Upgrade your Steam Deck's GPU by turning it into a jury-rigged monstrosity

pcgamer.com:

Turns out you actually can upgrade the graphics in Valve's Steam Deck(opens in new tab) with an off-the-shelf GPU. So long as it's an AMD Radeon card, and you don't mind pulling the SSD out of its slot, you can get up to ten times the gaming performance of the stock Aerith APU.

The Steam Deck is a full gaming PC. That's something Valve has been keen to talk about since revealing its handheld gaming PC. And what do you do when your gaming PC doesn't have enough graphical grunt? You strap a new graphics card to it, which is exactly what YouTube channel, ETA Prime(opens in new tab), has just done.

This isn't the first time someone's plumbed a new GPU into their Steam Deck; UFD Tech had an RX 6600 XT running(opens in new tab) in one it picked up off Ebay for a likely offensive sum of money. But ETA Prime went further, a lot further, and has managed to plug an ASRock RX 6900 XT OC(opens in new tab) into one of Valve's handheld beasties.

Now, you may be asking how they got a desktop GPU into the confines of the Deck, and the answer is they obviously didn't. But neither did they use an external graphics card dock. That's because the Steam Deck has no Thunderbolt connection, just USB Type-C. That's a real shame, but what it does have is an M.2 PCIe connection for its SSD.

As it's essentially still just a x4 PCIe 3.0 slot you can use a simple adapter to wire a desktop GPU into the inner workings of your Deck. Unfortunately that does necessitate removing any SSD storage you have in there previously, and also means you have to boot from the SD card slot.

Currently that precludes using SteamOS 3.0 as it still isn't available to be installed to an external drive. But you can install Windows onto an SD card, and that will let you boot