Valve’s Steam Deck portable gaming console finally coming on this date

In July 2021, Valve Corp unveiled Steam Deck, the company’s first ever hand-held gaming console. It was slated to hit stores in the US, UK and other select global markets in December. But, due to the chipset shortage, the scheduled release was deferred indefinitely.

Now, the company has announced that the portable Steam Deck will be finally available for purchase online from February 25 onwards and the delivery process will commence on February 28.

For the uninitiated, the new Steam Deck sports a wide 7.0-inch HD+ (1,280x800p) LCD panel with a 16:10 aspect ratio. It supports up to 60Hz display refresh rate and offers close to 400 nits of peak brightness.

Besides the touch-sensitive display, it also features an ambient light sensor, stereo speakers, and a dual microphone array.

The new Steam Deck comes with a standard D-Pad, two full-size analog sticks with capacitive touch one on each side, A B X Y buttons on the right, bumpers, triggers, two trackpads, and also comes with a built-in gyro (6-Axis IMU) sensor.

On the rear side, it houses four additional buttons that can be assigned with new controls during game playing. The Steam Deck can also be connected to wired/wireless peripherals including keyboards, mouse, and PC too.

Furthermore, it supports Dock to connect with HDMI or DisplayPort to an external display. It also features 3.5mm stereo headphone / headset jack, Bluetooth 5.0 (support for controllers, accessories and audio), and Wi-Fi (Dual-band: 2.4GHz and 5GHz, 2 x 2 MIMO, IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac).

Under-the-hood, Valve's Steam Deck houses AMD's custom APU, optimized for handheld gaming. The APU's power ranges from 4W to 15W, which promises to deliver more than enough performance to run the latest AAA games very efficiently.

It is backed by AMD Zen 2 architecture-based 8-thread quad-core CPU, which can clock speed in the range of 2.4GHz and 3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32). Its GPU comes with 8 RDNA 2 Compute Units (CUs) that range from 1.0GHz to 1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32). It features 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM (5500 MT/s) and the company is offering the Steam Deck in three storages-- 64GB eMMC (PCIe Gen 2 x1), 256GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4) and 512GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4). All three support microSD card slots and users can use SD, SDXC, and SDHC standard memory cards.

The new Steam Deck hand-held gaming console. Credit: Valve Corp

Valve's new gaming console runs Arch Linux-based SteamOS 3.0 and users can install games in addition to installing and using PC software. Users can browse the web, watch streaming videos, do the normal productivity stuff, install some other game stores.

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It comes packed with a 40Whr battery and depending on the type of the game, it promises to deliver seven to eight hours of gameplay. The USB Type-C port supports 45W charging and also be used to connect to the PC, monitor, or TV too.

Among the three, the 512GB model will be the fastest and also come with premium anti-glare etched glass, exclusive carrying case, exclusive Steam Community profile bundle, exclusive virtual keyboard theme. It costs $649 (around Rs 48,453).

The 256GB model comes with faster storage (compared to 64GB), a carrying case, and an exclusive Steam Community profile bundle. It costs $529 (roughly Rs 39,494).

On the other hand, the 64GB model comes with just the carrying case for $399 (approx. Rs 29,789).

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