Valve’s upcoming Steam Deck gaming console is set to start shipping in December of this year, and interest is high for the handheld gaming console. Steam Deck buyers have a lot of upfront questions, though, so Valve has posted a frequently asked questions (FAQs) page to share some more details about the new system.
As a reminder, the Steam Deck gaming console is Valve’s attempt to enter the handheld gaming market, and it wields a custom AMD APU. Featuring four cores and eight threads of Zen 2 core IP, the chip runs at 2.4–3.5 GHz clock speeds. It also features an RDNA 2 graphics engine with eight compute units running at 1.0–1.6 GHz. The APU is rated for a thermal power budget of anywhere from 4W to 15W, and it connects to 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM running at 5500 MT/s. For external storage, there’s a high-speed microSD card slot. This is all tied together by a custom Arch Linux-based operating system with Valve’s Steam UI on top of it.
Valve’s new FAQ has quite a bit of new information. For starters, all Steam Deck models have a glass, optically bonded IPS LCD screen, except the 512GB model, which has a screen with an additional anti-glare etching applied. The console also has dual LRA motors, with one placed under each trackpad for haptic feedback purposes.
