Hey guys, Taki here. Valve is back for
round two with the Steam Deck OLED model, and this time, they went all out. This is going to be a first-impression look at what is
easily the best handheld of the year now this time around I don't have a crazy long
story about how I got this this one was kind of painless huge shout out to valve for sending
this my way they didn't need to do that but it did simplify a lot of things because this is not
available where I live and I would have had to go through the huge Rabbit Hole of trying to get a
scalped unit again so I am very grateful that I don't need to do that also a huge shout out to
the nice people that I met in customs yesterday that helped process this thing faster and to the
absolute Chad of a FedEx employee who ended up handing this off to me at 11:30 last night that
dude was super nice and he went out of his way to help me with this I even offered to give him
a free unit of any handheld that I've ever made a video on and he didn't take me up on that
offer that dude needs a raise but with that out of the way let's get into this so This Time
Around we have a new accent color for this case they've gone with an orange Accent on the steam
deck logo and I think that's a pretty cool way of differentiating a product that basically
looks the same this is similar to what we saw with the first steam deck but I don't know if
we will also see this monochrome option on the cheaper versions of this new OLED model if you
have a steam deck then you probably know that these cases are really good as a free case that
just comes with the unit the new one is also good but they did make some important improvements
to it I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on this but I do want to go over some of the new
things with this case the first thing you'll see is we still have that same sock that came with
the 512 GB steam deck the only difference this time around is that they didn't add any color to
this tag if you bought a 512 gigb steam deck then you'll know that that came with blue accents on
the case and on the sock these aren't necessary by any stretch of the imagination but I do like
them I only have one out of all of the steam Decks that I own but I did go with a 3D printed option
for my other decks I'll have to check if this new charger can fit in those older 3D printed cases
but we do have a new one and they did make some important improvements in it first thing that
you'll see right off the bat is we now have a steam deck logo on the charger itself and this
is actually pretty cool I have a lot of chargers that look very similar to the steam deck one
without any branding on it so this is really nice to have as a quick visual cue that this is
meant for the steam deck beyond that the biggest change is in the cord length the new cable is
significantly longer than the old one and this is something that I didn't know that I wanted
until I started seeing longer cables in other PC handhelds when it comes to the steamex that
I had before today I would primarily use third party Chargers just because the cable was longer
and now I don't need to do that because this one is way longer than the original one I typically
will only use the charger for the original steam deck when I take it traveling inside the house
I end up using a charger that has a longer cable so that way I don't have to feel so Tethered to
an outlet this new charger will allow me to do that but in terms of specifications this is the
same charger as the original but this case has one final party trick and we can see it after we
open it up so with the case fully open we can see that it looks very similar to the original one
the main difference being that this one has a different material on the inside if I take out my
64 GB steam deck case that one looks very similar to this new one but the new thing that we can
do with this is actually take out this inner shell if we look on the bottom half of this you
can see that there is a separation here this is held together with velcro and if you just pull
on this you will separate the inner shell from the outer shell that leaves us with a hard shell
case that you could still use with a steam deck this one doesn't have any zippers but it does have
that velcro latch the inner shell is a nice soft case that is much thinner than the full case
and this is going to work a lot better if you want to slide this into a bag that already has
padding for protection it's not going to give you a whole lot of protection on its own but it
is a nice option to have if you have a backpack that already has padding this is a pretty cool
quality of life Improvement to see and that leaves us with the smallest change of this unboxing
experience the new white microfiber cloth now now let's go over the specs The Steam Deck OLED comes with a die
shrink of the original Steam Deck APU, but now it is at 6nm. This should give clear
benefits to heat, and power consumption assuming there are no other changes to available clock
frequencies. Our RAM is still 16GB of LPDDR5, but they have bumped the onboard RAM
up to 6400. The highest-end Deck now comes with 1TB of NVMe storage, and
that is the version that I have. This is a much better top tier option than
the older 512GB option. We also have a bigger screen than we did before. We now have a
7.4” panel with the same 800p resolution, but it is an HDR OLED panel with a max
refresh rate of 90Hz. Our battery also got a decent bump up to 50Wh, and that
is going to significantly increase our minimum battery life. Connectivity got a
welcome upgrade to Wi-Fi 6E for wireless networking, and we also got a nice bump up
to Bluetooth 5.3 for better audio support. When it comes to pricing, the entire
stack has changed slightly. I am going to focus only on the OLED models, so I won’t
be talking about the updated pricing for the normal LCD version. Our base OLED SKU
comes with the old max available storage, and that is going to set you back $549. If you
think about it, you now have the ability to buy a huge upgrade for less money than people
bought a regular 512GB Deck. That’s SKU is a great option. Up from there, you have the
high-end version with a few extras at $649. That’s the version that I have. They have a
limited edition available in only two regions, and that one goes for $30 more and
it comes with a transparent shell. in this first section I want to talk all about the
improvements and changes that they've made to the hardware and the software of the steam deck OLED
anything that's like a significant change we'll probably do a dedicated section just on it to
evaluate it further the first and the biggest change is the new screen it is an OLED screen but
even Beyond just being an OLED screen there are a lot of things that are better with this screen
given that's it's an OLED panel it's going to have extremely dark blacks so if you're going to play
anything that's like a darker game it's going to look amazing on this we also have a higher maximum
brightness this time around on the original deck I was able to measure around 540 knits of peak
brightness on this model we can get 1,000 nits of peak brightness but that's only in HDR games
and yes this is an HDR capable handheld that is not that common in non HDR content you're going
to be limited to 600 nits of peak brightness and I'm not anticipating that that's going to be
a noticeable Improvement or a change over the stock steam deck that being said it should easily
be possible to see 1,000 nits of peak brightness so the resolution is the same but the screen
is bigger with smaller bezels on the top and the bottom we have a higher maximum brightness
especially with the new addition of HDR mode but we also have Rich colors that completely fill out
the srgb color space this was one of my biggest gripes with the original steam deck content
just didn't look as good as it did on other handhelds and that pushed me to want to play on
those other handhelds the steam deck has always been either in the top position or in the second
position of the best handhelds that I've ever used and it never had the chance of losing that
position due to having lower performance than newer handhelds that are out there it would lose
that spot because the content just looked better on those other devices but that is not the case
anymore this screen looks amazing but we'll talk more about the screen later on our next biggest
change is in the cooling system and this can be either the fan or the heat sink that they're using
but it also ties into the more efficient processor that we have so far in the brief testing that I've
done I am noticing that this thing is performing a bit better than the stock steam deck it also has
the benefit of having that new vent smell for me charging speed was never an issue on the original
steam deck but they've also improved that and it is a noticeable Improvement especially when you
take into account that this battery is going to go a lot further than it would would before I'll
need a bit more time to do some full battery tests but just based on what I saw thus far this thing
charges super fast and the final Improvement that I was able to see is in Wireless functionality
the new Wi-Fi support is amazing as is the updated Bluetooth spec on the Wi-Fi side that's going
to mean much faster download speeds and lower latency in online games and on the Bluetooth
side that's going to mean better compatibility and lower latency with newer Hardware both
on the audio side and for controllers when it comes to the remaining physical changes that
we can see without opening up the device there's not a whole lot left the screen printing on all
of the face buttons is a bit darker than it was before and they've also changed the color on
the base of the analog stick the top of the analog stick also changed and this can kind of
be seen as an improvement I never really had any problems with the original stick but it was easy
for this to get dirty and a bit difficult to clean it at times so I always ended up just using
thumb stick caps the top of the new stick is now a grippy plastic that should be way easier
to clean and better to maintain it also sits a bit recessed from the rim and I found that that
also helps with grip a bit and that just leaves us with this final change which is the new orange
power button and again like the case I think this is a cool way to differentiate a new product
that basically looks the same as the original in this section I want to talk all about gameplay
performance and benchmarks and because we only have a die shrink with this new device we
shouldn't expect to get better performance than the original steam deck unless those situations
can take it advantage of the faster Ram that we have and those are going to be edge cases so if
we just run a benchmark on these they should be within a percent or two of each other now other
people have already looked at benchmarks of the new steam deck and I plan to do that myself in the
future but what I want to do now is try to find out if there's any instance where the new deck
is worse than the old one before we do that let's quickly talk about the onscreen display we can see
in this example right here running Resident Evil 3 on both of these devices the original steam
Deck shows that it's using 1 to two Watts more power than the OLED deck and both of these are
at Max brightness so this would be 540 is nits on the original deck and 600 nits on the OLED one if
their data is accurate now one of the things that I need to point out is when we're looking at that
charge drain we need to also take into account that the battery sizes are different between these
two devices charge drain as you see here is just a snapshot and it's not always that accurate
if this battery was lower let's say like 20% or so that charge drain would increase but you're
not using more power it's just that the reading is not that accurate throughout the entire scale
different devices are more accurate at different positions in the charge drain scale but you have
to do some tests to find out where that point is on the original steam deck you got the best
accuracy with a spot check at around 50% battery ideally we would want this battery capacity to
be equal to the old one when we were doing that measurement but I have no doubt in my mind beyond
the die shrink that the screen probably also uses a lot more power than the new OLED one because
there are pixels that just don't even need to be turned on in this scene but anyway this is
resid Evil 3 and what I want to do is start looking at the TDP scale and how it affects the
FPS that we have inside this menu you can see I have both devices set to 6 wat TDP and that allows
us to get 60 FPS on both of the units if we focus in on the GPU and CPU frequencies we can see that
those are similar between both devices but there is some fluctuation on the OLED one if we bump up
to 7 watt TDP we see that the same clocks between both units what happens when we go down let's go
down to 5 watt TDP on the original deck at 5 watt TDP in this setting we're getting between 48 and
50 FPS on the OLED steam deck in this setting with all of the same game settings for some reason
we're getting less FPS and we can see that Gap persist even if we go down to 4 watt TDP on both
devices so I don't know if this is a driver issue with this game but this is not something that
I was expecting to see and just so there's no questions these are both using the same settings I
don't know if I'll see this in other games because I'm doing this as I'm saying it right now but even
if we do see this in another game I don't think it really matters if at the end of the day we're
still using less power at that TDP on the OLED steam deck it just means that you're going to have
to bump up to the next highest level to be able to match the performance that you would get on the
original deck at these very low TDP levels but let's try to see if we can find another instance
of this but just as another point of reference here's de HD on the top versus the original steam
deck and both of these are also at 800p with the same game settings and you can see the FPS
readings are pretty much similar between the two of them plus or minus a couple FPS here's another
game for this one we need 7 watt TDP to be able to play it at 60 FPS in this setting we can see at
that TDP our GPU clock is the same or about the same on both devices they fluctuate a bit the CPU
clock see a bit of fluctuation on both of these with the OLED 1 sitting at the minimum clock for
this TDP a bit more often than the original one but they're largely the same now let's go down
from 7 wat TDP to see what happens so at 6 wat TDP on the original deck we are at 54 55 FPS and
on the OLED one we dropped to around 48 fps if we go down to 5 watt TDP on the OLED deck we are
sitting at around 33 FPS and on the original steam deck for some reason we are still around
40ish FPS again we're using less power to do this on the OLED deck even if we accounted for the
differences in their battery size so I don't think this matters but it is interesting nevertheless if
we go down to 3w TDP on both of these our FPS is basically the same good thing is this doesn't seem
to be uniform across the board here with freedom planet we have both of these running at 3 watt TDP
and the FPS is locked to a solid 60 FPS where it fluctuates a bit on the original it can go down to
58 as you can see with these spikes right here and these seem to be uni form but that does not happen
on this if we move over to Horizon zero Dawn neither of these can run this game at 15 wat TDP
with the settings that I'm using in this area the OLED steam deck is on the bottom and the original
one is on the top and I believe with this game we seem to be running a bit better on the OLED model
versus the original the FPS is fluctuating a lot on both of them but we seem to hit 60 FPS a lot
more on the OLED model than we do on the original but let's see how both of these behave when we
go under 15 wat TDP if we go down even further to 6 watt TDP that's when we seem to get more
performance on the original deck versus the OLED one but this could be due to some things that are
on screen right now this isn't an exact copy of what is being rendered on both devices like it was
for the other two games Skyrim is the final game that I want to look at in this way again both of
these are using the exact same game settings and we're running both of them at 8w TDP at this TDP
we are able to run both of these games at 60 FPS no problem let's go down to 7 watt if we bump down
to 7 watt TDP both of these are pretty similar but the FPS is a bit higher on the original deck at 6
watt TDP there is a much bigger gap between both of these and there are some interesting things
that are happening if we look at the GPU clock the frequency is a bit higher on the original deck
than it is on the new one when it comes to the CPU frequencies those are almost the same but we're
locked at 1,399 MHz on the OLED deck whereas the that seems to fluctuate quite a bit on the old one
and even when we're in this idle animation here where the camera is panning around you can see
that the FPS is definitely better on the original deck but again the power consumption is higher on
the original deck so if we balanced based on power consumption the OLED deck would definitely beat
out the original one hands down and even if we take this down even further to 5 watt we can still
see that there is a sizable gap between both of these units so yeah that's an interesting takeaway
from this I don't think it really matters because at the end of the day the OLED deck is using less
power but it is interesting to see that there are some instances where the original one is getting
better performance with the older processor I have three original steam decks and they all basically
are around the same that you can see in any of the testing that I did and I did switch between a few
while I was making this section and so far from my sample size of one there are some instances
where the original deck outperforms the newer one but it does so by consuming more power so it
doesn't really matter at the the end of the day In this section, I want to talk about the
thermal performance of the Steam Deck OLED. Now, I haven’t had a ton of time with this
device, but I don’t expect things to change from my initial impressions. There are a
few aspects of thermals that I want to touch on. The first thing that I want to say is that
this fan makes less noise than any of my other Steam Decks. I noticed this right
away. On the top end of the TDP scale, it’s not as quiet as Ally for example, but
I think there is some room for improvement with external tools like the fantastic
plugin. I don’t have that installed on this, but I think it is the first time when
I could see myself using it on a Deck. I am using the updated fan curve on this,
and it does a great job of keeping this thing super quiet at like 8W TDP or lower.
Above that, it seems to be over-tuned a bit, and I say that because this Deck
runs cooler than a normal one. I’ve tried almost every cooling mod there is for
the normal Deck, and I have never been able to get the thermal experience that I am getting
here. If I were to make this fan operate at a lower RPM to match the thermal performance of
the original Deck at let’s say 15W TDP, it would be even quieter than it is right now. That is
something that I want to explore going forward. Again, this is a sample size of one, but
I have found that this fan operates at a frequency that doesn’t bother me or that I can’t
easily notice. I never had the whiny Deck fan, but I do have other fans that make a
high-pitched noise at even low RPMs, and I’m not hearing it with this one. Don’t
get me wrong, the thing is pushing air at the higher end of the TDP scale, but the sound
that it is making is not annoying. In fact, there were times while I was filming
this video when the ambient noise of the room that I was in overpowered the fan
with the volume set to 0. That’s nuts. So beyond the fan noise, or lack thereof,
this device also feels cooler to the touch at the max TDP. The original Deck never
felt that warm to me when I would game on it because of how far my hands are from
the heat, but I could still feel the back getting warmer to the touch when I pushed
it full throttle. I don’t have that here. In the background, I have
Cyber Punk 2077 running, and I had this propped up like it would be if I were
gaming on it. I want to take out my thermal camera so we can see the temps on the back shell, the
temps of the screen, and the temps near the vent. Let's take a look at the temps. Again, this is
at 15W TDP. If we look at the controller area, that is at 32C, which is below
skin temp. It doesn’t even pick up from here, until you get to the border
of the screen. At that point, we are at 42C, which again isn’t bad. In the center, we
go up to 45C, but even that isn’t bad. The other end of the device drops down
a bit. So if we just take into account that this is with max brightness
and we have temps like this, this is very good. I would anticipate that
this would be a bit warmer with HDR content. On the vent, we have a hotspot of around 60C, with a range of 50-60 in this area.
This is while the CPU is reporting 75C. If we look at the back, this area
here would usually be where you would be able to feel some heat, but it
feels way better to the touch than it ever was with the normal Steam Deck.
This is nuts for it feel this good. I’m very impressed. This area right here is
usually a big hotspot, but now your hear is over to the middle where your hands will never touch.
That’s amazing, and it’s a huge improvement. This is the OG Steam Deck, and you can see that the edge of the screen is super
toasty on this at around 50C. Near the vent, we have a hotspot
of 70C, and this is with the CPU reporting temps of 85C. This 10C gap
seems to be common from my tests. And if we go to the back, you can see
that not only is this fan area warmer, but that heat extends out to
the processor area. That’s 50C, and your hands can come in contact
with this area while you are gaming So if we just focus on this thermal imaging, it’s easy to see that the OLED Deck
is an entirely different beast. but the biggest thing that we haven't talked about
yet is the single biggest reason to even consider buying this in the first place when I originally
did the outline for this video I was planning to cover a lot of content on the screen but I've
decided that it's probably better just to do a deep dive on the screen itself in a separate
video or in a video that covers the screen in other topics so I will keep this centered just
on my Impressions and my impressions are that this is an amazing screen there are many great
aspects about this beyond the fact that it's an OLED screen I love that this is a 90 HZ panel
because that's going to open up a lot of doors to us beyond what we could do with the stock
steam deck on the normal steam deck we could adjust the refresh rate of the panel from 40 H
Herz to 60 HZ and you know that 40 HZ became the deao option for demanding titles because it gave
you the ability to have a smoother experience with less power consumption but we've also had a lot
of demanding PC games that can't run at a solid 40 FPS but oddly enough those titles usually do
run at 35 FPS the unfortunate thing about those games is we didn't have a good option to pick for
the refresh rate of our panel that would give us a smooth frame time experience now we do but yeah
I'm planning to do a deep dive just on the screen because there's a lot of information to cover here
and there are a lot of things that I would like to know as a consumer if I was thinking about
upgrading to this or purchasing my very first steam deck I know there are a lot of people out
there that are wondering if they should upgrade to this new version if they already have a steam
deck or if they don't even have one at all I'm going to speak about my situation and maybe some
of the things that I say here will resonate with yours I currently have three steam decks and now
that I've experienced this new version I don't think I'll use any of them anymore if I do use any
of them it'll probably only be the one that is set up for emulation there is no other reason for me
to use the normal steam deck now that I have this one it is much better than the original model in
every way that I care about the most the biggest of which is the screen I care a lot about the
visual experience on my gaming handhelds and the steam deck was lacking in that department versus
a lot lot of other handhelds that came out after it with this new screen the steam deck stands out
alone but it's at the top this is way better than other handhelds that are on the market especially
when you consider the price that this goes for I do just want to point out that if you do have a
steam deck there's no reason from a performance standpoint to upgrade to this since the experience
is going to be the same but if you care a lot about thermals and the visual experience of the
device this is the definitive version of the steam deck whether or not it's worth going through the
effort of trying to sell the deck that you have now to finance this one or if you just want to
buy two of them at the same time that's really up for you to decide I will just leave you with this
anecdote for a long time I've had the belief that if a company could manage to get their hands on a
decently sized OLED screen then that would allow the hardware to far outlive the usefulness of the
processor that it uses if we look at the processor that this has and that the original steam deck has
they are outclassed by the newer AMD processors that are out there on the high end on the very
low end they can be matched to some extent by ryen 7,000 but this still has a place where it
exceeds over other options that you can get that won't be the case forever if ryzen 8000 isn't
able to surpass this processor or the original steam deck processor at every TDP level then that
is a real shame but even if that happens or we get to the point where there are other apus that are
available in the steam deck 2 or other competing handhelds at cheaper prices or the same price
as this one this device will never stop being relevant let's say for example 3 years from now
there's a very popular PC title that isn't even able to run at 20 FPS on this Hardware with all of
the future FSR tricks that are available well you can just stream that game to this device and with
this screen and the controls that we have in the amazing audio system this is the best streaming
experience that you can get from any device that's on the market right now but that added quality
does come at a cost this time around you need to buy at least the mid-tier option if you want to
get this new screen this new processor and all of the other improvements I believe this Hardware
is worth that but I'll have some more videos delving into this deeper if you're on the fence
if you enjoyed this video and you want to see another take a look at the video that I did on the
Lenovo Legion Go Happy gaming everyone Taki out
That sounds to me like the TDP settings are more aggressive on the OLED. Bump it up a watt and you're back at parity. A moot point either way when battery life will be better regardless.
So basically, LCD runs better than OLED when matching TDP levels, but OLED's better battery allows you to up the wattage to make up for it and break even if not slightly perform better?
Seems like the OLED hasn't got the low wattage optimizations the original deck has, hopefully the OLED gets those optimizations in future patches.
I googled TPD but couldn't find a clear answer. Anyone has a reference to what this means?