Steam Deck's Docking Station was quietly updated in a very useful way

Valve ofiicial Steam Deck Dock — (Image credit: Valve)

We're still waiting on the launch of the official Steam Deck Dock—now called the Steam Deck Docking Station, btw—but on the plus side at least it's now had a wee upgrade before it's even reached our hands. Or Decks. Or desks. Or wherever.

Perhaps realising there's no place for USB 2.0 on any new PC dock in 2022, Valve has changed the port configuration of the Docking Station to include three USB 3.1 Type-A connections ahead of its imminent release. We're still promised that will come in "Late Spring" so, er, any day now?

Originally there was only going to be a solitary USB 3.1 Type-A port, with the further two connections restricted to the older USB 2.0 specification, but now they're all high-speed connections, baby. Though we're still restricted to only a single Type-C port for powering the Docking Station.

It has actually been listed as such for a while, we just hadn't noticed until it was pointed out by GamingOnLinux recently. If you check out the WaybackMachine, you can see that Valve quietly released the update around the middle of February, and then eventually delivered the Docking Station name a little later on that month, instead of the original 'Official Dock' moniker it had been going under up to then.

Valve has also updated the image detailing the port layout of the dock confirming that it is supporting Gigabit Ethernet, too. Previously both the image and specs listed just "Ethernet" without any qualification on speed.

I have to admit I'm still a bit sad that I've not been able to get the Steam Deck to play nice with my Eve Spectrum's built-in USB Type-C hub.

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Steam Deck Docking Station specs changes — (Image credit: Valve)

That would have been a great way to get connected to a screen with a keyboard and mouse ready and waiting, and power coming the other way to keep it charged… and no extra Docking Station necessary.

But them's the breaks; maybe one day the myriad Deck updates will enable the DP alt-mode to a state where it will chat with my monitor sans dock.

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.