Steam Deck OLED v LCD Teardown - What's Changed?

we put the original steam deck and the newly released OLED Edition head-to-head and verified the improvements claimed by Valve by doing a full tear down of both the LCD and OLED devices but that's not all as we test both their charging speeds and battery life measure screen brightness power on time and much more is the steam deck OLED a true performance enhancing upgrade to the LCD version or is it just a carbon copy with a new screen slapped on the front let's find out starting with a quick power on test from shutdown we pressed the power buttons on both systems at the same time and the OLED did turn on first taking just over 32 seconds and the LCD version would take just a bit longer coming in at 38 seconds valve didn't mention anything about power on time in their notes so it's good to see an improvement here but it's not surprising considering the amount of hard hardware and power changes they've made to the system but more on that later valve did State however that they had reduced the total system weight by 5% in our test the LCD version weighed in at 677 G and the OLED at 643 which is 34 G lighter almost exactly the 5% reduction promised to begin the tear down the screws needed to be taken out of the back panel have reduced the amount of screw types in the system for the LCD I had to swap screwdriver bits partway through the tear down whereas for the OLED I could use just one Philips screw type bit from a disassembly point of view this is a good Improvement if you're trying to get into your steam deck there is little difference to see between the back panels apart from these pads that were present on the inside of the LCD version the front panel too sees no Visible Changes except from the obvious upgrade to the display the active area of the screen has increased from 7 in to 7.4 resulting in a much smaller bezel when the system is on the max refresh rate has also gone from 60 to 90 Hertz and they have even increased the touchscreen polling rate for a more responsive experience it's also stated that the OLED screen boasts an improvement to the peak brightness to test this we used a digital light meter to physically record the brightness of the two displays on a pure white screen placing the sensor on the LCD screen we got a recording of 611 Lux then on the OLED we recorded 878 meaning the OLED screen Peak brightness has a massive 44% Improvement once inside the system we can already see some Visible Changes the outside of the motherboard EMC Shield is now entirely painted in Black along with the new fan which seems to me for cosmetic reasons whereas in the LCD it's silver I know most people won't see this but as a tech nerd it at least makes me feel happy next I removed the analog sticks by taking some more screws out of their dedicated pcbs and then the same for the door boards which are attached to the touchpad sensor apparently the plastic on the analog sticks has changed both on the top material for increased grip and dust resistance as well as on the post to improve the feeling of it sliding across the front cover we wanted to test the hardness of the new Plastics to see how exactly they have been adjusted the post had an increased Shore hardness of 20 meaning it is a harder plastic this in theory would then cause less friction and mean it can slide more easily on the top material the plastic was a significantly softer Shore hardness especially on the grippy part of the head so for the opposite reason the top cover should have much more friction leading to better responsiveness and less likelihood of your thumb slipping off the stick the architecture of the daughter board has changed significantly with the LCD version being much larger the reason for this is that the micro switch for the bumpers is on the end of it on the OLED they have moved the switch to be part of the analog stick assembly by doing this it becomes much more easier to remove the door board as on the LCD version you have to pry the triggers off to get to a screw holding it in place valve mentioned that they had reduced the step count for common repairs and you can see that here the only potential negative I can see here is that the micro switch now sits on a small protrusion off the analog stick PCB which could potentially be a weak point when dropped however we haven't tested this the trackpads have been redesigned with fewer parts and and the metal brackets that hold the trackpad in place is now straight in comparison to the LED Spring Light design they claim that the trackpads feel and precision has been improved as well as the Fidelity and Edge detection removing the motherboard shielding we can see drastic differences with the LCD version having huge thermal pads sitting on the inside I think there is a very good reason why these are not needed anymore in the OLED version which I will get to in just a moment there is also this cut out on the LCD version for a screw needed for extra grounding as this hole is too big to pass EMC testing they have covered it with a metallic tape removing the screws holding down the copper heat pipe to the CPU I can remove the fan there is a significant structural change as they have completely flipped the orientation of the fan meaning the direction of the flow of air both intake and exhaust have been reversed the OLED intake air from this fent in the back panel which crosses over the motherboard through the fan and out of this fent in the top of the device whereas the LCD intakes through the top vent and pushes the air down and out of the vent in the back as for the fan itself it has changed design appearing more Compact and presumably can push more air through it I would guess that the bulkier less aesthetic LCD fan was an off to shelf design used at lower cost whereas for the OLED it looks like a custom design albeit most likely at a higher unit cost but the trade-off of cost versus thermal performance would be something they would have considered carefully by changing the direction of the airflow the OLED is able to pull cool air over the motherboard whereas before the LCD version pushes the hot air across the CPU SSD and RAM this would explain why they removed those thermal pads from the inside of the EMC Shield because they are no longer stifling the performance with all this hot air in the system onto the motherboard itself after removing the connectors of the antenna and the other ribbon cables I was able to take out the motherboard the architecture of the two motherboards is vastly different with the OLED version appearing to achieve much more component efficiency compared to its LCD counterparts the reason for this is due to the reduced Apu size to 6 nanometer which makes it smaller as well as reducing the number of overall discrete components on the PCB this in turn makes the whole system more efficient the net effect of this is a faster more powerful efficient device it's also worth mentioning that this will produce less heat along with the new fan configuration the SSD along with its M2 slot has changed orientation turning 90° to the left this was probably part of redesigning the motherboard architecture from the ground up for the new Apu the ssds also have an ESD shielding sleeve you wouldn't normally see this on an SSD so I'm curious as to why but my guess is that they may have had issues with static shocks the battery was probably one of the most talked about upgrades for the OLED they claim that the battery capacity has been increased from 40 to 50 W hours increasing the battery life of the unit we tested the battery life by having both systems start on 100% battery and running them down until they died we put on aperture Laboratories a game made by Valve as a sort of tutorial to the steam deck controls the LCD conked out at 1 hour 52 and 30 seconds with the OLED still running which would last an additional 44 minutes and run out at 2 hours 36 30 seconds that is a 40% increase in battery life something that is really appreciated for a handheld console like the steam deck things got a lot more interesting however when we tested the time it takes for the systems to charge back up again valve states that they have improved the battery chemistry for faster charging from 20 to 80% we plugged both devices in whilst they were out of power and time to their charge the OLED quickly outpaces the LC c d hitting 80% charge at 1 hour 34 minutes and the LCD would take an additional 21 minutes to reach 80% taking 1 hour and 55 minutes but it's from this point on that things get interesting as the LCD would begin to catch up with the OLED in the final 20% to the point that they were actually neck and neck both at 99% the LCD hit 100% first it actually took the OLED another 30 minutes to reach full charge so the OLED was much faster at charging at the lower percentages but the LCD charged at a faster rate at the higher ones this must be due to the difference in battery chemistry as the LCD has a Lithium Polymer battery whilst the OLED has a lithium ion the fact that the LCD charged fully first might be why valve decided to talk about 20 to 80% charge in their notes instead of full charge however when you compare the 20 to 80% charge times the OLED was only 10 minutes or so faster the time it took the batteries to go from 0 to 80% is around the same time as it took from 80 to 100 this is because the batteries taper off their charging speed the higher the charge as there is less space for the lithium ions the way to think of it is to imagine the lithium ions are cars coming into a parking lot lot when the parking lot is empty it is easy for the cars to find a space but as the Lots fill up it takes longer and longer for each car to park with this in mind I would still consider this to be a small win for the OLED as faster charging is much more beneficial for the user at lower percentages as this would be important when you need to quickly throw your deck on charge before you're heading out when charging up to 100% it is more likely that you will have left your deck on charge for a long time or overnight so faster charging speeds aren't really helpful batteries rarely charg to real 100% due to the battery control firmware to avoid thermal runaway which can lead to batteries setting on fire like the Samsung Note 7 did in 2016 finally we wanted to try taking the screen off with a suction pad we did hear that they improved the display replacement to not require taking the rear cover off you would assume that this meant that the screen could be taken off like this but to my best efforts I couldn't get the screen to pop out and I didn't want to force it and break it as we wanted to keep the device for a very good reason as this is the one we're going to give away whilst valve was very clear that this wasn't a second addition to the steam deck it looks like they have gone above and beyond what is expected of a simple update it doesn't just have a new display but a new Apu an upgraded battery and a new thermal solution the steam dech OLED has been redesigned from the ground up and it's incredible to see to what extent these changes have been underplayed for this release the steam deck OLED has either delivered on or outperformed on its promises as for the design for manufacturer score I'd give this a solid 8 and 1/2 out of 10 of course there could be further Improv movements to maximize the internal space a little more this could increase battery capacity or even lower the weight even further but these are minor points to take part in the giveaway all you have to do is to subscribe to the channel and comment on what you think of the steam deck OLED the best comment and discussion wins and don't worry we'll put it back together again for you thanks for watching

Channel: Intretech secrets of scale

Views: 3,780

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Id: cOtNtH6kc3I

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2024