In a nice touch, the grips' widths ensure that your thumbs and the meat of your palms won’t accidentally touch the trackpads or block the speakers, located under the Steam and Options buttons. Square touchpads sit below the analog sticks and above the Steam and Options buttons. The standard dual analog sticks are present, along with four menu buttons, a direction pad, and four face buttons. Even the Asus ROG Zephyrus 14 gaming notebook is just half an inch wider, though to be fair, it’s considerably deeper and heavier than the 4.6-inch-deep handheld.Ī significant portion of the Steam Deck’s frame consists of the control surfaces and grips, which are considerably wider than the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons (and not removable). You can pack the Steam Deck in a bag, but it’s far too big to tuck into a jacket or comfortably play on the train. That's a bit surprising, since the Steam Deck and OLED Switch both have 7-inch screens. The Nintendo Switch with Joy-Cons attached is over two inches slimmer and half a pound lighter than the Steam Deck. A Big PortableĪt nearly a foot wide and weighing almost a pound and a half, the Steam Deck stands firmly on the unwieldy side of what you would consider a portable game system. Valve's handheld is a terrific device for taking your Steam library on the go, but the software still has some quirks that need to be addressed, especially if you want to go all-in on emulation and game mods. It has a reasonable $399 starting price, but we recommend spending the extra $130 for the mid-tier model that features four times the amount onboard storage (note that all three Steam Deck models house the same CPU, GPU, and RAM power only the display and storage type/capacity differ).

The Steam Deck is a lot of machine in a portable (albeit clunky) package.

Steam deck retail price