Why I sold my gaming laptop to buy a Steam Deck
After waiting for almost a year, I finally have a Steam Deck. I’ve been excited about this device since Valve first announced it, and although the Steam Deck has some problems, I love using Valve’s handheld gaming PC. I love it so much, in fact, that the Steam Deck is replacing my Razer Blade 15 — a gaming laptop that costs over four times as much.
I won’t pretend like the Steam Deck is as powerful as a proper gaming laptop, or that it will kill gaming laptops overall. Calm down. But for me, I can’t find a reason to open the lid on my Blade now that the Steam Deck is in my hands. Here’s why.
The Steam Deck isn’t anywhere near as powerful as the best laptops, and there’s no question about that. On the Steam Deck, you’re looking at 720p at 30 fps for most modern AAA games, while going to 60 fps for older titles and indies. That’s vastly below even machines like the MSI GS66 Stealth, which come with a 1440p display capable of as high as a 240Hz refresh rate.
But the Steam Deck allows me to just pick up and play. I don’t have to fuss with graphics settings because I’m getting frame drops, I don’t have to mess around with my Xbox controller constantly losing its Bluetooth connection, and I don’t have to stay tethered to a massive power brick just to run games.
Look at the spec sheet on any gaming laptop — even if the GPU doesn’t tell the full story — and you’ll be convinced that it can tear through the most demanding games at the highest resolutions. And although that’s true for behemoths like MSI GE76 Raider, the reality of playing games on a gaming laptop is much different.
That reality is extremely loud fan noise, which is constant among gaming laptops from all vendors, and so much heat that you can’t even use the
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