Watch the first Steam Deck hardware reviews — nearly two hours of impressions
Valve will finally start selling the $400 Steam Deck gaming handheld on February 25th, after a two-month delay — but you won’t have to wait another minute to see hardware in reviewers’ hands. GamersNexus, Linus Tech Tips, and The Phawx have now published extensive impressions to YouTube with the final version of the Steam Deck, giving us their thoughts on ergonomics, performance, battery life, and more.
While you shouldn’t take these as final Steam Deck reviews — Valve only let them test specific games, and they had to stay away from the underlying OS — I’m pretty sure you’ll get useful info from each of them if you’re on the fence.
For instance, none of them are seeing quite the battery life that Valve’s been promising, which is kind of key for a portable, no? Both GamersNexus and The Phawx were able to drain it dry in just 1.5 hours playing Devil May Cry 5 and Control, respectively, on higher settings without VSync, and neither of them was able to reach Valve’s suggested eight hours of light play / remote play no matter what they did.
A few other assorted battery life tests:
In general, The Phawx says “it’s pretty easy to get four hours” with the Steam Deck, but only if you’re running games at 30Hz, half the screen’s refresh rate. I might be OK with that in a bunch of titles, but a racing game like Forza? Ehhh. Valve is still working on possible power-saving techniques, however.
The flip side of battery life is performance, though, and there, everyone seems just as impressed as I was in my original hands-on. So far, the Steam Deck seems to totally outrun other recent portable PCs like the latest Aya Neo and the GPD Win 3, and you don’t have to take anyone’s word for that: The Phawx includes 10 straight minutes of
Read more on theverge.com
