Today Valve announced the Steam Deck, a new portable console that will be able to play your Steam library on the go, either in a portable form or on a separate screen when inserted into a dock. Its price ranges from $399 to $649 and Valve will begin shipping in December of 2021.
Pre-orders will open tomorrow on three different bundles of the Steam Deck. As noted below, pre-orders for the various bundles will open on Friday July 16 at 10am PDT. Here are all three of them via Steam/Valve:
Valve has partnered with AMD to develop the guts, nuts, and bolts of the Steam Deck, touting that “It is a Zen 2 + RDNA 2 powerhouse, delivering more than enough performance to run the latest AAA games in a very efficient power envelope.”
Valve, hoping to avoid pre-order problems that have plagued Microsoft and Sony recently, has put a restriction that the initial reservation will only be open to people that have made a purchase on their Steam account prior to June 2021.
You can learn more about reserving a Steam Deck right here.
According to IGN, which had a first look at the Valve’s new console, the Steam Deck has a 7-inch, 1280×800 resolution, 60hz LCD screen, a custom AMD APU featuring a 4-core, 8-thread CPU paired with 8 RDNA 2 compute units for the GPU, and 16 GBs of LPDDR5 RAM.
Below each joystick, there is a trackpad that can be used for mouse inputs and four buttons on the back of the console that can mapped to whatever you need as well.
It will support playing games off of Micro SD cards to expand the storage beyond the built-in storage.
The Steam Deck is compatible with most Bluetooth devices (whatever you could use with your PC) and will offer mouse and keyboard support while docked. The dock will be sold separately, but third-party USB-C adaptors will work fine as well according to IGN.
As we learn more about the Steam Deck today we will continue to update this post.
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