(calm pop music) - Valve purposely made the Steam Deck as modular as they could. They encourage user repairs,
even teaming up with iFixit early on in the Steam Deck's lifecycle to show people just how fixable it is. Even if there's nothing
wrong with your Steam Deck, there's a lot that you
can do to supercharge it. One of the simplest and most
essential mods you can do is the SSD swap. I went from having a
256 gigabyte Steam Deck to a one terabyte, and it
was a fairly simple process. There's also new hall sensing
sticks made by Gulikit. Valve purposely made the
thumb sticks easy to swap out, because they knew they
were a consumable product. Now, they're a little less consumable, and finally, eXtremeRate recently came out with a whole line of shells, some of them are transparent, because everyone's gotten nostalgia for a transparent tech these days. EXtremeRate sent me
this smoky black shell, because I wanted the Steam Deck to still look like a Steam Deck, just with a little bit of edge to it. This sucked. I mean, it looks really cool, but it was an absolute drag to do. All of these mods took me a solid weekend, maybe a grand total of
like eight full hours. That time could be dramatically cut down if you heed some of my warnings here, but that shell swap is still gonna be a bitch no matter what. At least in the end of all of this, you end up with a cool-looking Steam Deck that is functionally better in some ways, but you can very easily ruin the integrity of your $500 device. So here's my review of these
Steam Deck mods you can do. (melodic electronic music) This video is sponsored by Factor. (lullaby xylophone music) (man snores) (snorts) Oh God, why am I so tired? Did I eat anything today? Yeah, I had a handful of chips. (snores) mommy, mommy, mommy,
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I did was the SSD swap. The type of drive that you
need is a little bit confusing. You need an M.2 NVMe drive,
which you probably know, but if you search that up,
you're gonna get the long ones, and that's pretty much it. You want one that's in
the form factor 2230. Those are the ones that
fit inside the Steam Deck. Looking up this form factor
made me feel a little old, because I don't recognize
any of the companies that make any of these types of drives. I wanted this Sabrent
one, because it's fast and it's cheap and it's from a company that I've heard of before, but that would've taken a
long time to ship to me, and I wanted something that would come in time for this video. So I ended up going to Microcenter and getting what is essentially
the Microcenter brand M.2 NVMe form factor 2230
drive, and it's fine. It's like fast enough. The Sabrent one would've
been a little bit faster. It's also around the same price. I would say just get that one. The one I got was like a hundred bucks. Now this mod is insanely easy to do, and it's even easier
if you just don't care about any of the data that
you have on your Steam Deck. (Steam Deck powers up) Emulation Station and Retro
Arc and all of my ROMs are on the micro SD card. So take that out. It'll make things less confusing for all of these mods
that you're gonna do. All of my other games and all of their saves are on the cloud. I can just redownload
them whenever I want. So it probably would be very
easy to just pop a new drive in here and just
redownload all of my stuff. If you do it that way,
you're still gonna need to follow Valve's guide on
creating a recovery image, because your brand new drive
won't have anything on it, and it needs the Steam OS on there, but that seems simple enough. Instead, I decided to
back up my current SSD by using Clonezilla to create
an ISO of my current drive. I used this video tutorial that
I'll link in a card up here. This is pretty straightforward, but it does require a bunch of tools, a USB drive, I used a
micro SD card and a reader, an additional drive that can
fit all of your data on it, a keyboard, and a dock or
dongle that can handle plugging in all of these things,
including a power cable, 'cause your Steam Deck could
die in the middle of this, and that would really suck. The transfer process took over an hour and failed at about 75%. Instead of making an ISO
of your current drive, I was made aware that
Clonezilla has a feature where you can just take
the drive that's in here and directly transfer all of its contents and clone it straight to
the new drive that you have, so long as you have a way
to plug that new drive in, because you can't plug
two M.2 drives in here. You need some sort of
enclosure or something that will be able to
plug it in through USBC. I had this ASUS enclosure laying around. I bought it way back in the day, because it looked so awesome, but I had no way of
plugging it in or anything. This is an Evangelion
theme, and I'm right. It's (beep) sick. Well, it finally came in handy. I put the new drive in here,
plugged it in through USBC, did the device-to-device transfer, which also took about
an hour, but after that, all I had to do was take
the back off the Steam Deck, insert the drive, and my
Steam Deck just booted up like nothing ever happened. Now it's just many gigabytes larger. If you don't do it this way, you're gonna have to
create that recovery image, although I guess you
need to create an image for Clonezilla anyway. So either way, you're gonna need to create some sort of recovery image. I guess this was slightly easier because it's a direct clone of your drive. You don't need to go out and
buy an enclosure for this. If you don't have one, you
could just do it the other way. I'm sure it's fine, but if you have one, this might be ever so slightly easier. So SSD upgrade, 10 outta
10 definitely recommend. Maybe eight outta 10 if
you've never flashed firmware on anything before, like if you don't know what belinaEtcher is, but I mean, this isn't a bad place to start. Next, I guess I'll talk about
the Gulikit thumbs sticks. This was also very easy to do. All you really have to
do is take the back case off by unscrewing all of these screws, unscrew the thumbs stick modules, and the new ones just slide right in. One annoying bit is
that on the newest model of these sticks, there's a
switch on the back of each board. Apparently you have to know
which model Steam Deck you have, and the only way to
accurately find this out is to go into the Steam Deck's settings, and I was already knee deep
in my Steam Deck at the time when I found this out. So that me pissed me off a lot, but this is a launch switch, and older Steam Decks almost
certainly need this switch to be in the A position. So I just took this gamble,
and that worked fine. The sticks felt like
absolute ass at first. Make sure the screws aren't too tight and give them both a good
hard press right before using. This made them feel significantly better. However, my right stick wasn't
calibrated all that well. It probably would've played just fine because of the dead zones, but the center position
was slightly off center, which is annoying when you do an upgrade, and the thing that you
just upgraded to is worse. You understand? You can check the calibration
in the Steam Deck's settings, but you can't do anything about it. It's not like the Switch where
you can set the calibration in the settings. Instead, you have to go
to the Linux desktop, ugh, and do a console command, ugh,
but honestly, that worked. It worked just fine after that. Everything's fixed. So this mod was very easy too. Going into console is always
a little bit intimidating, but I'd say this is probably
also a 10 out of 10, if you have drifting or
broken sticks already. If your thumb sticks are working
perfectly fine right now, you got no reason to do this mod. Oh, what are you afraid
of a little bit of drift? Oh yeah, you poor little thing. You think you're a little scared? You scared you're (bleep)
gonna get all messed up? There's no reason to buy these sticks now. Buy them later when something goes wrong with your thumb sticks, which, you know, honestly probably won't ever happen, and finally, we have the case mod. This was one of the
most frustrating things that I have ever done for a few reasons. You'd think it just be so simple, because you'd think all you have to do is just take the back case
off, take the front case off, and you're done. The case is just two pieces, but no, you have to take apart
every, single, little piece of the Steam Deck from the inside out, and Valve did a really good
job of making this process as simple as they could make it. I very much appreciate that
every ribbon cable has a tab that you can pull, and there
are a lot of ribbon cables. All the screws are nice and big. There's not that much
adhesive to mess with. It's not hard. It just takes forever,
but it's not easy either. There are a few bits that are hard, and eXtremeRate doesn't
make it much easier with the tools that they provide. They do have a pretty decent tutorial on their YouTube channel. It's pretty long, but it's fine. I bounced between their
tutorial and the JSAUX tutorial, but honestly, eXtremeRate's is fine. Finger condoms? Yeah, why not just wear
gloves at that point? The reason I bounced between the two is because eXtremeRate advises that you take out the motherboard and you
take the heat sink off and all of this stuff and I thought
that that was a little stupid. Certainly I can just take that all off as one big piece, right? That ended up biting me in the ass. So maybe just follow their
tutorial the whole way through, but we'll get to that. Anyway, to start, the
plastic on these sorts of devices are usually
extremely form-fitting. Even after the screws are unscrewed, you're gonna need a plastic prying tool or what they call a spudger. EXtremeRate provides a generic (beep) one. I have had major success
with this Lego piece remover. I've bought a couple of these, and honestly, this kind
of carried the whole mod. I'll also note that the Steam
Deck requires multiple size screw bits, and some
are deceptively large, and some tiny screws require
a deceptively large bit. So make sure you're using the right bit before you strip your screws. I'll link this screwdriver that I use in the description with an affiliate link. The worst part is for sure the screen. Screens in modern electronics
are usually always held together with some sort of adhesive, and this always makes
it a bitch to remove. The Steam Deck is no exception. Even with how modular it
is, this seemed unavoidable. EXtremeRate provides
this abysmal suction cup with an extremely weak keyring on it. It was actually painful to use. It's also nerve-wracking to pry
up the corners of the screen with a Lego separator. The screen is obviously very delicate. So a lot can go wrong here. A hairdryer that gets hot
enough should be enough to loosen the adhesive,
and with enough patience and a concerning amount of
force, the screen comes right up. When you put the screen
back into the new case, there is some new
adhesive that they provide to help stick it together, because you just loosened
up all that old adhesive, but it's impossible to remove
all of the old adhesive. So you're putting this new adhesive right on top of this old, crappy adhesive. This isn't a problem for the hold, but it's a problem for
the height of the screen. It makes the screen jet
out ever so slightly, just enough to really piss me off. Also, the screen is
connected to the whole unit by one ribbon cable that is directly in the back of the screen, and the only way to
properly access this cable is by removing the whole main board. I put the whole Steam Deck back together and realized this cable
was not connected properly. So I had to dive back in, which
almost ended my whole life, but I managed to finagle the ribbon cable without disassembling too much. Go in, go in, go in. So it's all fine now, but I'm not sure if all
of that was worth it, and there is one more thing that is almost just as a annoying as
swapping out the screen, and it's the touch pads. Yeah, the Steam Deck's useless,
just worthless, touch pads. Explain to me why I can
go left sometimes (laughs) but I can't go right at all. (Steam Deck beeps) It's absolutely dumb. I decided to go all in
and replace the touch pads with the clear black ones
just for consistency. There is a lot of adhesive
holding this together and it really does feel like
you're gonna break that board. With enough heat and enough
Lego separators and time, it does come off. However, the new adhesive that they give you is opaque black. So you can't even see through
the transparent touch pad. There was absolutely zero point to replacing these touch pads if you're getting a transparent shell. Why did I do all that? What was the purpose of that? It's just black, man! The (beep) adhesive is black. What the? After all of that, I
gotta admit I ended up with a pretty cool looking Steam Deck. The buttons here, though, are
not the eXtremeRate buttons, just the shoulder and back buttons are. The Wulff Den blue ones and
this opal dpad were provided to me by Colored Controllers. They even put this cool Wulff
Den logo on the Steam button, which was a nice touch. The guy actually came to my signing at the convention last week. He was like one of the first guys in line, I think maybe the first, and he handed me a
package with my logo on it and all of these buttons inside. That was very cool. Thank you very much for that, and they definitely look awesome. I'll say however, the, what is this? The start button was a little tight. No, that's the select button. I'm pretty sure these are resin printed. So I think there was just a
little extra goop on mine, but this was nothing one of
my trusty files couldn't fix. Now it's good as new. It presses just like
any other button would. I'll also link this pack of files that I use in the description. So after all of that with all
of those things done to this, I'm happy with the way that it looks, I'm happy with the way that it functions, and I'm happy with the way that it feels, but I gotta admit, I think
I did make my Steam Deck just a little bit (beep). You're taking the whole thing apart, every little piece of it, and
putting it all back together. Things are not gonna be
the same when you're done. You're also replacing
the shell with a cheaper, clear plastic shell. It's gonna be a little bit more brittle. One of the pegs on the inside
bent on me really easily. There was also a peg
just completely missing on one of the sides. When it's all done, it feels fine, and it looks nice, but
it's definitely (beep), and I'm still mad about
how the screen is just like a quarter of a millimeter raised, and I'm not sure why this happened, but you know how when you
remove a micro SD card, it kind of like springs out,
sometimes it like pops out. Well, that doesn't happen anymore. I put the micro SD card in,
and it's never coming out. It just lives there now. I'm gonna go ahead and say that this is a zero out of 10 mod. It is not worth it at all, unless you have like multiple Steam Decks for some weird reason. So to recap, absolutely do the SSD mod, don't do the thumbs stick mod unless you already have drifting
or broken thumbs sticks, and just don't do the shell
swap unless you're a psychopath. Maybe change out the buttons
if you really want new buttons. That's pretty easy to do. The last little modification
that you can do, believe it or not, is to the case. You know how there's this
like perfect little space in the back that would
be great for the charger? Well, I found a 3D printable
file that holds the charger and three micro SD cards. I ran out of filament
at the end of the print, but it does the job just fine. If you've seen some of my other videos, you might already know that
I've been having a lot of fun with this 3D printer that I have. I just uploaded a video on
my other personal channel that's all about that 3D printer. So if you're interested in more of that, go watch that video right now. So what do you guys think
about my brand new Steam Deck with all these cool mods? Does it at least look cool? Did you try any of these and
have a different experience? Is there another reason
you'd like to try this out or did I kind of deter you away from it? At least do the SSD mod. That's so easy. Leave it in the comments
below, at me on Twitter, any and all of this other
social media garbage. Steam Decks are on sale for a
couple more days now, I think. They're like the cheapest
I've ever seen them, and now after knowing how
easy it is to do the SSD mod, get whatever model you want. There's new videos here all the time. The most important things you can do to help support this channel
is just subscribe right here and turn on notifications
if you want to know when every single video goes up and share this video with a friend, a friend who maybe is into modding stuff, was thinking about making
a cool colored Steam Deck. Thank you very much. Have yourself a very good week.
