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.
The Steam Deck was first released in 2022 and it is, unsurprisingly, the original LCD-screened model with the now entry-level 256 GB of storage that's had a 20% price haircut and therefore not the revised and improved OLED model.
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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.
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.
1. Best overall:
Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS ed.
2. Best budget:
Steam Deck
3. Best Windows:
MSI Claw 8 AI+
4. Best big screen:
Lenovo Legion Go
5. Best compact:
Ayaneo Flip DS
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