Delayed numerous times, yesterday Valve finally confirmed that the launch of the Steam Deck was already official, beginning to arrive the first emails with the details to confirm and complete the orders of the units already reserved, and starting to ship the first unitswith the surprise for a lucky few to receive their delivery hand in hand by Gabe Newel himself.
Originally scheduled to start shipping in December 2021, About a month ago we saw how Steam began to make some changes to the date shown for Steam Deck reservations, predicting a small delay that would take the launch of this console or mini computer until the current year. However, there are still many reservations (like mine) made during the first hour of availability of the console, which still do not have a specific date of availability, dated for the moment for the period of the second quarter.
Everything you need to know about the Steam Deck
Developed in close collaboration with AMD to create a custom APU optimized for gaming in portable devices, we met before a powerful combination of Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectureswhich offers more than enough performance to run the latest AAA games in a very efficient power envelope.
Although small compared to a computer, this console is larger than the Nintendo Switch, with a seven-inch LCD touch screen with a resolution of 1,280 x 800 pixels in a 16:10 aspect ratio, with a refresh rate of 60 hertz and an average brightness of 400 nits.
In addition, it offers a power that could be considered closer to mini-PCs, with a basic version equipped with 64 gigabytes of eMMC storage accompanied by 16 gigabytes of LPDDR5 RAMas well as the aforementioned custom AMD APU, with a Zen 2 4c/8t CPU clocked between 2.4 and 3.5 gigahertz and an RDNA 2 GPU.
Qualities that give the Steam Deck the ability to play almost a thousand of the titles available on the PC gaming platform without problem, Valve continuing with a rapid adaptation to expand this catalog little by little. And it is that in fact this console could become a “laptop”. Independently of the console, the company has already announced the imminent availability of a docking station for the Steam Deckwith which we can connect it to external screens, cable networks, USB peripherals and the electrical network of any home.
Where and how to buy the Steam Deck
Currently we can continue to access Steam Deck reservations through the official website enabled for it, as well as through the Steam store itself in both versions for browsers and applications for PC and mobile. As we said before, the oldest orders (about a year ago) have now started to be shipped, so it is expected that, given the high initial demand, new reservations see delivery times of a few more months.
It should be noted that the process to reserve the Steam Deck is very simple, exclusively needing a Steam account and making a small advance payment of 4 euros.
