Steam Deck vs. Gaming Laptop: Which Should You Buy?
The Steam Deck lobbed an unexpected grenade into the PC gaming world, distilling the handheld PC gaming experience into a simple, approachable, and affordable device. Gaming laptops are versatile but expensive and lack the ultra-portable handheld convenience of Steam’s device. That may sway you towards Valve’s handheld, but the Deck’s shortcomings shouldn’t be overlooked.
Gaming laptops are available in numerous configurations and sizes that range from bottom-barrel budget devices with AMD or Intel integrated graphics to high-end models with powerful GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30/40 series and AMD’s Radeon RX 6000M line. Modern gaming laptops also ship with Intel Core and AMD Ryzen processors that, in most cases, have at least eight cores. Maximum power draw can be extremely high, with the most powerful gaming laptops exceeding 250 watts at load.
The Steam Deck always ships with the same, slightly customized AMD APU. It includes a four-core, eight-thread CPU based on AMD’s Zen 2 architecture, which also appears in numerous Ryzen 4000 and Ryzen 5000 mobile processors (and some Ryzen 7000 models, too). The integrated Radeon GPU has eight RDNA 2 Compute Units, equivalent to those found in many Ryzen laptop APUs. The Steam Deck’s APU is restricted to a mere 15 watts of power—at stock settings, at least.
Performance varies widely, of course, but even the least capable gaming laptops are roughly as powerful as the Steam Deck. IGN's Steam Deck review tested its capabilities with the 3DMark Time Spy gaming benchmark, which hit a score of 1,715. That’s slightly behind a laptop with Intel Iris Xe graphics, which scored 1,837, and way behind a budget gaming laptop with Nvidia GTX 1650 graphics, which scored 3,764.
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