminds me a lot of the Wii U gamepad poor thing poor Wii U man uh sometimes I  just think back on that console and how badly Nintendo just decided to they just did thispoor thing on poor thing poor thing because especially like all they had to do all they had  to do was call it the we too instead of the Wii U but no you know this is Nintendo being being just  themselves uh and you know the advertising was poor just everything about you oh man poor thing  it's a great console amazing console but yeah just lack of third-party support lack of sales  I mean I swear I think the switch out sold the Wii U in the first like first few months of his life  right would you just ah sad sad times around sad time anyway back to the steam deck so this thing  well that was a tangent and a half um but yeah this thing really does bring me back  to the Wii U gamepad it's it's a pretty similar like size and shape it's a bit more like compact  vertically but uh it's about as ergonomic it's it's good it's nice to hold it's it's Hefty as  well which again is pretty similar to the to the Wii U gamepad there's quite a bit of heft  to this thing but because of the ergonomics or the handles on either side and just the  way like everything is placed I really enjoy playing on this thing like it doesn't really  fatigue me too much yeah so I don't really feel too much fatigue from playing on the steam deck  it's it's the joy to use it's very comfortable and yeah it's good fun it's good fun so I mentioned  before about how the steam storefront is probably the most prolific storefront the  game storefront in the world right so another consequence of that is the fact that there's  a wide plethora of community mods available for most games out there so even if you have  a game on another system say for example like uh start you value right I have that on the switch  play through most of you on the switch but I decided to buy it again on Steam a because it  was on sale it was at its historical low and also because there's a lot of mods available for StardewValley to really change up the game how it plays and how it looks and everything really so that's  another thing even if you already have a game on another system on another platform it might  be a good idea to buy it again on Steam you know this again there's cheaper ways of buying steam  keys not necessarily through the steam storefront itself you can go through like CD keys or um or  bundle deals or stuff like that and again that's another video I'm going to have coming up soon  how to Be Clever about the way you buy games and how to get games as cheaply as possible but yeah  so all the tinkering or the modding that happens with games on Steam might make it a good idea to  potentially purchase a game again and also as I said before this thing is it's literally just a  PC that happens to be running basically Steam Big Picture Mode and there is a desktop mode right so  if you hold down the power button you can go down switch to desktop wait for it to load and thenboom you have a desktop interface it's perfect everything just works and if you want all you  have to do is plug in a a mouse and a keyboard and you could literally use this as your main  PC if you really if you really wanted to and you know there's there's other ways to I guess  install other operating systems so if you want to dual boot Windows and Steam OS you can if  you want to add the third which is let's say I don't know Batocera or Ubuntu you can as  well there's so much available right now for the steam deck and there's so much community  support for it and there's so much that you can do with this thing that it's genuinely incredible  um I man I really enjoy it I really do so overall is the steam deck worth it oh I should probably wait  switching back from desktop to gaming mode screen's just gone black so there  we go there we go logos back and it is back it's back don't worry I didn't break anything  huh so good it is all good anyway so is the steam deck worth it and I think the answer is an easy  resounding yes for about 300 I think 350 dollars right for the base model this is such an easy yes  it's it's incredible like especially because right now um it's readily available in most countries  just to buy out right so if you compare the value proposition well say the the price the performance  of the steam deck versus other handhelds on the market like say the switch or any of these these  millions of Chinese handhelds it really does blow the competition out of the water and obviously  that's because Valve is subsidizing the price of the steam deck because they assume they'll make  up the difference and more by people purchasing games on their storefront so so it's a bit unfair  to compare it price wise to other consoles on the market um which you really don't have that ability  because they don't have their own storefronts but regardless the steam deck is an amazing buy and  I'd highly recommend it it's genuinely man it's genuinely changed the way I game I guess I have  these phases right where you know sometimes I'm into gaming sometimes I'm not and Hades really  pulled me back in on the switch I think this time last year and nothing was really doing it  for me until I really sat down and played vampire survivors on this thing so okay so it's clearly  worth it right but which model of the steam deck should you buy you know I alluded to this  previously but I think by far the best value is the base model just the standard 64 gig model buy  that for 350 spend another I don't know like 50 60 on a good micro SD card you can get probably a  512 gig for about I think about the 60 Mark if you want to go up to one terabyte you basically just  just double it so it's more like 110 120 so stick that in and then if you if you do in the future  really want to upgrade your internal storage maybe you want to install you know other operating  systems all you do again as I said before take out the screws on the back pop this off and swap  out the SSD so for a one terabyte internal SSD in the 2230 size that's probably going to set  you back roughly somewhere in the region of 100 to 150 dollars depending right you can find them on  eBay pretty pretty easily and it should just work I think the the standard is the Western Digital so  the the WD SN740 just by either the 512 gig the one terabyte or the two terabyte model the one  terabyte probably is The Sweet Spot and that goes roughly for one 100 to 150 if you really do want  the anti-glare screen all you need to do is buy a screen protector that has anti-glare properties  slap that on and then for I don't know so all in let's say for roughly around five hundred  dollars you you now have a steam deck that has twice the storage of the highest available model  right now but you've only paid about 500 so you've saved a good 100 to 150 dollars  just by buying the base model and upgrading as needed so yeah just buy the base model buy a a  good micro SD card if you want to upgrade the storage later feel free but that's that's what  I'd say if you're looking to get a Steam Deck of your own and you and you want to know what  the unboxing experience is like click up here for my unboxing and I'll catch you next time so yeah