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Consoles and handhelds · Valve Steam Deck

Valve Steam Deck OLED

24owners with an opinion
77%of verdicts positive
17/5positive/negative since 2024
2 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and display; criticized for battery and ease of use.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like itOwned 1 year
Really tempted to sell mine. I have a 1TB OLED that I think I paid $649 for last year. It's a dumpsterfire* of a device and I hate it and never use it. Could easily sell it for more than I paid for it. * Too big and heavy to hold without sitting and resting it on my lap, which is a horribly-unergonomic position with neck strain. Controls are widely-separated such that even with my giant sasquatch hands, it's hard to reach all the buttons. So many buttons on it that there's nowhere to hold it without accidentally pressing them (I accidentally turn it off every time I use it). Loud fan and hot air blowing out. Few games I like that work well without a keyboard and mouse. Even fewer that have readable text on the tiny screen. CPU/GPU too weak for many games. Almost no games targeting the platform so UX feels hacky. Honestly I don't know what the market for this is. I bought it to use in my RV and figured even if I didn't use it as a console, it'd be good connected to a proper monitor/keyboard/mouse, but a lot of titles don't work well under emulation, even after eliminating the hardware UX issues.
Likes itOwned 1 year
I bought a Steam Deck OLED last year, and it's honestly astounding to me how well it both provides an amazing out-of-the-box experience for both the "gaming mode" Steam interface and the "desktop mode" with a regular Linux desktop without sacrificing basically any customization. It's a glorified tablet that in my baggiest pair of jeans I can just barely fit into my pocket, and somehow probably the most realistic attempt I've seen at making something suitable for the mythical "year of the Linux desktop", which wasn't even the goal! It's also so clear to me in retrospect how long they've been building up to something like this. Investing in Wine and developing proton to make running Windows games on Linux as frictionless as possible, dipping their toes in hardware with much less ambitious projects like the Steam link and the controller for it so that they weren't going in without any experience as a company dealing with physical products...I can't imagine that this would have been able to pull for for most companies due to how much they had to be willing to invest in long-term endeavors that couldn't be guaranteed to succeed. I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say that they might have single-handedly lifted up Linux gaming to the point where I'll never end up using Windows on a personal machine again, and that's because they put so much time and effort into the tooling for running the games independent of their distribution network. At this point, I probably wou…
NeutralOwned 1 year
With the OLED model the lowest you'll get is maybe 1.5h on heavy games. That seems .. okay to me. It's not super great, but it's more than enough to play a more demanding game during a break or something. I played nontrivial portions of the Dead Space and Resident Evil IV remakes on the Deck over the past year and I didn't mind it, once I got used to the low frame rates, anyway. BG3 was similarly fine until act 3, though it admittedly falls apart then.
Likes it
This has ruined my optimism for the steam machine. I love my Steam Deck OLED, I don't play high end games at low settings or low framerates. I play older games, simpler indie games and it's an absolute joy for that. This price increase is a hard sell still, makes me stick to the mantra of don't upgrade or buy anything unless there is no other option. I'll just play different games, read a book, watch TV. There so much media out there, I don't want to be drawn into this AI RAM pricing war on products. /rant
Likes it
I'm someone who's fairly sensitive to PWM. Have tried and returned iPhones, Pixels, and similar. Steam's OLED doesn't bother me. I think it's the same screen as the Switch OLED which also doesn't bother me. Wish Apple and Google would buy from that supplier. But in general you're correct. When given a choice, I'll generally buy IPS when I can.
Likes it
I have the switch 2 and an OLED steam deck and it's not even close - the switch 2 screen is just not very good. To a point where if you have grey on grey movement you can see visible smearing like it's some old LCD from 20 years ago. When an OLED version comes out I'll definitely upgrade(so I guess the joke is on me, because I'll end up buying the same console twice just to have the screen that it should have had from the beginning)
Recommends it
Just get a Steam Deck. it's an incredible value for what you get and for what it can do. I'm no expert, but I do pay as close attention as I can to what's going on with gaming hardware because of my limited budget, and I'm guessing Steam Deck 2 is more like Q1 2028, not any time sooner. I'm ok with that. I play all the games I want on my Steam Deck OLED, and I see plenty of life left in it, even this "late" in the game.
Likes it
I dropped my Game Pass sub immediately after they upped the sub price and unplugged my Xbox Series X. I have a Bazzite machine, but I've had issues with the NVidia drivers and not enough patience to deal with it. So i'm currently ONLY using my Steam Deck OLED for gaming. When i want to play big AAA games at my desk (SD in docked mode), i'll use GeForce Now and all of it has been a wonderful experience, even the online "competitive" FPS games like BF6. Much better than my experience on either Windows or Xbox. I'll never go back... and i'm impatiently waiting on my Steam Machine!
Likes it
seconding this. I bought a SteamDeck OLED -- and it blows my mind more people havent heard about these. it's essentially a bad ass handheld laptop. yes it plays games great, but the OS side when you boot into desktop mode is quite capable - I spend more time on it than my home pc these days
Doesn’t like it
> It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more. I had the original Steam Deck and the OLED Steam Deck and neither of them would hold a charge past a day or so. It's a constant annoyance for me as I don't want to leave it plugged in 24/7 but if I don't, it won't be ready to go when I use it. I often end up playing while plugged in which is just silly. A week of battery (while it's "off") would be amazing, it feels like I can't get 24hrs without the battery being trash. Compare this to my iPad or MBP and the difference is stark. I really only use my Switch in docked mode (the joycons suck) so I don't have a good read on how long it holds it's battery but I assume it must be better than the Steam Deck.
Likes it
Interesting to see this is so variable. I got a Steam Deck OLED a few months ago. I haven't changed the standby behaviour at all. I can get a bit less than a week of standby + a few hours of gaming out of the box. Currently, my deck is on 52% charge after last charging it 4 days ago and playing ~3 hours of Silksong across those days.
Neutral
This is a project that had been eating away at me for a bit, sitting in the back of my mind. It's a computer that fit's perfectly underneath an Apple Magic Keyboard, and has a compartment to store peripherals like a dongle or small mouse. It has no display, instead opting for XR display glasses. The internals are the main board, cooler, and battery from a Steam Deck OLED. I bought the parts separately rather than gutting a perfectly good one. The link is to the CAD files. I decided to open source it as I explore building a better one. Feel free to jump straight to that, here's the origin story for anyone interested: I started using the XREAL glasses a few months ago. they're great, easily my favorite "XR" product. It's built around the one killer app of XR, a virtual display. shedding all non-essential hardware into a small, lightweight package. but I hate the redundancy. Whatever device I'm using it with, the built in screen goes unused. In parallel, I've also found myself extremely disappointed in each product calling itself a "spatial computer" despite being nothing but an overweight iPad for your face. I wanted a real computer designed to be used with these glasses, and in the smallest package I could possibly achieve. So I grabbed an actual iPad, downloaded Shapr3D and got to work. My iteration process involved jumping back and forth between my iPad and a 3D printer. I went through roughly 15 failed iterations getting the screw mounts, airflow, and ergonomics just right.…
Doesn’t like it
I also own a Deck OLED and I have to disagree on the polish. When I first got it, there were so many little issues with compatibility, crashes, and straight up freezes, I even considered returning it. It got better since, but if you try to use anything but Steam games, it's death by 1000 papercuts.
Likes it
I’ve been playing MHWorld on my steam deck OLED (low settings) at a consistently smooth 60fps. The only hiccup is the new map introduced in the Iceborne DLC (hoarfrost reach, the area covered in snow) hovers around 55-57. Side note, I’m afraid they’re going to bork MHWorld in an update too. Which would be hugely disappointing as I’ve easily put 100 hours into the game on deck alone.
Doesn’t like it
I have a steam deck OLED and I am very happy with it, but there are a few minor annoyances I don't see a lot of people talking about: The 800px screen size is lackluster and very noticeable for that size of screen (dunno about the LCD deck). It is one of the main reasons texts are not very readable in some games. Games that use non-standard fonts (which is quite common surprisingly) and haven't been made with small screens in mind (or have an UI-size slider) have this problem a lot. Besides the fonts the low resolution is still noticeable, but not a HUGE issue. I hope they bump it up to 1080p for the next model. Another thing is that games don't go on suspend mode once you go to steam menus like other consoles do. The game is still running in the background (with audio and everything). In fact there is no game-suspend functionality at all, only having the device fully going to sleep actually pauses the game. Going to desktop mode and back to steam-mode takes quite some time, making dual-use a bit annoying. It seems KDE is not actually running in the background if you are in steam mode. Which is fair enough I suppose, but the thing has 16gb of RAM, a toggle to make both load at the same time would be nice.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
You can do less on the OLED with a few tweaks in the quick menu. Specifically the OLED because it has a more efficient APU. Limit APU to 3W, disable radio, maybe more. > Anyway X86 is the past, risc-v is so completely lost into eternal future... only ARM really works right now. I don't disagree but all of the recent Raspberry Pis have worse performance, cost more than x86, and barely use less power. There are so much better examples to showcase ARM.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
The people buying this will be a small niche who have a lot of disposable income, already have a high spec gaming PC and a Steam library, and likely already have a laptop or handheld before considering this as a third device for the living room. At these prices, it's not going to convince console gamers/more casual gamers to move to Steam. Steam Deck was also vastly more appealing at launch when the base model was £349 (64GB/LCD). It now starts at close to twice the price, £649 (512GB/OLED) despite the hardware being kind of old at this point.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
It's not like wired earbuds/headphones are invincible either. I've had a few wired ones lost due to cable damage, which constitutes more casualties than my wireless inventory, including noticeable charge loss. Of course, there are a lot more cheap wired options with replaceable cables now, thanks to Moondrop and gang. I really wish the debate was more than jack vs Bluetooth, and more wired fans would consider supporting devices with multiple USB-C ports. Yeah, Sony still puts a jack on Xperias, but most audiophiles note that it's driven by Snapdragon's mediocre integrated DAC, possibly because Sony doesn't want it to compete with Walkmans. Yeah, Valve puts a jack on the Steam Deck, but SD OLED's jack has interference issues that users need to fix with electrical tape or loosening screws. If these devices had two USB ports, then it would be easy to use a better DAC with no interference issues (while also charging with a cable attached to the other port). Having a second USB port would increase device life, and tie wired earbuds/headphones to a more durable standard that's actively developed and backed by legislation. We know this is possible for phones because ASUS ROG Phone has 2 USB ports.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
The article is full of shit. SD Express cards, by virtue of being PCI-E x1 or x2, top out at whichever gen of PCI-E they implement. Lets say its a brand new 4.0 card that implements x2 lanes, that is 3.93GB/s maximum speed (there aren't any 5.0 cards yet, afaik, but double that for 5.0). Want to know where that 900MB/s figure came from? A 3.0 x1 card is 984MB/s. That is the first gen SD Express cards when the spec was launched, but not the currently available ones. In other words, this is a PR release, this isn't news. It's marketing. They chose the worst case of their competitors, the best case of their own, and lied by omission. Also, re: Valve's position on M2: they didn't support even swapping them when it first came out, although obviously allowed and expected, because you can put M2s in the device that are outside of the thermal parameters allowed by the design due to proximity to the battery and other heat producing items. This is also why they specifically used a 2230, as those are usually the lower power models meant for ultrathin laptops. That said, Valve has worked with a few companies to get some officially blessed 2230s that actually do fit the intended use case and are also performant. Like, if you think the Steam Deck sucks for actually doing the swap job, a) the new OLED replacement internally is a lot saner, with both construction and PCB layout, b) go try dealing with the really nasty designed laptops that don't have an externally accessible panel covering t…