On hand Steam Deck game console, compact, beautiful but extremely powerful

The Steam Deck will be Valve’s big break.

As we reported, after a lot of leaked rumors in May, Valve officially announced the Steam Deck, a handheld game console that will be released later this year, promising to rival directly from the newly launched Nintendo Switch and Switch OLED handheld game consoles. Reporter Bo Moore of IGN news site had the opportunity to quickly get his hands on the world’s first Steam Deck right after the launch event ended to share with the gaming community about this new handheld game console of Valve.

The Steam Deck has a similar design to that of the Nintendo Switch but is slightly larger with the features of a complete PC Gaming. It runs a version of Valve’s operating system called SteamOS, complete with an interface similar to today’s other consoles and easy access to Steam. It can output to a removable screen as well as allowing users to install any 3rd party application.

In terms of hardware, Steam Deck has a 7-inch LCD screen with 60HZ refresh rate, 1280×800 resolution, equipped with AMD’s custom CPU with 4 cores, 8 threads, 8 RDNA 2 compute units for GPU and 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Practically speaking, that makes it significantly more powerful than the Switch, allowing it to run impressively current titles. Sharing with the gaming community, the IGN reporter said that the Steam Deck can completely play today’s games.

“To test the power of the Steam Deck, I tried playing a dozen different games on this machine, some of which were first-person Doom Eternal and Portal 2, some third-person, including Death Stranding. and Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, Stardew Valley and Hades. In most games, the console plays smoothly on the default graphics setting of 720p, which helps the Steam Deck stay cool during gameplay,” said the IGN reporter.

It has a control button system on the sides including two main scroll buttons, a D-pad and a four-button layout. There are also two touchpads – one on either side of the machine, under the thumbs – for added precision. The Steam Deck has eight triggers on its back.

“When I first got my hands on the Steam Deck, I admit that I was a bit surprised by the layout of its controls. Mainly because the thumbsticks fit the D-pad and the front-facing controls look a bit odd with higher arrangements than the Nintendo Switch. However, as soon as I held it myself, the composition felt completely natural: hand orientation is as comfortable when you hold the Steam Deck straight as it is on either side of a steering wheel. So it’s easy and natural for your thumb to touch the buttons on the side of the Steam Deck.”

During the Steam Deck experience, IGN also said that gamers can completely remove the pre-installed SteamOS and replace it with Windows. While that will likely affect the Steam Deck’s gaming performance (since this new version of SteamOS is optimized for Steam Deck hardware), it means gamers can install any what applications do you normally use on your PC (even installing crack games). Gamers can even install the Epic Games Store (Steam’s rival) to play the free games that the platform gives away every week.

The Steam Deck will be available in three different capacities and prices, with the same size and configuration. The cheapest version costs 399 USD (equivalent to 9 million VND) with 64 GB of storage. Next is the 256GB version of storage that costs 529 USD (more than 12 million VND) and the most expensive version costs 649 USB (nearly 15 million VND) with 512 GB of space and an anti-glare screen. The Steam Deck doesn’t have an official release date yet, but it’s currently set for a 2021 holiday release.

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