If you feel like your Steam Deck is still pretty underpowered, then maybe you should check out Linus Tech Tips' newest project. Because in it, they took a basic Deck, modified it to the absolute limit, then came up with a sheer beast of a handheld.
A Steam Deck handheld gaming console, taken on August 26, 2021.
As described by Kotaku, the so-called "Ultimate Steam Deck" looks like a device that actors in an 80s sci-fi movie would've hacked doors with after the extensive modifications. But on a more serious note, LTT's project focused on improving the Valve handheld PC's longevity, durability, and cooling, and they succeeded in more ways than one.
Linus Tech Tips' Ultimate Steam Deck" video has now earned over 560K views at the time of this writing, simply because of how extensive and effective the mods were at improving the handheld's hardware:
Obviously, they can't replace the Deck's CPU, GPU, and add more RAM to it. But they did what they could, and among the biggest mods they did to the Deck (and relatively the "simplest") involved the device's storage. For LTT's project, they extended the Deck's storage to a whopping 3TB by adding a 1TB microSD and a 2TB Micron M.2 2230 SSD (albeit an engineering sample).This is already far beyond what the highest-end Steam Deck model could do, which only tops out at 512GB of internal storage.
Next up, they upgraded the Deck's drift-prone thumbsticks. They replaced the original potentiometer-based sticks with a pair of electromagnetic joysticks, with the focus on almost fully eliminating drift. If you're a Nintendo Switch owner, you'd give everything to have that peace of mind.
To cap things off, they further improved the Deck's cooling (which they already did by attaching a small heatsink to the back) by adding a fan on the heatsink, first up. Second, they upgraded the battery to make it last longer even on more intense game sessions. And third and last, they beefed up the device's protection by using the Killswitch protector from DBrand so it does more than just survive a drop test.
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What About A 'Real' Performance Upgrade?
LTT's Ultimate Steam Deck changed a lot of things, but the game performance stayed the same because they can't change the CPU and GPU. But technically, you don't even need to change either of those to get better game performance, as proven by another tinkerer called ETA PRIME on YouTube.
That's because using an M.2 SSD adapter, they managed to connect an entire freaking desktop GPU to the Steam Deck. The GPU used was an AMD RX 6900XT (the current top dog for Team Red), which was powered by an external Corsair desktop-size power supply. The result is extremely ghetto and completely takes away the portability of Valve's handheld, but it's an interesting project nonetheless:
While games did run way better, the GPU was still held back by the relatively weak CPU in the Deck. This is known as a bottleneck, wherein the CPU basically has to work really hard to catch up to the GPU. It just cannot send data to the GPU fast enough, leading to the decreased performance.
How about you? Are you satisfied with your Steam Deck, or would you want to make it way faster?
