The ULTIMATE Steam Deck

beneath this protective trout is the world's ultimate the greatest steam deck or at least it will be by the time we're done we will have replaced the inherently flawed analog sticks with hall effect sticks we will have added tempered glass protection to the screen we will have upgraded both the cooling and the battery allowing us to run faster longer and quieter and we will have upgraded it to a staggering three terabytes of storage that's without violating valve's guidance on aftermarket ssd upgrades probably the biggest change though is to the protection this video is brought to you by dbrand who is showing off their kill switch steam deck protector it's both a carrying case slash grip complete with kickstand and a protective cover so you can huck your steam deck into your bag preferably one from lttstore.com and you're off to the races linode linode is a powerful affordable and easy to use linux based cloud computing service that has one click apps for websites game servers and more sign up today at leno.com linus to get a free 60 day credit [Music] what qualifies a steam deck as the ultimate steam deck well there's kind of two routes that you can go down i want to come over here brandon one route is the ultimate dock station so like here we have the jsox i don't know if that's actually how you say it but they're dock so you're able to come in you know set your steam deck down keyboard mouse have ethernet you could even plug it into a whole display with hdmi port i don't really like that because kind of the logical extreme of that is this is the ultimate steam deck and it's just a gaming computer instead what we want to do is work on everything that's inside of it and then makes it better as like a portable gaming station the first thing we're going to do then is upgrade the storage a really easy way to upgrade it is a one terabyte sd card now one terabyte's fine but we want to go even further which is why we have this right here it's only 30 millimeters long but inside of this is two terabytes of storage it's an engineering sample for micron they're not totally sure that it's going to work in the steam deck they send it over to us and we're just like hey guys can you test if this works if it does we'll go and sell it to people we can even see like a little connector here for debugging to make opening up our steam deck a little bit easier we have this 3d print right here it's from ma strong bad mac whatever they give you the 3d print you can pop it out pretty simply there we go getting in the steam deck is pretty simple now there have been modifications to put a 45 millimeter drive into the steam deck but that causes quite a few issues this is the charging ic it kind of handles all of your battery management and crap and even from the factory it gets over 90 degrees celsius so if you're putting you know an ssd over top of it you're gonna have a really bad time now we did add a heatsink to it and i need to upgrade that later but fortunately by putting our 30 millimeter one in here we don't have to worry about you know valve getting super mad at us once the ssd is installed it's very simple to get steam os back onto here so you just go to this steam support page and download the recovery image use rufus to check it on a usb like this one right here and then very simply plug that in when you boot up you hold volume down and power at the same time until you hear a chime i think it chimed there we go and you end up in the boot manager okay it's just working um i lied earlier i tested this yesterday the ssd is fine storage yep 1.6 free of 1.8 terabytes we also going to be able to add this one terabyte right here and then boom three terabytes of storage that's freaking sweet now this is not the most storage that's ever been on a steam deck bret from ufd tech was able to do 20 terabytes it was ridiculous the stuff that he did we could try and do that but uh it looked like just one of the most painful things ever and a bunch of linux if you want to see that watch his video i'm not doing it the next thing on our list is the upgraded joystick so these are electromagnetic joysticks from ghoulie kit freaking sweet because they replace our potentiometer based joysticks in here which are you know they can cause joystick drifting and stuff like that look at these brandon okay let's get the old guys out now why would you want to replace this joystick as you move it around a wiper is on a resistive layer and that's what gives you the output i've got one right here this right here is the resistive layer and as you turn it the amount of resistance changes these joysticks from ghoulie kit work a little bit different they have a magnet and as the magnet moves the electromagnetic field changes and then that gives you your output normally the amount of error in a joystick with a potentiometer is like five to ten percent so you just need a dead zone that's five to ten percent on this right here it can be less than one percent one thing you might have noticed is that uh this is not the most satisfying of joystick toppers ever so we need to take it off of here now the problem is that this right here senses when you're touching it and we need to get rid of a little lead and solder it back on [Music] well that was easy just chuck her in like that the factory joysticks would have had a calibration in them so that you know from the factory you don't have joystick drift in order to change that we need to first turn it on with the back off and then press this tiny little button that's right there once we do that it should all be fine we'll verify that later though okay yeah the joysticks are absolutely dead on i even have the dead zone cause like why not next thing we need to do is add an external fan now if you haven't watched it already you should definitely watch the video where me and linus made this steam deck cooler but the problem is is that we thought that it would just cool everything passively but after about half an hour of gameplay or so it ends up just getting to the same temperature and this thing is scalding hot what we did find out is that it works incredibly well if you just add a fan who would have thought problem is is that i need somewhere to attach this fan i don't know where though and it's going to involve cutting a hole in our steam deck ask you how you are you just after an in-depth pondering with the creator warehouse actual electrical engineers we decided that the best course of action is to just say and not make it removable when this is on here if the heatsink's on there you can very easily put the back on take the back off if you want to remove the fan and the heat sink you have to remove both fans and heat sinks this way we can just do it in a couple minutes and it's going to be functionally just the same bye oh this is going to be terrible look at how small those wires are like that's my fingernail compared to it well it's the point no return right here there it is unsurprisingly we don't have wire strippers that are this small i don't really trust myself to just like take a flush cutter and get that off so uh that's what we're gonna do yeah i was really dumb cutting this nine out of ten electrical engineers recommend you do your very small soldering exactly like this the only unfortunate thing is that linus is going to open up the back of this and immediately make fun of us oh no i've never been made fun of on the internet for my soldering skills thank you commenters for saying how great my soldering job was we did it let's wait for this one to turn off maybe it's not turning off oh we're running down oh we're running doom that would do it oh and our ground wire of course all right got the fan working total pain in the butt really wish we had a data sheet for this but uh for everyone that's going to be modifying the fans of this and probably mostly for future alex it goes ground pwm sense and then 5 volt it turns out that if you connect a pwm signal for your other fan to a sense wire it makes them kind of invert each other so when the one spins up the other one spins down as you can see they are both running and when this one turns off they both should turn off there we go perfect works great the final thing we need to do in here is fix this tiny little battery management chip it gets super hot and so the last time we put this very tiny heat sink on it problem is is that the thermal adhesive that we used on it was not very great so it came loose and made a bunch of sparks when it moved around we're going to use some proper thermal epoxy to attach it this time i'm also going to conformal coat everything around it just to be sure to attach it we're just using thermal conductive adhesive from mg chemicals it's a two-part mix and it kind of smells like fish sauce yeah definitely don't eat it perfect now we can leave that to dry overnight and it should not come off again all right so the next day this heat sink is absolutely not coming off and i believe we are good with the internals of the steam deck to protect our steam deck we're going to be using the d brand kill switch there's only one problem uh we added a heatsink i just had a brilliant idea though for how we can cut a nice hole in the back watch this brandon perfect now we know just where to cut i'm so happy with myself that i figured that one [Music] out have a bunch of ducks show up outside i was very concerned that the whole thing would just turn into a real floppy mess once we removed all that plastic because you know this back bit here is the hard plastic that kind of holds it all together seems like it's fine though i need to take off just a tiny bit more but this is going to work great [Music] okay our case is on next thing we want to do is protect our joysticks and to tell you about that here's past alex to get our joystick protectors what we want to do is create a mold inside of these 3d printed pieces now it's pretty simple we take 10 of this one of this combine them together in here and then stick it into our vacuum chamber that takes out all the bubbles that we've created when we mix them together and makes it so you don't have you know well bubbles in your finished part then you just simply inject it into the mold piece here until it squirts out of all of the other holes that means that you don't have any like voids in your mold and then you wait 24 hours see when they're done why thank you past alex now it's been it's actually been two days so these should be nice and set okay look at that even our ltt got in there also you can see all the lines from the 3d print okay diy injection molding that worked great does it fit here just head crabbing my controller yeah that should prevent it from getting too smashed around in your bag i can dig it now we need to protect up around this area from scratches and so on same as this one right here if you guys are paying for this video i even went ahead and watched the install instructions dbrand be proud of me to continue protecting this thing we're going to add some tempered glass after wiping with the cloth we wipe with some liquor and interestingly i thought these were just stickers and like they are but their intended use case is actually to take it and if you have like lint or anything on your screen you can just hear that comes right off all right removing the backing have to be real careful not to touch this oh that's pretty cool looking actually okay that looks really good really this is the cable we're using we haven't even told the people what we're doing yet we want to upgrade the battery but you obviously can't do that inside so you know this okay it's a bit of a hack hey speaking of hacks really that's the mounting mechanism for the fan still do you have a better idea yes i do have a better idea we could drill through the heat sink this way put a bolt and then a nut on the end and it could be held in with like hardware there's a heat pipe there though you need to have the fan up like a quarter inch oh so there is oh it just doesn't feel very ultimate turn it on it has actual pwm it's controlled by the steam deck yeah that linus is going to open up the back of this and immediately make fun of us did you just pigtail it off the stock concept wow good soldering it was very difficult oh this is amazing so it's built into it now yeah this is going to be my steam deck now right sure if you want you see these things yeah the kickstand thing yeah these right here because their prototypes are just hand assembled which means this pin comes out super easily do you know it fits pretty well in this spot a battery oh that's cool yeah so our battery can be magnetic yeah yeah and this thing right here is what 36 watt hours that almost doubles your battery life if that isn't enough you know what you can always do oh my god are we talking about this again yes it's so good look at this it's just over nine pounds you can stash it in your backpack because it's a well-made backpack you know it's not too heavy when you have it on like this over 10 hours of battery life this is the best i love it but it's stupid what's your plan for attaching this to that belt sander off these and double sided tape it on and this will never come off i do have to wonder about our total weight now that we've added all of this extra cooling and battery i mean given the magnet was designed to hold on a little piece of plastic not a battery bang i guess that makes sense does this just feel deluxe or what like oh man it's like gold controller vibes i definitely it is a prototype made a second error it'll be fine it just needs to i just need to put it in the right way wow that was really not designed to come apart cool hey there we go nice oh man that looks so clean i love it all right what you said before though i really want to see what the weight difference is oh yeah that's so this is a normal one 677. whoa 1.1 kilos so we added about what like half a kilogram yeah over 400 grams how much is it without this only 874. another point no that is not an argument in favor of the backpack battery i mean yeah but you're wearing a backpack all the time you have a heatsink at the back of your steam deck and this is what you're concerned about oh oh sick oh sick who needs a kickstand anymore hey dbrand hey if you guys are watching this which i know you are you should do a battery kickstand this is the deluxist steam deck that does exist we are hitting over two gigahertz on nearly on every cpu core right now while gaming with our cpu at 46 usage this is butter smooth i'm running do maternal at medium at native resolution and we're getting 60 fps freaking locked oh my gosh it's gonna get a little hotter we know this already but our cpu and gpu are both 50 to 55 degrees right now that is like nothing oh yeah if this fan is not turning that fan's not turning wait have we been gaming all this time completely fanlessly yeah wow have you noticed any difference in the joysticks at all um no [Music] yeah i have to the dead zone and you can probably make it even smaller wow the dead zone is something that's configurable on the steam deck right yeah so you can make it probably even smaller than it is right now and the reason these hall effect joysticks allow you to shrink the dead zone is because they're so precise so you don't have to have that slop in the middle to account for them wearing out what are the temps at though still 59 degrees yeah and our external fan hasn't even kicked in yet damn this is wild like our sponsor dbrand oh those guys yep they drove a big truck full of money into our office to push their latest plastic thing project kill switch on pretty much every steam deck video we have what's project kill switch you might ask what are you some kind of dbrand shell all right it's kind of cool though it's like they're grip cases for phones and other devices but it's for your steam deck it's got a rugged rubberized finish plus a kickstand for when you're out on the go and you want to pull out your controller and game they've also got their tempered glass screen protectors for the steam deck which we tested out for them as it turns out regular tempered glass screen protectors inhibit touch sensitivity while dbrand screen protectors are super precise and guaranteed to work on your display so you can think of them kind of like the super thin condom except they probably won't break you can reserve your project kill switch now at dbrand.com killswitch or at the link down below it is a pre-order but to my knowledge they're the only game in town so what are you gonna do take your business elsewhere also dbrand give the people the scorpion if you guys enjoyed this check out the full video on adding extra cooling to the steam deck the results although not as impressive as we got today yeah obviously were absolutely mind-blowing well the fan turned on oh there it goes shut down thank you

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,681,834

Keywords: Steam deck, ultimate, cooling, battery, 3TB

Id: JXhT13oZchA

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/franzjpm]

I'm just waiting for Austin's version of this.