- This is a refurbished Steam Deck purchased directly from Valve. So they just started selling refurbished Steam Decks on the Steam store. And this is actually a
surprisingly good deal if it is not a complete disaster. Getting DKOldies flashbacks right now. So the main story with this is that it is significantly cheaper. So all three of the
variants of the Steam Deck are available as refurbished. I purchased the 64 gigabyte, which the brand new MSRP is $400, but I only paid 320 bucks for this. Which $320 for a Steam Deck is a very, very good deal. And a little bit later in the video I'm going to be spending
that $80 that I saved on upgrading it to above the spec of a brand new one. But the real question is, did they refurbish this correctly? This, I will actually say, looks basically like new
Steam Deck packaging, which is nice. We've got ourselves the refurbished power supply. I will actually say, immediately points to them. They're putting some effort into this. They're actually putting "refurbished" on the box, so there's no question whatsoever. So we'll take a look at that in a second. And we do have a case. Yeah,
we may have just gotten an actual good deal here. Case looks nice, fresh, clean. Let's take a look at our Steam Deck. Oh, look at that! It's even got a little lock on it. I'm gonna cut the tag. Let's see what we got here. Okay, the big reveal is... It's not terrible! Yeah, boy! This looks almost brand new. There's a minor, minor, little bit of scuffing on the back here. So you can see right there as
well as around the Valve logo. Let me see if I can actually try to clean that up a little bit. It is a little scuffed, but honestly it's on the back. For something that's refurbished, I mean, they're pretty clear on their site that it is not going to be perfect but there may be some
minor cosmetic defects. But the thing that I care way more about is the actual display. And I will tell you once I get the little
specks of dust off there. That display is flawless. There's no scratches, there's no scuffs. I was really nervous about this, 'cause I was like, "Why are they selling it for so cheap?" Like, they could sell this for like 350 and I think people would still buy it. Because considering that you're buying a $400 Steam Deck for 320 bucks, I mean, that's legitimately a good deal. So we do have a refurbished power adapter. Oh, actually you know what? No, hold on a second. The power adapter's scuffed. Why is the power adapter scuffed? Okay, I think it's fine. That took a very bizarrely long time. So let me actually just
try set up real quick. But, yeah, I'm seeing no dead pixels. So after getting Steam OS up to date, everything does seem
to be fully functional. Now you might look at those more expensive options and think, "Well, you know what, I want 256 gigs of storage. That's still way cheaper than the original version." But to that I would say, why don't you do what I'm doing? Buy a 64 gigs Steam Deck, as soon as they actually show up, and upgrade it yourself. Because I saved $80. And with $80, I got a bunch of upgrades, including this, a 256 gigabyte SSD that
I'm going to install. So this was about $28, which is certainly not cheap. But considering that this only has 64 gigs of fairly slow storage out of the box, that I think would be the number one upgrade for a Steam Deck. 'Cause if you get, like, a 256 or 512, they actually have SSDs
which are quite fast. But the base storage on
the 64 gig is just slow. And yes, you can upgrade it with a micro SD card, and that's fine for some games, but again, we're getting to the era where a lot of AAA titles these days kind of need SSD speed. So, I'm gonna be upgrading
this with a few items. First of all, with the SSD. I also have a transparent back. Now I got this shell just because I thought it looked cool, but it works out perfectly because the only cosmetic damage whatsoever to the system is a little bit of a
scuff on the back shell which I can replace 'cause I am good at thinking ahead. Or I just bought the shell 'cause it looked cool. So, I will say, Valve have done a lot of smart things with the Steam Deck. So there's actually an entire iFixit page all about different modules. You can actually buy replacement parts for the Steam Deck from iFixit, which I think is terrific. But that being said, the parts that I'm going
to be installing today are meant more so as upgrades, not just replacements. Because, theoretically, nothing is broken. 'Cause as far as I know, it is all fully functional
right out of the box when you buy it from Valve
Certified Refurbished. So, Valve claimed that they go through over 100 tests to make sure that the Steam Deck is fully up and running at as good, if not better, specification than a brand new model, which is very admirable. Now, as far as where they actually get these models, I mean, I assume that these are probably, like, returns. I don't know why else they would have a bunch of them. And especially considering that when they put this live, they have not been able to really put a lot more
of these in restocks. I'm assuming that it's actually gonna be kind of hard to
get your hands on these. Okay, well, I found one problem. There's no screw here. I'm trying to unscrew it. Do you see this? There's no screw there. So there's one screw missing. That being said, that does not really matter too much. So, just getting in here. Usually, yeah, when it comes to, like, things with controllers, usually the triggers are a good spot to work with. We've got some nice
easy-to-open plastic clips. So that's very simple. Again, this is not an iFixit ad in any way whatsoever, but I will say if you're doing something like this, honestly, iFixit makes some really helpful tools and guitar picks and stuff that I like to work with. There we go. All right. Inside we have a very
clean looking device. The ribbon cable says, "Beautiful." Well, I appreciate it. You're beautiful too, Valve. Everything in here has been very, very well cleaned. So either this was essentially never used, or they replaced the internal components or something. But, like, I am seeing absolutely no signs of dust, debris, any kind of issue at all. Now I don't actually see where the SSD is, but I do have easy access
to my joystick modules. So, I will say that the joysticks on the Steam Deck are quite good, but they are standard joysticks which means that they are
prone to dust, debris, and eventually just sort of breaking down. Which is why with my $80 budget I have opted to go with the GuliKit hall-sensing Joy-Con upgrade specifically for the Steam Deck. Now, I wanted to do this regardless, but I will say that this actually looks like a super easy
installation from this side. I see three screws and a ribbon cable. So I don't know if it's actually going to be that easy, but I plan on upgrading those joysticks, upgrading my SSD, and installing this
transparent back cover. So this is a clear back shell that I purchased off of Amazon from JSAUX, and it was $22. Oh, look, it already has the buttons on there too. Oh, look at that. Also, wait, "Remove the plastic sheet before use." Is that a little heat sink on the back? So you put this side by side with the original Steam Deck. There's really no actual heat dissipation going on here. It's just plastic with this little sort of cover on it. But this actually has, I would say, a very simple heat sink on it. What are these? (everyone laughing) No, don't mind me. I was just- I didn't quite understand. There was so many of them. It's a party pack. Let me dive into this and start upgrading this Steam Deck. With our battery removed, we now have access to our SSD. I'm just gonna unscrew my SSD. Oh, look at that. Okay, so the stock storage has this little metal sleeve on it. So if I pull it off, you'll see that, yeah, this is 64 gigabytes of what should be eMMC storage, which is just basically like a slow SSD. This is what you would typically find on like a very low-end Windows laptop or something that, you know, speed is not that important. You obviously can game on this, it's fine, but we're gonna make a big upgrade to a real proper SSD. So I'm going to take the little sleeve and I'm gonna slide it back on, line it up like that, and then take that single screw and reinstall it. Cool. Boom. Number one upgrade already done. We've upgraded from 64
gigs of slow storage to 256 gigs of fast storage. Next, let's install our sticks. So I'm, again, just gonna try to YOLO this, but this looks massively simple. So I see that there's a ribbon cable on the left and the right, and then I see that there's three screws, so I'm just gonna undo those. The fact that they make these joysticks easily upgradable on their own little, like, daughterboard is incredibly cool. Look at that. That's it. That was the simplest
thing I've ever seen. That's just the whole thing. Props to Valve for making something so modular and so easy to work on. So this is my GuliKit upgrade kit. So if I open it up, they've got it very nicely set up here. So, basically, I mean, I'll look at the instructions, but I think I just
replace one for the other. That looks very simple. This is the original joystick and this is the new one. Hall-sensing joysticks
actually use magnets, which means that not only
do I personally think that they feel a little bit better, but importantly, they're way, way less prone to failure. Which means that if you
wanna use your Steam Deck for a long time, this may be a worthwhile upgrade. So I'm just gonna pop this off. I assume it just comes off. Oh, my God. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Wait, what's that? Ooh. There is a point to do that. Oh, do I have to solder? No, I don't wanna solder. Oh, right! Because the Steam Deck has a touch sensor on the actual stick top, which means that if I wanna do this right, I need to solder. (Austin groaning) (upbeat retro music) Whoo! 800 degrees, boys! Almost, almost, almost. There we go. We're good. We're free. Okay. - Yeah, just wipe it down on
there. Yeah, makes it easy. - Next, let's do the same in reverse. So I'm going to hold this on the side here and I'm just gonna heat it up and then put it in. Melty. - [Ken] Yep. It
should just be able to, like, let it actually- - [Austin] That's it. Done. I now have two brand new shiny joysticks ready to go. So with our freshly soldered joysticks, the next step is to install them and, importantly, make sure that they work and they're calibrated. So it should be fairly simple. All I need to do is connect this little ribbon cable, maybe put like one screw in, and then I actually need to boot up the Steam Deck, first of all, just to make sure that
these function and work, and secondly, to make sure that my touch sensor works as well as the calibration has been done. If not, I will re-solder stuff or cry. Steam Deck is firing up. I'll be a little careful since it is all very exposed on the back. But I really just wanna make sure that it is functioning. I
feel like the Steam Deck sometimes takes a slightly
longer amount of time than I expect. So, first test, does the left joystick work? No, it does not. Does the right joystick work? Oh, okay. Ah, that's bad. Oh, yeah. Okay. There's your problem. Left joystick is showing wildly off, but the right joystick- Oh, wait, the right joystick
actually seems to work. So maybe what I'll do is this, I will just pull this ribbon cable out and put it back in. That's what I'll do. Now we're gonna open up the test again. Oh, that worked. Left now shows 0.0. So I move it around. Oh, that was it. I just
had to plug and unplug it. I'm pretty much good to start sealing everything up and putting our brand new back plate on. This should be really straightforward. The only thing I need to do is remove this little plastic piece over the heat sink. Oh, it's actually got a thermal pad on it. Oh, interesting. Okay. So, yeah, it's very sticky.
So the only thing with this, I just need to make sure I
am correctly attaching it. So basically this is a little thermal pad and a little piece of
what looks like to be maybe aluminum or something that attaches to this back heat shield. So basically right here is where our actual SoC is. So that heat comes through and is dissipated here and run through this little fan and the heat pipe. But this is just going to help remove maybe a little bit more heat. It's certainly not necessary because the stock shell doesn't have it. But, I mean, I didn't realize that there was an upgrade here at all. I just thought it looked cooler. So if I have this lined up right it should just click into place. Wow, dude, this looks cool. It is rare that I buy
something refurbished and do a bunch of work on it myself and the end result is, "Oh, hey, this actually worked," but this is legitimately fun. All right, my friends, the Steam Deck is complete. So I have reinstalled Steam OS, so everything is back up and running. I will say, 256 gigs is also not an
enormous amount of space. I literally have one game which is "Apex" installed, and I only have 141 gigs left. So, you know, if you're gonna do this upgrade, you may wanna splash the cash for a 512 gig SSD. But I wanna stay inside the $400 budget, and importantly, I am
going to be utilizing that micro SD card slot once I fill out the SSD. But realistically I'm not
gonna play that many games. It's fine. A couple of notes. So everything went together fine. I'm gonna play some "Apex" to make sure the sticks
and everything work, but all the tests inside
Steam OS that make sure all the controllers and stuff work, everything is showing up just fine. One interesting thing I've noticed- What is that noise? So I took the Steam Deck
home over the weekend, and I think the fan is an issue. Now, it's certainly
something I could live with, but as you can hear from this clip... (fan scraping) It's quite loud. To me, it almost reminds me of the PSP, where you kind of hear grinding as you move it forward and backward, especially playing a game like "Baldur's Gate 3" which is quite demanding. So, here's what I'm gonna do. I have ordered a brand new fan from iFixit, which costs $25. So one of two things is about to happen. I'm gonna swap it into my Steam Deck, and either this fixes the problem, in which case I did have a faulty fan, or it doesn't, in which case either I got to live with it or maybe it's the shell that's like putting some extra pressure. I don't think so, 'cause the shell's not physically touching the fan and the fan is completely screwed in the exact same way that it was when I first bought it. I've not unscrewed or
removed the fan in any way. So let's put a new fan in here and hope that that fixes the issue. 'Cause if not, eh, I don't know. This is really the way they pack it. I mean, this is a great packing job, but this seems a little bit excessive for what is a fan. That's it. That's the whole thing. But at least I got some
cool iFixit stickers. So for context, it does look like I've got the same style of fans. So this one matches up. N-O-O-P, N-O-O-P. Yeah. So this is exactly the same fan. Oh, so the heat sink is actually kind of attached to the fan. So I need to actually pull this little sticker up to get it out of the way. Again, looking at these two side by side, I mean, there's no real
physical differences that I can see. Wanna make sure that I'm doing this right, so I'm gonna put it all the way in. I'll put the little sticker on it to make sure that our
airflow is sealed off, which is fairly important for the fan to be pushing
through the heat pipe. And with any luck, we will no longer have a grinding issue. And if we do, I'm gonna be sad. So one of the things I
noticed and the reason why I didn't pick up on this to begin with, is that the fan didn't
make any noise at all until it was at a fairly high RPM. So if you're just kind of like chilling or, you know, scrolling through the menus or whatever, it's not enough to actually hear anything. But once you get into a game, especially something that's stressing it, the fan noise becomes
a lot more significant. I will say, the fan is- Oh, wait, the fan is spinning. I didn't even hear it. Oh, dude, that fan is immediately quieter. Just how much air is coming out of that. All right, let me get in the game. So you can see right here, the fan is spinning at about 3000 RPM. I don't wanna get too excited. I don't wanna get too excited. It might be fixed though. It might be fixed. All right, so we're in the game. So you know, GPU's sitting at 95%, temperatures are 67, 70 degrees. So the fan is certainly
having to work right now. So I'll put it right up to my mic so you can hear it. There's absolutely no grinding. Compared to the old fan, this is almost dead quiet. So I guess, you know what, there's a few takeaways here. If you're looking for a new Steam Deck, even though going through
this whole rigmarole with the fan was annoying, I think I'd still recommend to pick up a refurbished Steam Deck if you can find it. Outside of this, and I'm very confident that Valve would swap this out if you did file an RMA, you're getting a terrific deal. And if you already own a Steam Deck, I will say that I'm quite happy with all of the mods
that I've done to this. So starting with the SSD, complete no-brainer. If you've got yourself
a 64 gig Steam Deck, not only is that SSD swap relatively easy, but it's gonna give you a lot more storage and importantly, more performance. I will say that the
back shell is terrific, it feels good, this aluminum plate seems to actually do something, as well as you have adjustable triggers. The hall-sensing joysticks, I would say is actually a little bit more of a mid upgrade. They don't feel that different, if I'm being entirely honest with you. It's quite similar and it does require you, if you want to keep full compatibility, to solder. So maybe I would skip that one unless you know you're gonna be putting years of use into your Steam Deck, even then you could probably just swap the sticks out when you start having a problem. And the fan. If you're having a grindy, loud fan, and your Steam Deck's out of warranty, it actually might be worth buying a new one from iFixit. 25 bucks is a lot of money. Like, that's a lot for just replacing a thing that's already
built in your Steam Deck. But even without the grinding, just the noise of this one compared to the one I've just installed, I mean, it is unbelievable. We're currently cranking at 4,800 RPMs, so almost full tilt on this thing. We're pulling 23 watts on the Steam Deck. I mean, it's pretty much maxed out, and it is whisper quiet, which I think is incredibly impressive. So, I'll be honest, if you're having fan issues
with your Steam Deck, swapping out the fan might actually not be a bad idea. That plus this back plate quiets this down to the point where I'd say this is about as quiet as a Nintendo Switch. And considering that we're pulling out, like, what, three times the wattage in handheld mode is legitimately impressive. So, I'm curious, would you buy a refurbished Steam Deck? Let me know in the comments below. If you're interested in
any of the mods I did, I'll have links to those
in the description. Until the next time your fan gets wildly out of control, I'll see you then. (Austin blowing)
