A little while back, I upgraded my Deck. No, not the wooden thing on the back of a house. I’m talking about the Steam Deck.
I’ve had a Steam Deck for a little over a year. And over that year, the deck has gone from really cool, but needs to work. To… well… Needless to say, I really like the Deck, and even upgraded mine to 2TB of storage. So when Valve announced the Deck OLED, I didn’t want one.
Don’t get me wrong, it looked cool as hell. And would love to have one. My first thought, was simply to build an upgrade kit from parts. Pick up a new shell, and the OLED panel (once it hit iFixit), and boom, kinda Deck OLED… Valve said no. The parts are not inter-compatible. So I bought one.
Yeah, I caved. And I don’t regret it. The main big upgrade (being the OLED screen), is fantastic. But, there are a number of other smaller upgrades.
| Deck LCD | Deck OLED | |
|---|---|---|
| Screen Size | 7" | 7.4" |
| Screen Refresh | 60Hz | 90Hz |
| Battery | 40Whr | 50Whr |
| CPU Node | 6nm | 7nm |
| Weight | 1lb 7.6oz | 1lb 6.6oz |
| Cup Holder | No | No |
| RTG | 😰 | ☢️ |
Ok, not really on that last one
One of the most noticeable improvements, is the build quality. The Deck LCD wasn’t built poorly, but the OLED is just more sturdy.
The shrunk down APU, combined with the OLED screen, and the bigger battery, do wonders for battery life.
I could go on for a bit on all of the little changes, but channels like LTT, already have.
1TB Is Not Enough
1TB is plenty for a handheld, but I had a 2TB SSD, and I wanted to move it over.
I started with cracking my LCD open, and extracting the 2TB SSD. After making sure all my non cloud synced stuff was backed up, I gave it a quick format. I then moved to the OLED. Cracking that open was much nicer. The OLED uses Torx screws, vs Philips. This is great, as Torx screws don’t cam out. With the blank 2TB SSD in the OLED, and the old 1TB SSD in an external enclosure. I was ready. I popped a clonezilla boot disk into the SD card slot, and fired it up.
Clonezilla on the Deck is super easy to use. You can set up the whole operation with just the D-pad, and the A button… You just can’t start the clone. Clonezilla is really adamant that you press Y to start the clone… So you need to plug in a keyboard, to press one key… Great.
About 40 minutes into the clone. I decided to move the deck to a more powerful power adapter… The moment I unplugged the cable, my docking adapter, blinked… Causing clonezilla to shit itself, as the source SSD dropped off… Now I had to start over.
Once the second clone attempt was done, I fired up the Deck. After waiting for SteamOS to auto expand the partition, it was done. A 2TB handheld, in the palm of my hand.
Thoughts
Overall, the Deck OLED is a fantastic upgrade, and I’m very happy with mine. The 90Hz screen is fantastic for Halo. And the HDR OLED, makes everything pop in ways the old Deck just couldn’t. The Deck OLED is more than just a screen upgrade. And that, is what got me to pick one up.