5 MUST DOS for steam deck owners

so you just got a steam deck and first of all I'm really excited for you congratulations on your purchase I think you're going to have a really good time with it second of all we got to get you set up so you can have the best time possible with your deck and the first thing you need to do after you take your steam deck out of the box is put a screen protector on it if there's one thing I've learned in life it is to always use protection and the steam deck screen is no different screen protectors are pretty self-explanatory but just get one they are cheap and they are incredibly effective and it would be a huge bummer if the first thing you do is put a big old scratch in the middle of your screen and then you're looking at it all the time while you're gaming instead of actually enjoying the games now there is one big caveat which is that if you bought the high-end steam Deck with the etched glass then you probably shouldn't use a screen protector or at least if you do it'll negate the effects of the etched glass but if you bought the regular glossy steam deck then you can either get a regular glossy screen protector and then that's going to work just like your regular screen you're not even going to notice it or you can also get an etched glass screen protector which will give you very similar benefits to what the higher-end etched glass model is is long story short what I would recommend is do the glossy unless you're planning on mostly playing it outside or around really bright lights but with the new OLED steam deck because the screen is significantly brighter than the LCD deck Reflections aren't as big of an issue because you can just crank up the brightness I'll leave a link to the screen protector that I use on both my decks down in the link below but honestly any screen protector should be about the same as long as it's glass number two start downloading some games and this is going to sound a little silly but some of the games these days are absolutely huge so even if you have pretty good Wi-Fi it takes a while to download 120 gig game and yeah I'm looking at you Call of Duty that way while we're getting the rest of your steam deck set up you can be downloading games in the background and they'll be ready to use when you actually want to play and one thing to remember when you're downloading games is that the steam deck unless you do some tinkering it does not download games while it's in the sleep mode so you have to have the screen on basically in order to download games so just start downloading some stuff do not put it in sleep down fall asleep or it will stop downloading and then we can carry on with our list into number three which is to get an SD card you might be thinking to yourself I got the 512 gig steam deck so I don't need an SD card and guess what buddy I thought the same thing but then I went out and I downloaded games like Elden ring and Call of Duty and World War Z aftermath and balers gate and all of those games have like about 100 GB each for their game files so that means if you're playing AAA games the average AAA game is anywhere from 50 to 150 gigs and so you might be able to fit five AAA games on your internal drive which is just nutty and while yeah I am kind of frustrated that so many games have such enormously large game files that's just the fact of the matter so what I would say is unless you're playing entirely indie games which are generally pretty small just getting SD card get at least a half a terabyte but even something like a terabyte might be better to give yourself some more room to play and that way you can have more games available and you don't have to be constantly deleting and redownloading games like I was for the first week before I got an SD card as far as SD card speeds you're going to see a lot of things online but long story short the steam deck can only read UHS 1 which maxes out at 100 megabytes per second so you want to get a card that can at least do 100 megabytes per second I would get one that does a little bit over that so that way the card won't be the bottleneck but the steam deck will be the bottleneck so you're guaranteeing you're getting the best speeds possible and I'll put a link to the card that I use in the description box but just make sure you get one that can do at least 100 megabytes a second so that way you're getting the best speeds possible and the first time you plug in a card that hasn't been formatted you're going to have to format it but it's very easy to do all you need to do is go into your settings of your steam deck go to system and then about the fourth box down it'll say format SD card and you just do that and then it'll format the card and depending on the size of the card it might take a couple minutes but once it's done then the SD card is ready to use and you can install your games on it number four is get a dongle unless you're only going to be charging your steam deck the single USB type-c port is probably not going to cut it and that's where today's sponsor ugen comes in they have a whole lineup of USB type-c dongles that you can choose from but the two I would recommend for the steam deck are their revvo do pro 210 or 313 but you might be asking yourself why would I want a dongle to begin with and I'm glad you asked let me tell you the main reason that I use a dongle is so that I can plug my steam deck into my TV what either of these dongles you to do is you can plug your HDMI cord into your TV and then into the dongle and then that dongle into the steam deck and now your steam deck is acting like a console and you're plugged up to your TV but either of these dongles can do a lot more than that they also give you a bunch of type A ports if you wanted to plug in keyboards or mice or controllers or anything like that or you could do ethernet if your Wi-Fi is bad in your house like mine is often then you can have a Hardline ethernet plugged into your steam deck and that way you're getting the best and most reliable network connectivity it also gives you another SD card slot and a Micro SD card slot if you want to expand your storage even further or you could even go as far as to plug in an external drive to the dongle while still being able to power it because the dongle has an extra USB type-c port both of these hubs have a ton of ports but I would recommend getting more ports than you think so that way you only have to carry around one instead of having different hubs for different devices but as far as the differences between these two specific hubs the 313 has an extra usba a port a display port which could be big if your monitor uses display port and an extra audio and mic Port but if you don't think you're going to need any of those three ports what I would recommend is just saving your money and getting the 210 and you might be asking yourself why not just get a steam deck Dock and I actually do have a good reason I ended up buying a steam deck dock so that I could use it like this with the TV but what ended up happening is I ended up not using the dock because it limits your flexibility the biggest problem I have with a steam deck dock is that when you're plugged into the dock it's really hard to use the steam deck itself as a controller whereas if you're using one of these type c hubs you can still use the steam deck as a controller which just gives you more flexibility and also if you wanted to use one of these hubs with like a laptop or an iPad or a tablet or even your phone then you can do it whereas if you have a steam deck dock you might be able to make it work but because it's designed for the steam deck it doesn't work as well for other products so if you want to check out either of these type c hubs I'll leave a linked it in the description and thanks again to you green for sponsoring this section of the video all right and number five is get yourself at least one Bluetooth controller it doesn't really matter if it's a PlayStation controller an Xbox controller a Nintendo controller or whatever you want they all work great with the steam deck but just get at least one of them what that allows you to do is then you can use that Hub we talked about earlier and you can plug it into your TV and then you can kick back on the couch and just use a Bluetooth controller and play the steam deck much more like a console the other thing allows you to do is one of my favorite things to do with the steam deck which is that then you can play multiplayer or split screen on a TV with your friends one of my favorite ways to use the steam deck is I pack the steam deck a hub and a few Bluetooth controllers and then you have a whole portable console and I take it over to my buddy's house and then we can play split screen games together and it's super portable unlike something like an Xbox or a PlayStation which yeah you can take it to your friend's house but honestly you're probably not going to do it because it's just big and clunky and heavy so that wraps up the must tavs for your steam deck but there are a bunch of other stuff that I think will really optimize and make you have a better General experience with your steam deck so let's get started on these extras that didn't quite make the top five list but they're still good you can replace your steam deck's internal drive if you have a steam Deck with a 64 or 256 gig drive then I would highly recommend replacing it with something bigger even if you have a half a terabyte drive I might honestly get a bigger one just depending on what games you play and if you need the extra storage the pricing on the 22 30 m.2 drives which is what the steam deck uses have been going down really fast and now you can get half a terabyte for about 30 bucks or as much as 2 terabytes for about 160 bucks that sort of pricing isn't bad at all and if you're afraid of taking the steam deck apart I would encourage you that it's really not as bad as you think valve has specifically designed the steam deck to be user replaceable for a lot of the components and the drive is one of the easier ones I'm not very handy and I was able to do it in I don't know probably like 15 or 20 minutes it was pretty easy so if you want the cheapest way to expand your storage other than an SD card just get a new drive and replace it yourself it's really not that hard get an external battery now this isn't going to be for everyone but if you're someone who wants to play away from the wall like I do you're probably going to want to get an external battery there are a bunch of them and I've reviewed quite a few on this channel but I'll leave a link to two of my favorites down in the description below it's pretty self-explanatory I don't think we really need to go into battery details but if you want to get anything other than the two I have linked below just make sure they can put out at least 45 Watts because that's the maximum amount of charging that the steam deck can accept while you're playing the device so as long as it can do 45 watts and it's a relatively reputable company then probably you're going to be okay don't skimp out on the battery and just get one of the cheapest ones because the cheapest ones generally don't have the capacity that they say they have so just be careful with that if you don't want to get a battery but you still want to be able to play farther from a wall then I would recommend just getting a really long charging cable what I did is I bought a 20ft charging cable that's braided and then I plugged that in and now at least for my house I can play basically anywhere in the house while being plugged in and then I never have to worry about sitting somewhere that's close to an outlet so it can reach I can basically just sit wherever I want and I know that that cable is going to reach and if you're going to get an aftermarket cable you're going to need to plug that cable into something that'll plug into the wall and you might already have a charger that could work but if you don't let me give you some recommendations like I said earlier the steam deck can charge with up to 45 Watts but if you're weird in particular about heat you might not want to use that full 45 watts and let me tell you why basically if you're charging the steam deck battery while you're playing at full performance like you're playing a AAA game you can cause quite a bit of heat on the steam deck itself so what I do when I don't want to charge the battery but I still want to play the steam deck without overheating it I have a specific 30 W charger that I use so that way the steam deck is getting enough power that I can play at Full Tilt from what I've seen the maximum draw that the steam deck will pull at any given time is about 25 watts so as long as you have a 30 wat charger you're never going to be losing charge but that way you're only trickle charging it so it doesn't cause unnecessary heat on the system itself is this a sweaty thing for sweaty steam deck nerds like me yeah it is totally a sweaty thing so if you don't care about that don't worry at all just get a 45 watt charger and you're going to be fine but if you are weird like me and you do care about that then get a 30 W charger for when you want to play and don't want to stress the system out this is a little thing but the steam deck has paddles on the back that are like L4 R4 and L5 and R5 and I found I can press them but they're a little bit difficult for me to press so I found these little bumpers online that are like super cheap I'll put them in the description below and they just allow your fingers to rest a little more comfortably on those bumpers and it made it way easier for me to press them personally not at all necessary but I found it did increase my steam deck experience and it made me more likely to use those bumpers in games whereas before I basically just wasn't using them but now that I have a button four and five it's actually really convenient to have the extra controls available in that same vein if you don't like how the joysticks feel or how tall they are you can get little adapters that'll either increase the height of the joystick which may give you better Precision in aiming games or you can get something that changes the texture I'll leave some links below I've been using these ones to add an extra I don't know maybe an extra centimeter to the joystick and I do feel like I can aim better the only inconvenient thing is if you're going to put them in a case and the case fits tightly then you have to take those little joystick bumpers off before you put it in not a big deal but I just wanted to let you know and speaking of cases you can get your steam deck a case or a skin for me personally I ended up getting both and the case I got I ended up not liking it too much because it added more bulk to the steam deck and I feel like it actually doesn't need that much protection because it's already a pretty ruggedly built plastic device so if you're not going to be throwing it around and dropping it a bunch then probably it's going to be fine but if you do want that extra protection a case will go a long ways or if you just want it to look cool just get a skin that's going to protect from scratches and it won't add any extra bulk start putting Steam games on your wish list I've said it once and I've said it again don't pay full price for a game I mean of course do what you want pay full price if you want but steam is really good about having sales for games so what I do and a lot of other people do is when you see a game that you want just put it on your wish list and then you can have your notification set up so that when that game goes on sale valve will send you an email and then you can see okay the game's half off now now I'll pick it up and in my experience if you use your wish list like that what ends up happening is you end up buying a bunch of games at way below their actual price and then you have more games than you can play and you're not so worried when the new game comes out yeah you might want to play it but you have a big catalog already that you need to work through so then you're less tempted to buy the newest $70 game which really hits your wallet and you end up buying games for like half price or less than half price most of the time so just start adding games to your wish list that you're going to want to play in the future and you can sort those games on Steam by if they run well on the steam deck and there you go then it makes it really easy and the last thing before we get super sweaty is try installing Dei Dei is basically a plugins launcher which allows you to do a bunch of stuff on your steam deck like you can increase your vibrancy with one you can add custom boot animation with another you can overclock it with another there are a ton of different Community made options and that is going to get you into the world of tinkering with your steam deck and let me tell you is it sweaty yes but one of my favorite Parts about the steam deck is that it works Straight Out of the Box you don't have to do anything but if you want to Tinker with it you can add some really cool features and really customize it to however you want to use your steam deck and that's something that's really fun I think valve has done a fantastic job with empowering their users to make stuff that they want to make and then Pro tip here what valve has really done is like they allowed their users to make a bunch of good stuff and then usually what valve does is in future updates if something is really popular they just add it into the stock Steam OS but it's kind of a way you can get features before they're released to the rest of the public I would highly recommend it cuz it's fun to just be able to Tinker with your steam deck if that's something you're interested in but if you're not interested in tinkering don't worry about it it's not necessary at all and that should be more than enough to get you started with your steam deck if you have any specific questions let me know down below and I'll try to get to them but that's going to do it for this video

Channel: Sam.Alexander.Reviews

Views: 98,795

Keywords: first things to do with your steam deck, steam deck, steam deck review, first things to do with your steam, steam deck tips, your steam deck sam.alexander.reviews, linux gaming, steam deck games, first things to do with your steam deck sam.alexander.reviews, first things steam deck sam.alexander.reviews, FIRST, Deck, Steam, things, things to do with your steam, steam deck sam.alexander.reviews, FIRST Steam Deck Sam.Alexander.Reviews, first steam deck sam.alexander.reviews

Id: ku9TCDB7e7w

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2023