News $3,000 Steam Deck prototype disassembled — concept units had discrete GPU support, smaller joysticks, circular touchpads

[Admin]

Jon Bringus of Bringus Studios explored one of the first iterations of the Steam Deck gaming console.

$3,000 Steam Deck prototype disassembled — concept units had discrete GPU support, smaller joysticks, circular touchpads : Read more

 

[ezst036]

The huge circles remind me a little bit like the steam controller. Its like Valve cut the steam controller in half and stuffed a 7 inch screen into the middle of it.

This would be awesome having the ability to stuff a mobile RX 90x0 into it. Battery life would be pitiful though.

 

[jlake3]

This would be awesome having the ability to stuff a mobile RX 90x0 into it. Battery life would be pitiful though.

The thing with mobile, discrete GPUs on separate PCBs is that availability, physical compatibility, and BIOS support have been notoriously terrible. MXM is technically a standard, but in practice it’s implemented in such a way that modules have very limited compatibility.

Given what’s going on with AMD and Framework, I imagine AMD would allow Steam to do a swappable dGPU if they wanted… but this was probably always for development purposes so they could test different graphics configurations, and if the BIOS was hacky and the cooling was a kludge, hey, it’s a dev mule running on a bench.