What more can be said about Valve's Steam Deck that hasn't already been covered? I suppose one can point out that it wasn't the first handheld gaming PC and that it's not the most powerful one you can buy, either. But none of that actually matters, because what the Steam Deck offers over the competition, and by a country mile, is a comprehensive and complete experience.
Valve's ecosystem for the Steam Deck puts other handheld gaming PCs to shame—the enormous library of games that have been checked for compatibility and the work Valve has done in making the Linux-based operating system manage Windows-based games so well have yet to be matched by Asus, Lenovo, MSI, and others.
Beneath the 7-inch 1280 x 800 LCD screen lies the heart of the Steam Deck, a little 15 W APU made by AMD. With just four cores, eight threads, and a 3.5 GHz boost clock, you'd think it would be rubbish but it's anything but. Even the handful of RDNA 2 shaders cope far better than you'd imagine.
When it first launched in 2022, the best one to get was the 256 GB model, as you could replace the NVMe drive inside it with a much larger and faster gaming SSD. But with a price of $529, it wasn't especially cheap and it lacked the extra fancy etched glass screen of the 512 GB model.
With the launch of the refreshed OLED Steam Deck, that price was dropped and right now, Valve is selling its last stocks of 64 GB and 512 GB models with a 15% reduction until July 11. And it's the latter that gets our vote, partly because it has the best display of all the original Steam Decks, but mostly because it's actually cheaper than the 256 GB model.
Yes, that's right—you can get a 512 GB Steam Deck for just under $382. That's an absurdly low price and it's well worth every single cent.
But what games to get with it? How about Hades, one of the best roguelike action RPGs ever made? Baldur's Gate 3 is another RPG that's a must-have for Deck owners (or anyone, for that matter). Vampire Survivors would get my vote too. Your biggest problem isn't one of choice, as the Steam Deck will run more games than you could possibly want.
It's just that you'll need bags of storage space to store them all. There again, 512 GB is a pretty decent amount to get started with. Perhaps the biggest problem is the fact that eventually, Valve's stocks of the original Steam Deck will run dry, and then you'll rue the day you passed on a deal like this one.
