Valve is pricing the Steam Deck starting at $400, and that puts it right in the realm of a Nintendo Switch despite clearly superior hardware.
Valve has a new handheld, and I’m shocked by its price more than anything else. The Steam Deck is launching this December starting at $400. And that price gets you the 64GB model and a Nintendo Switch-like handheld running modern AMD hardware. This includes the following list of specs for the Steam Deck, which runs the Arch Linux-based SteamOS 3.0: The key specs for the Steam Deck are the four-core 3.5GHz Zen 2 processor, which should be quite efficient, and the incredible eight RDNA2 compute units. For comparison, the Xbox Series S has 20 RDNA2 CUs at only 1.565GHz. Based on these specs alone, it’s likely that the Steam Deck runs as well as a launch Xbox One or PlayStation 4. But then, how is this machine only $400. Even if you go a step up to the faster NVME SSD storage at $529 (256GB) and $649 (512GB), the Steam Deck is still incredibly affordable compared to similar devices.
