whoa i’m using gyro control
i’ve got an hour and a half hands on
with the valve
steam deck and i’m going to be plugging
as many dongles in and running as many
games as they’re going to let me run
i brought everything i need to answer as
many of your questions as i can
including a nintendo switch as well as
an a neo so i can compare ergonomics
as well as a thermal camera they won’t
let me open it even though i did bring
my eye fixture kit
just in case they were gonna allow it
they didn’t they didn’t i’m putting it
away i’m sorry
okay so at least maybe i can show you
guys you know hey where’s the cooling
system
where the where are the hot zones these
are early units these are engineering
units so these are going to be far from
the final experience
but i mean i’m going to be one of the
first in the world to even touch
rd and a2 hardware running on an apu
this is a game changer just like our
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[Music]
first things first they are not going to
let me directly capture off the device
today hopefully that
along with a disassembly is something
that we can follow up on for you guys
in the future but what we can do is we
can record the gaming experience this
this is it this is me picking it up
immediate
impressions absolutely raw ergonomics
of the handles of the controller itself
i think they’ve actually done a really
outstanding job i mean it shouldn’t be a
surprise the ill-fated steam controller
for all of its
quirks was absolutely a comfortable
controller to hold and in spite of the
fact that my hands are pretty small
like i am easily able to reach
everything from
these thumb pads to the joysticks the
d-pad and abxy i mean if you’re a retro
gamer if you want to play you know
emulated snazz games or anything like
that
this is what you’re going to be into and
ooh the feeling is actually pretty good
considering how early these units are
d-pad is smooth to roll but has a good
click for each individual direction
the abx y i can tell these are a little
bit early you can see you can actually
feel it the b
is a little bit different it’s a little
bit wobblier you can see it’s actually a
little bit of a different shape compared
to the other ones
it looks weird but it actually feels
exactly like the other ones to the thumb
so no problem there i like these valve
guys i walked in they said no no no no
no
no no no and then all of a sudden they
were like okay well you can
try your monitor and they’re saying you
can try to capture it’s not going to
work on this unit
but we might actually be able to do it
on the desktop docked one over there
these are in sandbox mode so we can’t
have the desktop experience
so that’s the thing you guys got to
understand this is not a game console
like a nintendo switch where it’s this
completely locked down thing
it’s going to run a custom version of
linux so all these games are going to be
running through the proton compatibility
layer but
fundamentally this is just a pc it’s a
zen 2 cpu with four
cores eight threads at anywhere from i
believe it’s 2.4 to 3.5 gigahertz
it’s going to have some kind of rdna2
based gpu integrated into it
16 gigs of lpddr5 memory and that bit is
critical
because it’s actually running at 5500
mega transfers per second
quad channel that’s insane we’ve
actually never seen to my knowledge
outside of bespoke console chips
we’ve never seen any kind of pc built
with that kind of memory bandwidth to an
integrated gpu
and you got to remember an integrated
gpu has to share bandwidth with the cpu
so the more you can have
the absolute better now in terms of
storage they’re going to have 64 gigs of
emmc
on the 399 unit that is not going to be
enough
thankfully the microsd expansion card uh
yes
right there you can actually see we’re
using it on these demo units
is going to allow you to install a much
larger game library than that i mean in
the terabytes
but microsd i mean especially when you
consider the way that game
development is going relying on these
super fast ssds and the playstation 5
and the
xbox series is it doesn’t feel very
future future-proof if i were you i’d go
for the 256 which is going to be
529 or the 128 which is going to be 649.
now that ssd is not upgradable but
i can pretty much guarantee that the
good folks that i fix it will find a way
a couple more housekeeping items it’s
got a 40 watt hour battery which is
fairly comparable to devices like the a
and neo
and this usbc port which is used for
charging is a bog standard usb c port so
that means you could use it with
standard peripherals like check this out
here’s a random five-year-old usb hub
i’ll plug it in
and boom i am using my mouse which is
important and i will show you guys why
this mouse is so important
later i mean really a huge part of the
story here for me
is the sheer choice available to the
gamer even before i plug in a mouse
and navigate the interface using that i
have
three different options for navigation i
can use the d-pad
i can use the thumbstick i can use the
touchpad which
i think they’ve still got a little bit
of tuning to do on the haptics but
it is a very interesting feel
definitely a step forward from the steam
controller of your
yeah it’s got a little bit too much uh
like kind of vibration
and not haptics right now we’re gonna
tune it he says yeah
i bet they will turning around to the
back we find a little confusing thing
that
may or may not get changed with the
final units uh we’re
whopping four buttons on both the right
and left sides
so you’ve got your l1 l2 this is an
analog trigger so it’s going to be great
for throttle control and things like
racing games
as well as l4 and l5 here is l3
bound to something else it’s bound to
pressing down the stick there you go
so uh it’s just a little bit of a weird
numbering thing there are in fact
four buttons down to each side and it’s
kind of up to you to decide how you want
to use them
after all that i forgot about a control
scheme touch
you can scroll through the game library
click on it and boom why don’t we play
some doom eternal
now valve has taken some criticism for
this move with some people saying that
1280×800 is not enough resolution in the
year 2021 but
i’m going to defend them here just like
i did with the a neo
and just like i did with the nintendo
switch oled edition
at this screen size it is enough
and from my perspective i would much
rather be running at 60 frames per
second more often it’s a 60hz display
compared to running at 30 frames per
second
and 1080p and we are still limited by
you know what is fundamentally an
ultrabook
crammed into a handheld gaming console
how awesome is this they’re at exactly
the same spot
as my save game on the a neo which is
just right near the beginning of the
game
this is cool this gives us a look at the
pause menu so we can adjust screen
brightness
audio oh that’s right it does have
built-in microphones
at least two of them i can’t remember if
there are more than that for noise
cancellation i do not
see any others but it does at least have
a
two mic array wi-fi bluetooth there’s an
advantage over the nintendo switch can
you even believe
the new oled one is not going to support
bluetooth headphones still
i mean talk about things that make no
sense in 2021 that
that right there we can turn haptics on
it well i want haptics on
okay now something that is built into
this game conveniently that they didn’t
tell me i’m not allowed to turn on
is performance metrics
oh hold on a second we gotta tune this
first though
this is this is an ugly default setup
here
you know what let’s tune them both at
the same time
okay yeah running at native resolution
that is not gonna be a thing
overall quality medium apply changes
yeah yeah go ahead and roll i mean this
is this is the experience ed
this is what the people want to see
okay so we’re getting anywhere from
around 40
we’re seeing some dips down to like 20.
that’s pretty much to be expected
i’m actually going to turn these
speakers down they do sound great though
i mean you do end up with a much larger
face
than something like the a neo but the
speakers are pointed at you so it kind
of comes back to the old htc one
like experience is it worth it to you to
have a big speaker girl looking at you
and you know actually be able to hear
what you’re listening to or do you want
a
kind of a sleeker looking device
the weight is good it’s got a good size
to weight ratio it doesn’t feel
cheap but it also doesn’t feel too heavy
i have not like compared the fps numbers
looking at exactly the same thing yet
but running almost all medium i turned
off motion blur because it’s for plebs
and like tuned a couple of other little
things but mostly medium and i locked it
at native resolution
valve had it set to dynamic resolution
which doesn’t tell us anything about the
performance
it is a way smoother experience so if
your question was
does rdna 2 run better than vega the
answer is
yes even if you have to sacrifice a
couple of cpu cores in order to get
there
oh valve also has the significant
advantage in terms of joystick although
to the aneo’s credit it’s a little bit
more
pocketable or like sleevable if you want
to slide it into a little pouch in your
backpack
you can see the profile especially if we
account for the height of the joysticks
is at least twice as deep
for the steam deck compared to um well
really i would say this is
the most comparable handheld on the
market right now
looking out into the skybox i don’t have
a lot of character models on screen or
anything like that
but based on this very early
hardware running very early software i
would be surprised if we don’t see
somewhere in the neighborhood of a 50
performance uplift
over a similarly equipped device and
what we know based on what valve has
told us about the internal battery
and the estimated battery run time is
that the power envelope of these two
chips
is fairly similar not bad
something i noticed holding them side by
side like this is that there’s a much
more muted glare
on the steam deck compared to the a neo
especially off
axis okay but this shouldn’t be a huge
mystery because they’ve actually
look at this they did r d check this out
so they’ve got different types of glass
over here that they’re showing us so
that we can compare what happens with an
anti-glare etched glass versus just a
regular glass that is going to
be like hey where’s my camera lens hi ed
can you see me
can you see me in the glass head okay
how about this one
can you see me no yeah but you’re not as
clear
right you only get the premium etched
glass on the 512
gig model but at 649 that’s starting to
look like a good deal just for the glass
i mean
apple wouldn’t even give you a stand for
their etched glass monitor at that price
now that we’ve got the game running well
it’s time to try some alternate control
schemes
these are touch sensitive joysticks so
as soon as i put my finger on it
whoa i’m using gyro control now valve’s
had support for gyro control with
playstation controllers for some time
now
but having it integrated into the device
rather than something that you need to
plug in a third-party controller in
order to use
is pretty freaking sick now it’s more
for
fine control i guess let’s see
yeah it’s more for fine-tuning your aim
so you get there with the stick and then
you fine tune
with the gyro that is pretty awesome
it’s a good way to like hold on target
while an opponent is
you know moving around or whatever
it’s gonna take me a little while to get
used to it for sure like the fact that i
have to touch this in order for it to
work
oh you can also touch this pad so you
can just be touching this pad and you
can look with this as well
so more like a like a touch pad but less
horrendous
what happens if uh like the meat of your
thumb
i think you just shouldn’t do that
honestly it’d be very hard to do that
like ergonomically
i don’t see it as a problem now that
both of these have been running due
maternal for about 15 minutes i’m ready
to talk about noise and thermals now
when it comes to fan noise there’s the
the volume like the the sound pressure
level but there’s also the quality of
the noise
and the a and neo though my
understanding is after the first 500
units they’re getting a different fan
along with analog triggers and a couple
of other little upgrades
definitely has a higher pitch to it
but i would say both of them are similar
in terms of their volume which makes
sense given that we’ve already inferred
that the power envelope of these chips
is quite similar
now i want to pull up thermal camera
i’ve been really looking forward to this
there’s two main reasons i want to look
at the thermals one is i want to see if
it will give me any hints as to the
internal layout of the device
and two is i want to know how
comfortable the touch surfaces are going
to be when you’ve been sitting gaming on
this thing for
half an hour an hour two hours five
hours who knows valve says it can go up
to eight hours if you’re running light
loads
although it should be noted it won’t get
nearly as hot when you’re running those
kinds of applications
curiously both the a and neo which we’re
looking at right now
and the steam deck have their hot spots
on the right so maybe there’s a good
reason that it was done that way
both of them managed to maintain very
reasonable grip temperatures but you can
see the a
neo is notably hotter so it’s sitting at
around
35 degrees around the left thumb stick
there
while the steam deck probably thanks to
the fact that
it’s larger is more in the neighborhood
of 27.
the touchpad is 29 just shy of 30 on the
right and
very similar over on the left hand side
let’s flip them over
there’s the a neo conveniently a shipped
me a clear unit so we can actually see
everything cpu’s here ssds here
batteries here
and then the actual heatsink is here so
that gives us a really
kind of good idea of what we’re what
these heat signatures might look like
uh okay well let’s see how we do here oh
okay there might actually be some
insights here
this is almost definitely our cpu slash
gpu this could be memory or storage
this big block here i’d be surprised if
it’s not a battery or something like
that it does have a little bit of
of heat output to it and this right here
now that’s interesting
that’s our intake but there’s quite a
lot of
thermal activity right around it you
know what maybe we can peek through this
grill and find out what that thing
you can see there’s a little there’s a
little outline here let’s see if we can
figure out what that is
nope the answer is a big fat no to my
eyes that is completely
impenetrable since we’re back here
though once again
grip temperature is advantage valve with
the a and neo being as high as 35
degrees where your index fingers might
rest around the back of the grip
and valve is sitting i mean maximum
28 degrees so they did go big
they lost that compactness but what they
gained is
a more enjoyable thermal experience for
the user
uh you guys are doing great in terms of
grip temperatures that’s their goal
see that oh nice so it’s like
night and day so there’s too much you
can see there’s too much uh kind of
leaked heat
from this uh heatsink here so the
intake’s here and there’s too much kind
of spreading out in this direction
and then you guys have basically kicked
it all
straight out it looks like you’ve got
pretty good kind of shrouding it looks
like we could probably use a longer
intake if i was to kind of
just look at this and say you know hey
what would i do not that you guys care
but it looks like there’s a little bit
more cooling needed here from the intake
because there’s still a pretty
significant heating
uh signature here even though there’s
nice fresh air coming in it looks like
you guys have some kind of shroud
covering whatever this is i’m
if i had to guess i’d say maybe ssd or
something like that but i don’t know for
sure obviously
there’s some kind of chipset there maybe
there’s a micro sd reader
i don’t know i don’t know only you can
know
you’ll find out soon yeah no there you
go apparently we’re not getting any
answers today
now one point of contention for some
users is the top
location of the charging slash usbc port
i can understand it both ways
on the one hand it’s a little bit more
ergonomic to have something hanging down
while you’re sitting like this
but on the other hand if you are you
know
lying in bed or something like that
that’s going to put a lot of strain on a
bottom mounted port now
aya obviously worked around this by just
having them on the top
and the bottom but valve for whatever
reason
didn’t seem to feel it was necessary to
add more so when you’re charging
or when you want to dock and plug into a
wired ethernet connection
you’re going to have something hanging
off of the top of the device
the good news is that as i mentioned
before the weight
is very comfortable so even having this
dongle hanging off of it
it’s not bad it’s not bad now it’s time
for the next act
valve was very particular about which
games we’re running i’m installing cs go
you know the developer has to give
permission so they didn’t have cs go on
these devices we had to get special
permission from the developer in order
to run it
in all seriousness that is fairly
standard practice at hardware launches
but the reason i want cs go is because
the m4 has a really bright muzzle flash
that i can use for the nvidia ldap
here we go now i pre-tested the a neo
and what we’re looking at with the ldap
is the total latency from click to
photon
so what kind of internal input lag the
steam deck might have
so far it’s felt really good but
feelings are just feelings
and numbers are better so we’re going to
go ahead and strap this on
i pre-adjusted it
i’m kind of expecting it to be a little
bit smaller
in person but that’s okay
this is quite an unusual control scheme
i wouldn’t expect most people to prefer
it but
hey there you go what’s interesting is
even though we’ve loaded up a few games
now
whether we’re coming off of the internal
ssd or the microsd expansion card it’s
been
fine but then direct storage also you
know isn’t a thing yet
um so we’ll see then again direct
storage on learn linux commands linux online training (Vps Evlla write an article) will that even
will that even be a thing it’s hard to
play with the ldap covering the screen
the game’s running really smoothly
though i’ve been extremely pleased
with the gaming experience in everything
i’ve tried so far
okay i want to get about 20 if i can
we got 40 seconds till the bomb goes off
okay good enough on average it is
measurably better than the anu and this
is even in its early state right now
what they’re showing here is a
functionality called bookmarks where i
mean if you’ve been paying attention to
steam for the last
15 years it’s got a built-in web browser
right
so essentially what you’re doing is
you’re just bookmarking a web page
whether it’s something like twitch or
netflix
and you’re able to use it to consume
content on them
that’s pretty cool i could see people
hacking all kinds of fascinating
functionality into this
just like that eh let’s go ahead and
pick something people won’t judge me for
responsive man i wish it had an oled
display
i truly do and this is an area where the
720p
resolution does hurt it more in my
opinion than in gaming
something where you’re supposed to have
that super sharp cinematic look versus a
game where
you know honestly you’re moving around
so much all the time that your eyes
natural motion blur is going to fill in
a lot of the gaps
1080p would have been nice for content
consumption
credit to valve for their tuning of the
display out of the box by the way at
least
at this early stage of development they
haven’t put it in any kind of gross
vivid profile everything looks to my eye
accurate to what i would expect from a
color accurate display so that’s awesome
scott insisted i show this one this is a
mind-blowing demonstration this
my friends is online multiplayer that’s
right i’ve got one pc here
and over the power of the internet scott
look at this we are playing a co-op game
he’s on his steam deck
you guys are super tech savvy you guys
know what’s up this thing is a
full-fledged gaming pc so if it wasn’t
already clear
that’s it it’s one of those but smaller
hey i just got permission to try my own
monitor let’s see what happens
i would like to try usbc displayport in
is it worth a shot all right hey should
be fine that’s famous last words right
there hey
if it doesn’t work if this even makes it
into the video we’re not
just like that so if you weren’t already
convinced that this is a full
fat pc just in a handheld form factor
well this should pretty much do it so
can i just i’m going to switch to
external screen right that sounds right
because it’s not a laptop but the
the os for running things as a laptop
and if you were curious if it’s going to
run 4k
60 hertz um that’s your answer right
there i think oh it might be at 30 right
now
it’s hard to tell i’m so used to uh no
it’s at 60 hertz
freaking awesome just like that how
relieved are you guys right now
pleasantly surprised we’re gonna go for
full completion here
uh extend to right oh yeah so this is we
plugged it
down honestly the fact that it’s working
this well already
is mind-blowing to me so we can even use
this display as a secondary display i
mean
imagine that right you’re gaming on your
steam deck you’ve got your twitch chat
up on your actual steam deck while
you’re using your monitor to play your
game or whatever like
i’ll take it by the way they’re working
on their own dock
this is uh daisy chain of
right angle type c connectors indicates
that valve has
in fact noticed that the top mounted
type c is
something that does need to be overcome
but that’s okay they have very skilled
engineers and i’m sure they’re going to
sort it out
haha first time lttstore.com has been
fired up on valve’s campus actually
probably not there’s enough nerds that
work here
any valve employees out there already
got this shirt it’s the new color of our
do not drop shirt
oh yeah mouse pads are in stock like for
the first time in a very long time
valve’s making me pack up and get out
before i can test all my controllers but
i’m sure they’ll have that compatibility
pretty much sorted out one thing i do
want to squeeze in before we go
is a quick size comparison with the
original nintendo switch
this is not the upcoming oled one you
can see it can it could basically
dock under the steam deck
but okay yeah it’s got a size advantage
but that’s to be expected given that
it’s
kind of like comparing a full-blown you
know apu equipped ultrabook
pc with four or five-year-old mid-tier
smartphone in terms of hardware
and i’ve got one more thing to squeeze
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credit if you guys enjoyed this video
check out our full review of the and neo
which is the closest thing that the
steam deck has to a competitor
the steam deck is expected to be
shipping sometime in december of this
year
with orders placed now already somewhere
in the middle part of next year so what
that’s going to mean for the competitive
landscape
well with our dna 2 apu’s probably
coming around that time
it’s going to be very interesting i’m
excited