A team took it upon themselves to dissect a Steam Deck prototype purchased on eBay for the modest sum of $3000. The least we can say is that many changes have been made between this prototype and the production version on the market… Not least in terms of configuration. Initially, Valve planned to adopt a dedicated GPU.
Steam Deck: a dedicated GPU spotted in a console prototype!
Valve ‘s console has changed, to say the least. For one thing, the shapes are no longer the same. On the other hand, the controls have evolved, with the presence of two real joysticks, whereas the touchpads of the Vive headset were to be used initially. All these changes benefit the tablet’s overall ergonomics, but the configuration has also undergone drastic changes. Once opened, the prototype reveals a Ryzen 7 3700 APU, a model equipped with four hyperthreaded Zen+ cores coupled with integrated Vega 10 graphics. RAM is asthmatic, with just 8 GB of memory, 2 GB of which is allocated to the APU‘s iGPU. Finally, the most intriguing thing concerns the use of a dedicated graphics card. One might think that the plan was to enable compatibility with external solutions, but it’s possible that at some point Valve considered installing dedicated graphics chips on the Steam Deck.
In short, the current version of the Steam Deck runs on an AMD APU, still in 4c/8t, but with a Zen 2 architecture, while the iGPU is in RDNA 2. Clearly, performance has nothing to do with it, as the current configuration delivers twice as many FPS as the prototype, according to our tests. As for RAM, we’re dealing with 16 GB of LPDDR5 at 6400 MT/s, while storage is entrusted to an SSD with capacities ranging from 256 GB to 1 TB. https://youtu.be/ZILXRqTEl3g?si=tEOhbZSCv5Mhz5YP
