- Whoa! I'm using gyro control. I've got an hour and a half hands-on with the Valve Steam Deck, and I'm gonna be plugging as
many dongles in and running, as many games as they're gonna let me run. I brought everything I need to answer as many of your questions as I can, including a Nintendo Switch,
as well as an AYA NEO so I can compare ergonomics,
as well as a thermal camera. They won't let me open it even though I did bring
my iFixit kit just in case they were gonna allow it. They didn't, they didn't, I'm
putting it away, I'm sorry. Okay, so at least, maybe
I can show you guys, you know, hey, where's the cooling system, where are the hot zones. These are early units,
these are engineering units so these are gonna be far
from the final experience, but I mean, I'm gonna be one
of the first in the world to even touch RDNA 2
hardware, running on an APU. (light upbeat music) This is a game changer. (light upbeat music) Just like our sponsor. Thanks to SignalRGB for
sponsoring this video. Signal is a free application that syncs RGB lighting
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in the video description. (futuristic music) (spirited upbeat music) First things first, they are not going to let
me directly capture off the device today. Hopefully that, along with the disassembly is something that we can
follow up on for you guys in the future. But what we can do is we can record the gaming experience. This, this is it. This is me picking it up. Immediate impressions, absolutely raw. Ergonomics of the handles,
of the controller itself, I think they've actually done
a really outstanding job. I mean, it shouldn't be a surprise. The ill-fated Steam Controller
for all of its quirks was absolutely a comfortable
controller to hold and in spite of the fact that
my hands are pretty small, like I am easily able to reach everything from these thumb pads to the
joysticks, the D-pad and ABXY, I mean, if you're a retro
gamer or if you want to play, you know, emulated SNES
games or anything like that, this is what you're gonna be into and... Ooh, (D-pad clicking) the
feeling is actually pretty good considering how early these units are. D-pad is smooth to roll
that has a good click for each individual direction. The ABXY, I can tell these
are a little bit early, you can see, you can actually feel it. The B is a little bit different,
it's a little bit wobbly, you can see it's actually a little bit of a different shape
compared to the other ones. It looks weird, but it actually feels
exactly like the other ones to the thumb, so no problem there. I liked these Valve guys. I walked in, they said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no," and then all of a sudden they were like, "Okay, well, you can try your monitor, and they're saying, "you
can try to capture." It's not gonna work on this unit, but we might actually be able to do it on the desktop dock over there. These are in sandbox mode, so we can't have the desktop experience. So that's the thing you
guys got to understand. This is not a game console
like an Nintendo Switch where it's this completely
locked down thing. It's gonna run a custom version of Linux, so all these games are gonna be running through the Proton compatibility layer but fundamentally, this is just a PC. It's a Zen 2 CPU with 4-cores, 8-threads at anywhere from, I believe
it's 2.4 to 3.5 gigahertz. It's gonna have some
kind of RDNA 2 based GPU integrated into it, 16 gigs of LPDDR5 memory. And that bit is critical because it's actually running at 5,500 mega transfers
per second quad-channel. That's insane. We've actually never
seen, to my knowledge, outside of bespoke console chips. We've never seen any kind of PC built with that kind of memory
bandwidth to an integrated GPU, and you got to remember, an integrated GPU has to
share bandwidth with the CPU, so the more you can have,
the absolute better. Now in terms of storage, they're gonna have 64 gigs
of eMMC on the 399 unit. That is not gonna be enough, thankfully, the micro SD expansion card, ah yes, right there, you can actually see we're
using it on these demo units, is going to allow you to install a much larger game library than that, I mean, in the terabytes, but (sighs) micro SD? I mean, especially when
you consider the way, they game development is going, relying on these super fast SSDs in the PlayStation 5
and the Xbox Series is, it doesn't feel very future-proof. If I were you, I'd go for the 256, which is gonna be a $529 or the 128, which is gonna be 649. Now that SSD is not upgradable but I can pretty much guarantee that the good folks, that
iFixit we'll find a way. A couple more housekeeping items, it's got a 40 watt hour battery which is fairly comparable
to devices like the AYA NEO, and this USB-C port which
is used for charging, is a bog standard USB-C port so that means you could use
it with standard peripherals, like, check this out, here's a random five-year-old USB hub, we'll plug it in, and
boom, I am using my mouse, which is important, and I will show you guys why this mouse is so important later. I mean, really, (chuckles) a huge part of the story here for me is the sheer choice
available to the gamer. Even before I plug in a mouse and navigate the interface using that, I have three different
options for navigation. I can use the D-pad, I can use the thumb stick, I can use the touch pad, which I think they still got
a little bit of tuning to do on the haptics but it is a very interesting feel. Definitely a step forward from the Steam Controller of your... Yeah, it's got a little bit too much uh, like kinda vibration and not haptics right now. - [Valve Guy] Yeah, we're gonna tune it. - "We're gonna tune it", he says, yeah, I bet they will. Turn it around to the back, we find a little confusing thing that may or may not get
changed with the final units. Our whopping four buttons on
both the right and left sides so you got your L1, L2,
this is an analog trigger so it's gonna be great
for throttle control and things like racing games, as well as L4 and L5 here. Is L3 bound to something else? - [Valve Guy] Stick. - It's bound to pressing down the stick. There you go. So, it's just a little bit
of a weird numbering thing. There are in fact, four
buttons down to each side, and it's kinda up to you to
decide how you want to use them. After all that, I forgot
about a control scheme, touch. You can scroll through your game library, click on it and boom, why don't we play some DOOM Eternal. Now Valve has taken some
criticism for this move, but some people saying that 1280 by 800 is not enough resolution in the year 2021, but I'm gonna defend them here, just like I did with the AYA NEO and just like I did with the
Nintendo Switch OLED Edition. At this screen size, it is enough and from my perspective, I would much rather be running
at 60 frames per second more often, it's a 60 Hertz display, compared to running at 30
frames per second and 1080p. And we are still limited by, you know, what is fundamentally, an ultrabook crammed into a handheld gaming console. How awesome is this, they're at exactly the same spot as my saved game on the AYA NEO, which is just right near
the beginning of the game. (Linus chuckles) This is cool, this gives
us a look at the pause menu so we can adjust screen brightness, audio. Oh, that's right, it does
have built-in microphones, at least two of them. I can't remember if
there are more than that for noise cancellation. I do not see any others, but it does at least have a
two mic array, WiFi Bluetooth. There's an advantage
over the Nintendo Switch, can you even believe the new OLED one is not gonna support
Bluetooth headphones, still? I mean talk about things
that make no sense in 2021. That, that right there. We can turn haptics on,
well, I want haptics on. (game revving) Okay, now, something that
is built into this game conveniently that they didn't tell me I'm not allowed to turn on is performance metrics. Oh, hold on a second, we've got to tune this first though. (keypads clicking) This is, this is an ugly
default set up here. (keypads clicking) You know what, let's tune
them both at the same time. (light upbeat music) (game revving) Okay, yeah, running at native resolution, that is not gonna be a thing. (keypads clicking) (light upbeat music) āŖ Do, do, do āŖ Overall quality, medium, apply changes. (keypads clicking)
- Am I still rolling? - Yeah, yeah, go ahead and roll, I mean, this is, this
is the experience, Ed. (game revving) This is what the people want to see. (game revving) Okay, so we're getting
anywhere from around (gunshots cracking) 40, I've seen some dips down to like 20. (game revving) (gunshots cracking)
That's pretty much to be expected. (gunshots cracking) I'm actually gonna turn the speakers down. They do sound great though. I mean, you do end up
with a much larger face than something like the AYA NEO, but the speakers are pointed at you so it kinda comes back to the
old HTC ONE, like experience. Is it worth it to you
to have a big speaker rear looking at you and you know, actually be able to hear
what you're listening to, or do you want to kind of
a sleeker looking device? (light upbeat music) (people chattering ) The weight is good. It's got a good size to weight ratio. It doesn't feel cheap, but it
also doesn't feel too heavy. I have not like compared the FPS numbers, looking at exactly the same thing yet, but running almost all medium, I turned off motion blur
because it's for plebs and like tuned a couple
of other little things, but mostly medium and I locked
it at native resolution, Valve had it set to dynamic resolution, which doesn't tell us anything
about the performance. It is a way (chuckles)
smoother experience. So if your question was, does RGNA 2 run better than Vega? The answer is yes, even if you have to sacrifice
a couple of CPU cores in order to get there. Ooh, Valve also has the
significant advantage in terms of joystick, although
to the AYA NEOS credit, it's a little bit more
pocketable or like sleevable, if you want to slide
it into a little pouch in your backpack, you can see the profile, especially if we account for
the height of the joysticks is at least twice as
deep for the Steam Deck compared to, really, I would say this is the most comparable handheld on the market right now. Looking out into the skybox, I don't have a lot of
character models on screen or anything like that, but based on this very early hardware, running very early software, I would be surprised if we don't see somewhere in the neighborhood
of a 50% performance uplift over a similarly equipped device. And what we know based on
what Valve has told us, about the internal battery and the estimated battery runtime, is that the power envelope
of these two chips is fairly similar. (light upbeat music) Not bad. (light upbeat music) Something I noticed holding
them side-by-side like this is that there's a much more
muted glare on the Steam Deck compared to the AYA NEO,
especially off axis. Okay, but this shouldn't be a huge mystery because they've actually... (mock laughs) Looked at this, they
did R&D. (mock laughs) Check this out. So they've got different
types of glass over here that they're showing us
so that we can compare what happens with an
anti-glare etched glass versus just a regular glass
that is gonna be like, "Hey," where's my camera lens? "Hi Ed, can you see me, can
you see me in the glass, Ed"? - Yes
- Okay, how about this one. (light music) Can you see me? - [Edzel] Um, yeah, but
you are not as clear. - Right? You only get the premium etched
glass on the 512 gig model, but at $649, that's starting
to look like a good deal just for the glass, I mean, Apple wouldn't
even give you a stand for their etched glass
monitor at that price. Now that we've got the game running well, it's time to try some
alternate controls games. These are touch sensitive joysticks so as soon as I put my finger on it, whoa, I'm using gyro control. Now Valves had support for gyro control with PlayStation controllers
for some time now but having it integrated into the device rather than something
that you need to plug in a third-party controller in order to use, is pretty freaking sick. Now it's more for fine control, I guess. Let's see.
(light upbeat music) Yeah, it's more for fine tuning your aim so you get there with the stick and then you fine tune with the gyro. (light upbeat music) That is pretty awesome. It's a good way to like, hold on target while an opponent is, you know,
moving around or whatever. (light upbeat music) Whoops, it's gonna take me a little while to get used to it, for sure, like the fact that I have to touch this, in order for it to work or you can also touch this pad so you can just be touching this pad and you can look with this as well. So more like a touch
pad, but less horrendous. - [Edzel] What happens if
like, the meat of your thumb touches the touchpad while
you are using the joystick? - Hmm, I think you just shouldn't do that. Honestly, it'd be very hard to do that, like ergonomically? I don't see it as a problem. Now that both of these have
been running DOOM Eternal for about 15 minutes, I'm ready to talk about
noise and thermals. Now, when it comes to fan noise, there's the volume, like
the sound pressure level, but there's also the quality of the noise (device whooshing) and the AYA NEO, my understanding is after
the first 500 units, they're getting a different fan along with analog triggers and a couple of other little upgrades, definitely has a higher pitch to it, (people chattering) but I would say both of them are similar in terms of their volume,
which makes sense, given that we've already inferred that the power envelope of
these chips is quite similar. Now I want to pull out the thermal camera. I've been really looking forward to this. (clock ticks) There's two main reasons I
want to look at the thermals. One is I want to see if
it will give me any hints as to the internal layout of the device and two, is I want to know how comfortable the touch surfaces are gonna be when you've been sitting,
gaming on this thing for half an hour, an hour,
two hours, five hours. Who knows? Valve says it can go up to eight hours if you're running light loads, although it should be noted, it won't get nearly as
hot when you're running those kinds of applications. Curiously, both the AYA NEO, which we're looking at right now, and the Steam Deck have
their hotspots on the right. So maybe there's a good reason
that it was done that way. Both of them managed to maintain very reasonable grip temperatures, but you can see the AYA
NEO is notably hotter so it's sitting at around 35 degrees around the left thumb stick there, while the Steam Deck, probably thanks to the
fact that it's larger, is more in the neighborhood of 27. The touchpad is 29, just shy of 30 on the right and very similar over
on the left-hand side, let's flip them over. There's the AYA NEO,
conveniently AYA shipped me a clear unit so we can
actually see everything, CPU's here, SSDs here, batteries here and then the actual heat sink is here. So that gives us a
really kind of good idea of what these heat
signatures might look like. (light upbeat music) Okay, well, let's see how we do here. Oh, okay, there might actually
be some insights here. This is almost definitely
our CPU slash GPU, this could be memory or storage, this big block here, I'd be
surprised if it's not a battery or something like that, it does have a little
bit of heat output to it and this right here,
now that's interesting, that's our intake, but there's quite a lot of
thermal activity right around it. You know what, maybe we
can peek through this grill and find out what that thing, you can see there's a little outline here. Let's see if we can
figure out what that is. Nope, the answer is a big fat no. To my eyes that is completely
impenetrable (laughs) Since we're back here though, once again, grip temperature
is advantage Valve with the AYA NEO being
as high as 35 degrees where your index fingers might rest around the back of the grip and Valve is sitting, I
mean maximum 28 degrees. (light upbeat music) So they did go big. They lost that compactness, but what they gained is a more enjoyable thermal experience for the user. You guys are doing great in
terms of grip temperatures. - [Valve Guy] That's our goal, just keep it away from the hands. - See that?
- Oh nice! - So it's like, night and day. So there's too much, you
can see there's too much kind of leaked heat - Yeah.
- from this heat sink here. So the intakes here and there's too much kinda spreading out - Yeah.
- in this direction and then you guys have basically
kicked it all straight out. It looks like you've got
pretty good, kind of shrouding, it looks like we could
probably use a longer intake if I was to kind of just look at this and say, you know, hey, what would I do, not that you guys care, but it looks like there's a little bit
more cooling needed here from the intake, 'cause there's
still a pretty significant heating, signature here, even though there's nice,
fresh air coming in, it looks like you guys have
some kind of shroud covering whatever this is. I'm, if I had to guess, I'd say maybe SSD or something like that, but I
don't know for sure obviously. There's some kind of chipset there maybe, there's a micro SD reader, I don't know, I don't know, only you can know. - [Valve Guy] You will find out soon. - Yeah, well, there you go. Apparently, we're not
getting any answers today. (Valve guy laughs) Now one point of contention for some users is the top location of the
charging, slash USB-C port. I can understand it both ways. On the one hand, it's a
little bit more ergonomic to have something hanging down while you're sitting like this. But on the other hand,
if you are, you know, lying in bed or something like that, that's gonna put a lot of strain on a bottom mounted port. Now, AYA obviously worked around this by just having them on
the top and the bottom but Valve, for whatever reason, didn't seem to feel it
was necessary to add more so when you're charging
or when you want to dock and plug into a wired ethernet connection, you're gonna have something hanging off of the top of the device. The good news is that as I
mentioned before, the weight, it's very comfortable so even having this
dongle hanging off of it, it's not bad, it's not bad. Now it's time for the next act. Valve was very particular
about which games were running. I'm installing CS:GO. You know, the developer
has to give permission so they didn't have
CS:GO on these devices. We had to get permission
from the developer in order to run it. In all seriousness, that
is fairly standard practice at hardware launches. But the reason I want
CS:GO is because the M4 has a really bright muzzle
flash that I can use for the NVIDIA LDAT. Here we go. Now I pretested the AYA NEO and what we're looking at with the LDAT is the total latency from click to photon. So what kind of internal input leg the Steam Deck might have? So far, it's felt really good, but feelings are just feelings
and numbers are better. So we're gonna go ahead and strap this on. (rubber strap twangs) I'd pre-adjusted it. I'm kind of expecting it
to be a little bit smaller in person, (chuckles) but that's okay. This is quite an unusual control scheme, I wouldn't expect most
people to prefer it, but, hey, there you go. (laughs) What's interesting is even
though we've loaded up a few games now, whether we're coming
off of the internal SSD or the micro SD expansion
card, it's been fine, but then direct storage, also,
you know, isn't a thing yet, so we'll see. Then again, direct storage
on Linux will that even, will that even be a thing. (mouse clacks) It's hard to play with the
LDAT covering the screen. The game's running, or
at least move a little. I've been extremely pleased
with the gaming experience in everything I've tried so far. (light upbeat music) (device clicking) Okay, I want to get about 20 if I can. (device clicking)
We got 40 seconds till the bomb goes off. (device clicking) Okay, good enough. On average, it is measurably
better than the AYA NEO, and this is even in its
early state right now. What they're showing
here is a functionality called Bookmarks where, I mean, if you've been paying attention to Steam for the last 15 years, it's got a built-in web browser, right? So essentially what you're doing is you're just bookmarking a webpage, whether it's something
like Twitch or Netflix, and you're able to use it
to consume content on them. That's pretty cool. I could see people hacking all kinds of fascinating
functionality into this. (light upbeat music) (people chattering) Just like that, hey. Let's go ahead and pick something people won't judge me for responsive. (light upbeat music) Man, I wish it had an OLED display. I truly do. And this is an area
where the 720p resolution does hurt it more, in my
opinion, than in gaming. Something where you're supposed to have that super sharp cinematic
look versus a game where, you know, honestly,
you're moving around so much all the time that
your eyes natural motion blur is going to fill in a lot of the gaps. 1080p would have been nice
for content consumption. Credit to Valve for their
tuning of the display out of the box, by the way, at least at this early stage of development, they haven't put it in any
kind of gross vivid profile, everything looks to my eye,
accurate to what I would expect from a color accurate display, so that's awesome. (clock ticks)
Scott insisted, I showed this one. This is a mind blowing demonstration. This, my friends, is online
multiplayer, that's right. I've got one PC here and over
the power of the internet, Scott, look at this, we
were playing a co-op game, he's on his Steam Deck. (game console clicking) (light upbeat music) You guys are super tech savvy. You guys know what's up, this thing is a full fledged gaming PC. So if it wasn't already clear, that's it. It's one of those, but smaller. Hey, I just got permission
to try my own monitor. Let's see what happens. (cords thumping) (light upbeat music) I would like to try USB-C display port in. (light upbeat music) Is it worth a shot? (light upbeat music) All right. (device cracking)
Hey, should be fine, that's famous last words right there, hey. If it doesn't work, (light upbeat music) if this even makes it into
the video, we're not... (finger snaps)
Just like that. So if you weren't already convinced that this is a full-fat PC,
just in a handheld form factor, well, this should pretty much do it. So can I just, I'm gonna switch
to external screen, right? (light upbeat music) That sounds right,
'cause it's not a laptop, but the OS for running
thinks it's a laptop, and if you were curious, if
it's gonna run 4K 60 Hertz, that's your answer right there. I think it might be at 30 right now, it's hard to tell I'm so used to... No, it's at 60 Hertz. (people chattering) Freaking awesome. (finger snaps) Just like that. How relieved are you guys right now? - [Valve Guy] Pleasantly surprised. (Linus laughs) - We're gonna go for full
completion here, extend to right. - [Scott] Oh, yes, since
we plugged and unplugged, the brightness is down. - Honestly the fact that it's
working this well already is mind blowing to me. So we can even use this
display as a secondary display, I mean, imagine that, right? You're gaming on your Steam Deck, you've got your Twitch chat
up on your actual Steam Deck while you're using your monitor to play your game or whatever like, (light upbeat music) (device clacking)
I'll take it, whoop. By the way, they're
working on their own dock, this is a (clear throats) dock of (chuckles) daisy
chain of right angle, Type-C connectors indicates that Valve has in fact, noticed that the top mounted Type-C is something that does
need to be overcome, but that's okay, they have
very skilled engineers, and I'm sure they're gonna sort it out. Ha ha, first time
lttstore.com has been fired up on Valve's campus, actually, probably not, there's enough nerds that work here. Any Valve employees out
there already got this shirt? It's the new color of
our Do Not Drop shirt. Oh yeah, mouse pads are in stock, (light upbeat music) like for the first time
in a very long time. Valve is making me pack up and get out before I can test all my controllers, but I'm sure they'll
have that compatibility pretty much sorted out. One thing I do want to
squeeze in before we go, is a quick size comparison with the original Nintendo Switch, this is not the upcoming OLED one, you can see, it can,
it could basically dock under (chuckles) the guest
Steam Deck, but okay, yeah, it's got a size advantage, but that's to be expected given that it's, (light upbeat music) to kind of like comparing
a full-blown, you know, APU equipped ultrabook PC
with four, five year old, mid-tier smartphone in terms
of hardware. (chuckles) And I've got one more thing to squeeze in. This message from our
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you'll get a $25 credit. If you guys enjoyed this video, check out our full review of the AYA NEO, which is the closest thing
that the Steam Deck has, to a competitor. The Steam Deck is expected to be shipping sometime in December of this
year with orders placed now, already somewhere in the
middle part of next year. So what that's gonna mean for
the competitive landscape? Well, with RDNA 2 APU is
probably coming around that time. (claps) It's gonna be very interesting. I'm excited.
Probably the most technically oriented first look reviews I've seen posted so far. Touching in grip temperature was something I never thought I needed to know, but I appreciate it.
Blows my mind I watched like 5 different impressions videos from this event and he's the only one who talked about the d-pad, buttons and sticks like, at all. What did people expect to be checking out on a new portable? Just "yep, games run on it OK, and it is comfortable to hold" and that's it? Most of them essentially amount to that seems like.
Kudos Linus, for doing it right.
The valve staff every five seconds: "wait can he do that?"
he's the only one who talked about the fact you can use the gyro with the stick to aim like Splatoon and breath of the wild which was a game changer for me personally especially if you don't like mouse and keyboard.
I figured there was a Linus video coming when I could hear him talking in the background of everyone else's videos...
But did it survive the Linus drop test?
The best impression in my opinion. Actually sold me the steam deck as a mobile PC/handheld.
Man that intro was soo great
Linus was just like a kid getting excited about getting the new game. And the amount of stuff he covered in that video hasn't been covered anywhere yet. Wonderful
Thing looks awesome, Iām very excited to get mine. I got lucky and my reservation is Q1 next year. Hopefully I get it prior to March, I have a lot of traveling to do then, and this would be great on the plane.
Iām really excited to see how easy it will be to run emulators off that and card slot. Many work with Linux, and Iām curious if you can just throw 351elec or RetroArch on a high end SD card and boot off it and have a badass emulator machine.