Valve has just dropped the Steam Deck LCD to $319 / £279 making it a stellar deal for entry-level portable PC gaming

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Over three years old, but still going strong.

steam deck deal
(Image credit: Valve)
Valve Steam Deck LCD 256 GB
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Valve Steam Deck LCD 256 GB: was $399 now $319.20 at store.steampowered.com

Portable PC gaming has never been such great value. Sure, the original LCD Deck is over three years old. Even at launch, it was no powerhouse. But that's the point. The Deck was never about performance flexing. It's about simpler, purer gaming fun and now you can get that for less cash than ever before. Nice.

Key specs: 7-inch LCD | 1,280 x 800 | 60 Hz | 256 GB | 40 Whr battery | 45 W power supply

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In an age where a budget graphics card costs 400 bucks, the fact that you can get an entire gaming rig—and a portable one, at that—for something around the 300 mark has to be celebrated. So, let's give it up for the new price-reduced Steam Deck, yours for just $319.20 or £279.20 from the official Valve store.

However, the original Deck still has plenty going for it, especially when you consider that the OLED one isn't meaningfully faster in terms of game performance. Indeed, it wasn't meant to be.

Apart from the superior image quality of the OLED panel, the newer model also gives you an upgrade to 90 Hz refresh and a bigger battery, plus improved wireless connectivity. And all of that is welcome.

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Steam Deck on a purple background with Cyberpunk 2077 on the screen
(Image credit: Future)

But it's now a big old price jump from the basic LCD model to the $549 / £479 512 GB OLED Steam Deck. Moreover, what's made Valve's handheld appealing has never been things like performance and features.

Instead, it's the overall experience, the operating system and indeed the broader ecosystem; the fact that game devs target the Steam Deck specifically and latterly the stability of the platform in hardware terms—all of this is what makes it such a great little device. And all of this is just as present in the entry-level Deck.

In other words, the Steam Deck has never been about performance flexing and Triple-A titles. It's been about purer, simpler gaming pleasures. And now access to that is cheaper than ever. Nice.

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Jeremy Laird
Jeremy Laird
Hardware writer

Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.

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