Valve Goes Hard: Steam Deck OLED Review & Benchmarks vs. ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme, Deck LCD

[Music] valve is killing it right now but they're not alone anymore valve at this point is flanked on all sides by compelling competition the steam deck OLED however made massive changes that we already detailed at a hardware level and those in our testing today have materialized in some major improvements against the deck LCD so even though it is besieged on all sides by competition it still has a Fighting Chance when the deed originally came out we were quick to get an in-depth ter down online detailing the component changes and valve changed a lot and now several months later we've spent a lot of Hands-On time with the steam deck OLED I check to make sure the button was orange that's how you know it's the OLED one other than the OLED and we're giving this a long-term user review approach to the benchmarking and testing today and this approach to the review means we've gotten to use it in a true user experiened sort of way in addition to the benchmarking and it allowed us some time to run into some special issues like the staticky headphone jack one testing today includes system latency with click to Photon measurements something we're just starting to introduce everywhere thermals with handwired Thermo couples on the PCB Acoustics in our quar million doll Hemi anic chamber gaming benchmarks and again some subjective thoughts and we're ready now to look at how the steam deck OLED compares to the Rog allly Z1 extreme not the non extrem that's not really worth thinking too much about we have a separate review on that uh this has been dropping as low as 600 lately originally launched for 700 but it has been in flux and we also have the legion go that will be reviewing next and against both of these so our plan to start building out handheld charts just like we do for CPUs and gpus we wanted to go crazy in depth with this one so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly and the cryos sheet graphine pads these cryos sheets are molecularly stacked in the z-axis to encourage vertical direct thermal transfer from the IHS to the cooler trios sheet pads are made to be easily applicable for a thermal interface and completely avoid paste dry out because it's not paste it makes them particularly useful for lawn service life systems with minimal maintenance they come in multiple sizes for suitability on the most common laptops and desktop CPUs and you can learn more at the thermal Grizzly cry sheets at the link in the description below none of these companies are ready to launch their second generation of this new era of handheld gaming piecs yet however valve has lightly talked about how it does intend to do a deck to and Asus has already committed to trying to ship an ally to this year MSI has gone a little bit overboard and they've said you know what we're going to make four claws we haven't put the first one out yet but there's going to be four of them that's two times more than two allies which is two times better so we're already deep into marketing competition here which means there must be something to this Market really briefly to get everyone up to speed here are the specs differences the steam deck oled's biggest difference is obviously the screen but there are a ton of physical Hardware changes that we already covered we'll leave that in the separate piece it's linked below the SRC remains a four core 8 thread AMD Zen two part but now with a die shrink to 6 nanm the target base and boost clocks are the same the rdna 2 GPU is the same the battery capacity has changed however the new batter is a 50w hour part which was possible thanks to the smaller OLED screen the OLED isn't as thick as the original LCD unit and valve used that extra space to increase the battery thickness the memory also got a major overhaul now up to DDR 56400 from DDR 55500 as we showed in our recent 8700g benchmarks this memory change will most heavily impact games where you are starting to be more GPU bound or at least where the GPU needs access to that memory that's because it's all shared our measured weight had the olad 37 G lighter so it's not necessarily a meaningful impact for the weight change it's really the memory and the battery they're the most noticeable on a spec sheet but throughout this video we'll also recap some of the physical Hardware changes that were significant even if you don't necessarily immediately notice them that includes repairability improvements as for the Ally it runs significantly higher core count for the solution with a more modern Zen architecture at eight core 16 thread Zen 4 and running at 5.1 GHz boost maximally the Ally also runs rdna 3 and has 12 cus for a significant boost and theoretical capabilities over the deck the Ally also however runs a higher Apu power and that will still constrain it unless you have it plugged into the wall and maxed out so the biggest limiter here in bottleneck for the Ally will be the power the alli's other downside is that it sticks to a 40w hour battery that compares to the original LCD we'll test to see if the de OLED has a battery life Advantage here spoiler alert bigger battery lower power consumption equals yes but we have some numbers for it we're starting with game testing today so methodologically some really brief notes for you we're using 1280 by 720 for all of the resolutions for gaming comparisons between the Ally and the deck that's because we need them to be like for like for frame rate comparisons running the Ally at its native resolution the deck at a lower resolution uh it's going to make the Ally obviously look a lot worse and we want to compare them with those variables controlled so that's the methodological approach if you want to run at higher res you can the frame rate will obviously be lower uh additionally HDR was disabled for games that offer an option for it with one exception that we'll talk about later firmware software and drivers on the Ally were all updated and the deck was updated at the same time so they were running the same uh set of updates for the same period during which testing was conducted we have a lot of options for the performance profiles but to keep things simple the Ally defaults to the performance power profile plug it in the device or manually selecting turbo leads to higher frame rates we've shown that the past and has predictable tradeoffs you can check our dedicated Alli Z1 extreme review for more detail we're not going to recap everything in this one for this piece we are focusing on the deck versus the deck as the primary comparison however the Ally with that performance profile will be present just remember you have the turbo mode you can plug it in uh if you want more frame rate still and check the original review for that you can use that as kind of a baseline for those also noted in the Alli Z1 extreme review there's a bit of the AMD staff them issue that we talked about in the Apu reviews which is skin temperature aware power management uh and because of that it will slowly throttle the clocks as it's running longer and for that reason we are discarding the first pass and all the test for the Asus Ally Z1 extreme because no one's playing games for like a minute and then stopping so we're using the data from the period after which it has hit steady state for the clocks and the same is true for any device which has this Behavior finally all frame rate caps were disabled unless otherwise stated there are some instances and tearing was allowed on both devices let's get into testing Red Dead Redemption 2 is up first for a game that was state-of-the-art 5 years ago it runs fairly well on handheld Hardware even without the help of upscaling the original deck LCD averaged 50 FPS with 26 FPS for the 0.1% lows lows are critical on handhelds in particular and are actually problematic sometimes on the Ally as we'll see later here the OLED averaged 53 FPS for a 7% uplift over the LCD despite valve's initial claims that performance should be about the same the memory is bolstering performance here the Z1 Extreme has improved in the months since launch and is now effectively tied with the olet previously there were instances where the Ally was outperformed by the deck when frame time pacing was less stable and red dead could sometimes be one of those for d light 2 we opted to set FSR to Quality and push the settings down to the low preset to hit playable frame rates the OLED had a lead over the original again with a similar 6% uplift to 45.8 FPS average the Alli Z1 extremes average may have been higher at 48 but the lows are terrible it's something that we also noted in our original review we've proven this countable times over the last 12 years but this is once again why it's so important to look Beyond average the frame time pacing wasn't good here and the difference in operating system and drivers used on each is a large part of that despite an average FPS Advantage for the Ally the deck provides a significantly better experience so let's look closer this chart shows frame times or the time required to render each frame the deck OLED plots an incredibly Flat Line frame to frame representing a pacing of frame to L that ensures the player won't notice any hitches or stutters the Ally is a different story and it's the reason the vertical scale is so completely blown out there's several spikes approaching 40 milliseconds which is already a 20 millisecond deviation with a few spikes to the 50s and some even up to around 110 milliseconds which represents oneth of a second that you're staring at the same old Frame data this also affects the total system latency as delivery of your input will be delayed you can learn more about the relationship of latency and frame rate in our recent latency engineering interview and the deep dive that will link below this is the Allies weakest point so far though we'd already installed f-122 for some noise and power tests so we ran an FPS test as well the OLED lost most of its lead here with a 60 FPS average that's functionally tied with the lcd's result the difference is run to run variant so memory has less impact in this test the OLED led the Ally Z1 extreme by 4.2% for average FPS which is a direct result of the poor 0.1% lows we're seen on the Ally again the Allies frame pacing issues mean reduced average frame rate as well and once again the deck produces a better experience cyberpunk with our tested settings had one of the least significant Deltas we tested in Dogtown which is part of the Phantom Liberty DLC at 720p low with FSR 2.1 set to Quality at those settings the LCD averaged 44 FPS with the OLED at 44.6 so it's it's the same basically the Allies Z1 extreme is behind the LCD as it was in a review months ago and although the Ally is capable of massive performance improvements on wall power against the deck at least here handheld we're not seeing that however we'll briefly show that chart as a reminder this data is not comparable to the chart that you just saw and the settings are different it was also done at a different time but this gives a reminder as the capabilities of the Ally when on wall power the deck can't approach that so if that's a way you're going to play maybe the alies is a better candidate for docked play for you Resident Evil 4 at 720p with prioritized Graphics preset is pushing what these devices can manage but the OLED handled it a little better than the LCD with a 4% improvement from 27.6 fps to 28.6 average the Z1 extreme improved this position from last time we tested and it pulls ahead of the OLED by 6.3% that has it at 30.4 FPS average with stable lows this time which is a major relief for the Ally that's more in line with what its Hardware suggests it should be capable of and it really needs that support here the difference really does end up in firmware soft software the operating system because at a hardware level it should be better at the time of testing there's no obvious way to run balers Gate 3 with Vulcan on the deck we tested using the default dx11 API since that's what a typical user would do rather than work around it the lows are abysmal on the crowded City street we Ed for testing even at 720p low with Evar 2.2 dropped all the way down to balanced 22.3 FPS average on the LCD with seven for the 0.1% lows is brutal from the perspective of a desktop gamer but balers Gate 3 doesn't require High frame rates to be playable and there are plenty of players online who testify to that the OLED improves things as much here as anywhere else up 7% from the LCD but that only translates to a 23.9 FPS average with unpleasant frame time spikes unchanged the Ally did better although it also had poor 0.1% lows overall uh it did however have a high run to- run variant in particular with some individual stable passes mixed in now we're talking latency and this is exciting because it's something we've been talking about a lot lately which is what is the human element to all of this frame rate is directly tied to latency in a lot of ways so there is a correlation there but it's not always perfect and looking only at frame rate as a measure of responsiveness or feel of the game even when looking at frame times it still eliminates the possibility for differences in the pipeline we have a whole engineering discussion on how latency Works what the differences between input lag or input latency are from Total system latency what click to Photon means all this stuff is linked below as well if you want to learn about that from a methodological standpoint and just educationally but the short version is that the total responsiveness of the device significantly hinges on the latency end to endend when you are putting command in through some form of input and that's what we're testing here uh because it can times decouple from just the frame rate the updated steam deck has a 90 HZ OLED screen which will help it to attain lower latencies than the original 60 HZ LCD at the back end of this pipeline in addition higher frame rates typically correlate with lower latency and will be reflected in the PC latency part of this pipeline in the middle we've already seen that the OLED usually outperforms the LCD we chose two games for latency testing there's holon knite which is a 2d platformer that renders well above the refresh rates of either device and d light 2 a more demanding 3D game that already showed Improvement in performance on the olet we used the Nvidia lat for testing this is a platform IC tool we validated separately the measurements we're showing today are full click to Photon system latency so they Encompass everything from the initial input making a physical connection to the first detectable change on the display panel meaning that FPS or the rate at which frames are rendered and presented is a factor this is a compromise we could isolate the latencies tied to individual parts of the pipeline or experiment with frame rate or refresh rate caps but we're reviewing the deck OLED holistically so that's how we're testing it latency we're doing 100 samples for all this testing for each test it's a lot of samples but we do it because variability is naturally high for latency testing between things like the rate uh the pulling intervals or input pulling refreshing and what we get for the end result as a culmination of all these steps of the pipeline from input to the display itself plus the PC latency in between we need a lot of numbers to make sure we're looking at something accurate it's 100 samples per test and let's look at it here's the chart for how night at 720p full screen with all frame rate caps disabled vsync off and particle effects and blur quality set to their default values of normal and medium respectively on the LCD latency averaged 20.9 milliseconds end to end technically we saw an average of 70.9 but there's a frame of windup before the knight's 20 FPS attack animation becomes visible and can trigger the lat so we subtract a flat 50 milliseconds or 1,000 milliseconds divided by 20 FPS from the measured time on each device as result of the fixed 20fps animation on the OLED that true latency was reduced to 16.7 milliseconds a reduction from the LCD of 4.2 milliseconds that's a tiny Improvement but our testing with a pro player coming out soon shows that people can definitely detect small changes any reduction in latency can improve your Precision whether you're consciously aware of it or not and it affects the experience the reduction here can be directly tied to that screen change the Ally tied the OLED at 16.8 milliseconds they are functional identical the Ally tested as usual in performance mode with its LCD screen running at 120 HZ and so they are tied and within error we tested dite 2 with the same settings used for our FPS Benchmark we experimented with different actions to trigger the lat and found that some like flashlight toggle seems to have lower latency than others like quick turn we settled on the quick turn as the most reliable and relevant trigger on the LCD we saw a sluggish average of 122.9 milliseconds of total end-end system latency down to 15 15.2 on the olet that's a reduction of 7.7 milliseconds for context that reduction is a little more than the length of one frame time at 144 FPS but any Improvement can have an impact when it comes to latency and this is a real Improvement since we're doing at least 100 passes the more demanding software allows the Ally to stretch its legs with the 109.5 millisecond latency improved by 5.8 milliseconds versus the olet this is one of the titles in which the Ally also had an advantage in over over all FPS average so the OLED has definitely improved over the LCD which is our main focus today the Ally however does also have the capability to post advantages given its screen differences uh and its performance capabilities in games where it can actually leverage them it is closer to equal with the olad in some scenarios but it's definitely better than the LCD uh and the deck is also the olad is definitely better than the LCD as well for just total latency now we're getting into one of the most important aspects which is battery life and discharge time between these devices we're running three primary tests for this we have video playback we have a 2d gaming scenario with a frame rate cap and then we have a 3D gaming scenario heavier load without a frame rate cap and those are the three we're going to be looking at uh we are using dead cells f123 and VLC looping 4K video locally for all of that and we found that as a note f123 would reliably crash on the deck OLED when using 100% brightness which is what we intend to test with in most situations and as a result we only have 50% brightness comparisons for that whereas typically we do 100% so we couldn't find a solution to the bug don't know why it was happening it not appeared to be thermally constrained because we had probes hooked up to analyze that as well uh so it just seems like a bug with that particular game and that setting all right let's look at it looping one of our own rendered 4K 60 videos full screen in VLC killed the oled's battery after 4.3 hours which is a significant improvement over the LCD and the Z1 extreme in comparison to the LCD the OLED lasted 70 2% longer it's a massive increase in total runtime for video playback and the lead over the Ally is less significant but still significant at 20% a benefit of the oled's larger battery in dead cells we allow the game to run at the native resolution of the device under test and vsync to that device's native refresh rate that means these are not purely 100% like for like you'll see that in the names for each of the devices in the chart and the next test will be purely like for like we allow this because the variable helps to represent likely real world to use even for a 2d game like dead cells this matters note that our old result for the Z1 extreme lasted 40 minutes longer with a refresh rate cut down to 60 HZ the oled's 90 HZ refresh rate should similarly decrease battery life versus the 60 HZ LCD here but the larger battery allows it to last 36% longer than the LCD model more than 8 hours of continuous 2D gaming is pretty good F1 is up this one uses all of the variables controlled including resolution so these are directly comparable vsync was disabled for the F1 test and the the medium preset was used with variable rate shading turned off the OLED deck is the only device we tested that allowed the in-game HDR option to be enabled so we did an extra test with it on and set to default values that's scgb with Peak knit adjustment set to 10 and at a system level the brightness was still set to 50% for all tests the Ally and performance mode slightly outperform the deck LCD the OLED handily beats both by more than half an hour of play time that's definitely noticeable in the real world and regardless of the in-game HDR setting uh we saw the same between them so a 57% increase versus the LCD original and it's a 47% increase versus the allly Z1 extreme in performance mode with those uh vsync settings as listed we're getting into battery charge time now so this is done with a logging power meter between the wall and the device it's tested with the devices completely off for the entire test and although fast charge time is desirable remember that there are safety limitations uh and also just battery preserv ation limitations where you have to balance as a manufacturer the Char of Time Versus those preservation or safety considerations despite the 50w hour battery Against The Originals 40 W hours the deck OLED uses a charger which is functionally identical it's still the chickeny or twin Guan AC adapter with 5volt 3 amp uh 9volt 3 amp 15 volt 3 amp and 20 volt with 2.25 amps listed as the available output modes if you do the ma that's 45 Watts Max output the deck OLED pulled 50 Watts at its peak measured at the wall and not the output with brief dips near the 55-minute mark that's where the rate of charging drops into a typical curve we found that the deck LCD only pulls 27 Watts at most under these conditions the Ally completed its charge in about 98 minutes here making it the fastest of these its curve is also the most aggressive with a stuttered stair step and a higher initial draw in total the OLED took 205 minutes to charge charge a 22% longer charge time than the LCD is 168 minute total charge time but its battery is 25% larger and there's more to the story The 22% increase in time lines up neatly with that 25% increase in battery capacity but there's more to it most lithium batteries don't charge at a linear rate as this chart illustrates the OLED reaches a usable state of charge faster than the LCD even if the total charge time is longer the OLED hits 80% charge at 78 minutes to the lcd's 94 minutes and 90% charge at 101 minutes to the LCD is 111 minutes note that the horizontal scale of this chart is half that of the chart above getting to 90% charge is much much faster than getting to that 100% fully but there's a flaw to this chart too and this chart fixes it because the oled's battery has a larger overall capacity percentages aren't the whole story plotting the Watt hours of held charge or capacity rather than percent of charge at the same intervals reveals a larger gap between the curves as the OLED both stores more energy and does it at a faster rate than the LCD we start to see them deviate the olad hits 30 wat hours before the LCD is even at 20 there's a quick revisit of thermals coming up on the steam deck devices for this testing we use a mix of internal sensors and thermal k type thermocouples that we attach inside the device one of the major changes to the internals this time was the rotation of the S so which likewise allowed a rotation of the taller vrm components away from the underpass that allows the fan to Supply Air to the motherboard side valve also went with shorter inductors in some places which also reduced impedance to flow and likewise the new memory chips are also about half the height of the original which allows more flow into the rest of the board the end result is this chart showing a significant Improvement to thermals across the board the memory temperatures checked at our probe points have dropped from 62° to 56 at 20° C ambient for the olet the charger IC dropped massively in temperature falling from 91° C in the original testing to 71 with the major overhaul that Val valve committed to this charger IC previously we detailed the technicals of this in our tear down but the significant changes work to resolve one of the main thermal problems that valve had previously nvme temperatures may not be 100% directly comparable because this uses sensors and software overall valves changes to component layout though for the things that are directly comparable with certainty have significantly aided in The Thermals of the device getting into noise anecdotally the deck OLED is a lot quieter than the deck LCD but it is louder than the Ally however we don't need anecdotes here we have a whole ass Hemi anico chamber for that testing so let's check it out this chart looks at noise levels over time during a 10-minute load period for all the devices under test fans are left to their default settings a 100% gaming load resulted in deck OLED fan ramp Landing at about 22 to 23 DBA at half a meter measurement distance the dips you're seeing here are from loading screens in the workload after the first loading screen temperatures begun climbing enough to push RPM higher and noise levels go to 24 and then 25 DBA at the peak the deck LCD climbed more gradually with less immediate RPM ramp but continued climbing past the OLED levels still as the occasional massive spike it still briefly and violently ramps before falling at its peak it hits 33 DBA which is nearly a 2X increase perceived noise to the human ear over the olet the average is closer to 30 DBA though as for the Ally it held a perfectly flat noise level during this particular test fans are not being utilized as much as with the deck they just kind of hold one speed here's a quick plot of the frequency spectrum from the same test case the Ally had its loudest range in the 500 to 1300 Herz area with another bump around 2,000 to 3,000 the dead is louder overall but follows a similar profile except for its bump in the 1500 to 2,000 HZ range the 800 to 1200 HZ part of the spectrum is also elevated the deck LCD is significantly louder in all frequencies with a more noticeable spike in the 1300 2,000 HZ range when compared against the olet as a reminder capping the frame rate brings down the noise level significantly and we have that plot it as well if you want to see that closing thoughts on all these we'll start with the latency stuff in general the latency on the deck OLED is definitely better than the deck LCD however the fastest way to improve the latency or reduce the latency on any of these devices is simply to increase the frame rate they are low enough in frame rate in general that's where you can get the biggest impact and whether you do that through reducing settings using some form of upscaling uh for its faults or a combination that will improve it the most noticeably now one thing here is that when you impose a frame rate cap that's going to hurt the latency clearly because it limits the amount of frames you're going to get by nature of it but the benefit is for battery life for battery life the deck OLED has significantly better battery life than the deck LCD and some of these scenarios it does manage to hit that 8 plus hour marker in our 2D gaming test uh and it also outperforms the Ally for battery life in both the like for like and the not like for like testing uh and that is just it's a larger battery and it's also not quite as high power as the Ally but definitely the larger battery contributes the most as we saw in That Dying Light frame time chart the Ally still struggles with frame time pacing in some games but not all and it has improved significantly in some test versus the original launch data looking at the market as of this writing a brand new Alli Z1 extreme can be had from asus's official Best Buy storefront for $600 uh sometimes it goes back up to $700 while a 512 GB steam deck OLED cost $550 on Steam at near equivalent prices the oled's potential advantages come down to its screen its battery Steam OS is awkwardly an almost larger Advantage for some of the frame time pacing here but has disadvantages and general compatibility after seeing the OLED panel in action we don't strongly prefer it to the Allies higher refresh rate and resolution similarly Ste OS isn't necessarily an advantage we like the interface uh we like the frame pacing but closing Armory crate and launching steam in Big Picture Mode offers mostly the same experience except in Windows on the Ally but with wider softer compatibility we don't prioritize testing with wall power and handheld reviews the Z1 extreme however has a much higher performance ceiling than any deck model when connected to wall power which we showed previously with more cores higher clocks so it might be a good docking option if that's interesting to you if you plan to play exclusively in handheld mode the deck OLED does beat the Ally in terms of battery life although both devices have settings that can be tweaked to extend play time however the specs and the testing for numbers don't reflect two of the drawn out issues for these devices one is the crackling headphone jack issue for uh the steam deck OLED which we talked about in a news episode we were able to replicate it on our device it doesn't happen with all pairs of headphones uh we have a particular pair here where it does occur for IMS and then additionally uh for the Ally there's the micro SD card burnout problem now both of these have resolution for the de OLED it's basically a grounding issue it's relatively easy to to get it recovered or repaired or have valve take care of it they have offered that for the Ally Asus has been dealing with it through its warranty system this did affect our unit like we talked about back when we reviewed it of the two the Allies problem is much more serious and we're reluctant to use the micro SD card slot at all even today that said it's a little easier to swap the SSD in an ally than it is in a deck and upgrading to a terabyte skipping external storage is always an option so that's it for the in-depth review of the steam deck OLED we had a lot of fun working on this one came in a little later it allowed us to get full depth hands- on really think about it for a few months approach it from some new angles like factoring in the latency testing doing new thermal testing uh and so hopefully you all appreciated it because that allowed us to get some unique data but the next one on the list it's right there it's the legion go and we've already begun testing so check back for that subscribe to catch it as always and go back and watch our tear down of the deck ol uh whether you're buying this or not whether you're even if you're not interested in any of these super interesting because we got to talk to some of Val's Engineers for that and it allowed us some additional Insight you might learn something there uh certainly I did when we were working on it thanks for watching as always if you want to support this type of in-depth content we could use your help head over to store. Gamers access.net your purchases there are what allow us to invest sometimes hundreds of hours into a single video just to review a handheld device so we can use your help grab one of our PC Building mod mats our high heat resistant silicone soldering mats which are also great for other projects like model building or some of the other options like our t-shirts and our coaster packs we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

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Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, steam deck oled, steam deck lcd, steam deck oled vs lcd, steam deck oled differences, steam deck oled vs asus rog ally, asus rog ally z1 extreme benchmarks, asus rog ally z1 extreme vs deck, valve staem deck, steam deck worth it, steam deck review, steam deck oled review, steam deck oled battery life, asus rog ally battery life

Id: egdV0NLoL-c

Length: 29min 39sec (1779 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024