Valve announces the Steam Deck portable PC

Valve has officially unveiled the Steam Deck, a portable PC with “more than enough performance to run the latest AAA games in a very efficient power envelope.”

Looking very similar to a Nintendo Switch, the handheld device has a 7-inch touchscreen, two trackpads for a mouse, support for gyro controls, two thumbsticks, a d-pad, face buttons, shoulder buttons, and four back buttons. Users will have full access to their Steam library through their account and can also use all of Steam’s features, including chat, Remote Play, Cloud Saves, and the store.

As for storage, the Steam Deck comes in three variants: 64GB eMMC, 256GB NVMe SSD, or 512GB NVMe SSD. There’s also the option to expand the available storage through microSD cards.

Moving onto the specs. The handheld comes equipped with an AMD Zen 2 APU with 4 cores and 8 threads running between 2.4-3.5GHz, an AMD GPU with 8 RNDA 2 CUs for up to 1.6 TFlops of power, and 16 GB of DDR5 RAM. Take a look at the full specifications below:

Compute

• CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
• GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32)
• APU power: 4-15W

RAM

• 16 GB LPDDR5 RAM (5500 MT/s)

Storage

• 64 GB eMMC (PCIe Gen 2 x1)
• 256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
• 512 GB high-speed NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)

Display

• Resolution: 1280 x 800px (16:10 aspect ratio)
• Type: Optically bonded LCD for enhanced readability
• Display size: 7″ diagonal
• Brightness: 400 nits typical
• Refresh rate: 60Hz

The Steam Deck is set to launch this December in select regions and reservations open today at 10 a.m. PT. Three versions of the handheld are available: the 64 GB eMMC for $399, the 256 GB NVMe SSD for $529, and the 512 GB NVMe SSD for $649.