Steam Deck OLED Australian Review: Was it worth the wait?

The Steam Deck OLED is an impressive take on portable PC gaming in a console style, though it’s still also an indulgent gaming option – and not without some issues.

Score: 3.5/5

In this review

Steam Deck OLED Specifications
Steam Deck OLED Design
Steam Deck OLED Performance
Steam Deck OLED Battery
Steam Deck OLED Conclusion

When I reviewed the Asus ROG Ally and Asus ROG Ally X, they were reviews done somewhat in the shadow of another mobile gaming platform.

That was of course the Steam Deck, Valve’s entry into making a system that’s one part personal computer, one part Nintendo Switch.

The Steam Deck was released back in early 2022… but not officially in Australia, which led to plenty of folks taking their chances and importing them at a higher cost than Valve’s list price.

That all changed back at PAX Aus this year, with Valve making a big splash by announcing that it was going to finally and officially release the Steam Deck in Australia in November, later clarifying that down to November 19 2024. Valve sent me a Steam Deck OLED for review ahead of that date to test out.

Honestly, it feels kind of odd to be reviewing a device that first debuted (albeit not in OLED form) two years ago – I usually try to be a tad more timely than that for tech reviews – but then there will be those who have held off on buying a Steam Deck purely because of the issues around warranty support and the sometimes outrageous prices that direct importers have asked for them.

Also, I was curious to see if many of the issues that a lot of many earlier reviewers had around the platform had been resolved, because the Steam Deck’s much more of a known quantity now.

The quick answer to that question is… maybe. It does depend on the games you’re playing to a very large extent, but you still do have to temper your expectations, especially around current era AAA titles.

Ethical disclaimer: I actually don’t know at the time of writing if Valve is going to ask for this particular Steam Deck OLED back or not; as always that’s fine if they do or they don’t, but it never has an impact on how I review a particular product.

However, I do feel that proper ethical disclosure is important, and it’s something that’s all too often overlooked or buried at the end of a review. That’s not my style… but now, on with the review.

Design

While the Steam Deck has a certain “Switch” quality to it in terms of design, and realistically there’s only so many ways you arrange gaming controls and a horizontal screen in a way that will fit human hands, it is a little different to the Asus ROG Ally systems I’ve reviewed previously.

That’s mostly because it’s substantially wider than those systems, and that’s largely to accommodate a feature that Asus doesn’t have in the form of dual trackpads, located under each of the thumbsticks.

There’s a simple D-Pad, start/select buttons and an XYAB button arrangement on the face of the Steam Deck OLED, as well as a dedicated Steam menu button on the lower left hand side. Finally there’s a set of four configurable R4/R5/L4/L5 buttons on the rear behind the section where you grip the Steam Deck OLED while playing.

The rear of the Steam Deck OLED... is not exciting at all, but there are extra buttons here.

This forces all of the face controls relatively high up on the Steam Deck OLED’s body, which does take a little bit of muscle memory learning to get to grips with. Another family member of mine who tested the Steam Deck OLED out for me briefly commented that he wasn’t a fan of that arrangement, but it does feel like it’s a personal taste matter for most games.

The benefit of having those trackpads is that it does make it easier to work with games that think in terms of mouse inputs more than thumbsticks, as well as enabling a level of control if you drop the Steam Deck OLED into its desktop mode – more on that later.

The trackpads are better than thumbsticks for mouse control for sure.

It’s not called the Steam Deck OLED by accident of course; that suffix indicates that it’s got an OLED display for the higher storage configurations, though if you opt for the entry level 256GB model it’s still just packing in an LCD display, and a slightly smaller one too at 7 inches compared to 7.4 inches on the OLED variant.

It’s not a particularly high resolution display, however, clocking in at just 1280x800 no matter which screen type you end up with. Outside of the colour presentation differences between OLED and LCD, the other difference between Steam Decks is that the LCD model only supports 60Hz refresh rates where the Steam Deck OLED bumps that up to 90hz.

Still, this is older and slightly lesser technology, no doubt built that way to meet some specific price points.

Comparatively the Asus offerings have 1920x1080 pixel resolutions, so they can handle 1080p resolutions where the Steam Deck cannot. At this size, there’s some argument to be had about actual resolution visibility, and of course that will again depend on the games you’re playing and how sharp you need the detail to be.

While it’s a wide creature, it’s not as heavy as I thought it might be, weighing in at around 640 grams. Essentially it’s the weight of an iPad, but in a very different form.

All of this hasn’t changed for the local release in any way all. Technically speaking, the biggest design innovation that the official Australian model of the Steam Deck OLED has is the inclusion of an Australian plug, rather than an international one.

If you’re an Australian reading this review, I’m going to take the wild and crazy guess that you know what an Australian plug looks like. This is another one. Whee.

Performance

Side tip: Nights into Dreams is being delisted from Steam on 6/12/2024.
Buy a copy now, thank me later.

The Steam Deck OLED runs on an AMD Zen 2 processor backed up by 16GB of RAM and 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of SSD storage.

If you do opt for the lower tier storage models, it’s easy – and essentially encouraged – to supplement this with microSD storage. The model supplied to me by Valve was the top-tier 1TB model, but if you’re a PC gamer, you’re probably aware of just how easy it is to fill up 1TB with all those games you purchased in Steam sales and didn’t play anywhere near enough of.

That can’t just be me, can it?

When most people think of Steam, they think of PC gaming, which is to say Windows gaming, though Steam’s had clients for other operating systems for many years now. The Steam Deck OLED runs on SteamOS, which is itself a Linux-based OS based around Arch Linux.

I’ve been doing tech writing for too long long enough that I can recall when configuring Linux systems was enough to break even the hardiest IT professional into a cold sweat, but here Valve has done a lot of work to make the experience both as Steam-like and as console-style as possible.

If you want to, you can stay within the confines of SteamOS’ default launcher with very simple icons and an easy to learn interface that makes it quite effortless to install and play your Steam games. It's essentially a rework of Steam's existing Big Picture mode, just not on a particularly big screen.

Supported games will show you their controller layouts -- a nice step.

There’s clearly been a lot of thought put into how SteamOS can work across different player types and needs too; for example if the XYAB layout doesn’t suit your gaming style because your gaming brain thinks in Nintendo layout terms, there’s a direct switch within settings to change it to the YXBA style of a Switch controller.

Valve is also clearly still supporting and developing SteamOS; during my review period I’ve had a couple of full software updates come down the line from the stable release channel for the Steam Deck. They’re simple enough to install and I hit no problems doing so.

Being Linux, the question of game compatibility rears its head. Here Valve uses its own Proton software layer for games that do not have native Linux versions to allow Windows code to run.

Proton is interesting, and here I do think Australians perhaps benefit from it having been tested for the past couple of years across a lot of games, because there’s a lot of games where you’ll find existing controller layouts already implemented – but not always.

Some games will warn of specific problems, whether that’s expecting or showing mouse inputs, smaller than expected text or possible crashing issues with some titles.

I’ve also hit more than a few games where Proton’s simply stated that it doesn’t yet know enough about a given game – Mutant League Football 2 was one of them – though I’ve not hit too many issues with games refusing to run.

SteamOS does provide tools for onscreen overlays and tweaking of performance through its performance overlay UI. This can give quite a lot of detail about how a game is running, though it does have its own overheads; for some games I’ve noticed how running the performance overlay can lead to some pretty big hits to framerate even as it tries to display... the in-game framerate.

The idea here isn’t that you’d leave the performance overlay running, however; it’s a tool to help you get games running that bit better if you do hit issues.

Given that the underlying processor doesn’t change up even for the entry level $649, you might be wondering how well it actually runs PC games titles, because what you can get in a gaming laptop at this price isn’t up to much at all.

The answer is… it depends.

No, very high-end AAA titles will not run all that well if at all, though they’re typically highlighted in grey if they’re not likely to run at all. Valve has its own Steam Deck verification system that will highlight games in your library that have no known issues, and they’re split out as being “Great on Deck”.

It’s a sample size of one, but for my own Steam Deck library of 1216 games (don’t ask about the pile of shame), some 397 are marked as “Great on Deck”, which does leave some pretty big gaps.

You can, however, step outside the big picture style display and drop to a desktop mode that’s considerably more Linux-esque… because it is Linux.

It’s to Valve’s credit that it’s made this an integral part of the Steam Deck system, because while I have zero doubt that somebody would have hacked it regardless, this is how you can, with some work, install other gaming sources or applications.

You could, in theory, use the Steam Deck as your everyday computer. I mean, that would be quite strange, and you 100% would want to use an external display, keyboard and mouse… but it’s feasible.

Battery

The Steam Deck OLED ships with a 50Whr battery that Valve says is good for between 3 to 12 hours of gameplay time. If you do opt for the lower cost LCD model, that’s got a 40Whr battery that drops the claim to between 2 to 8 hours.

Valve qualifies that as being “content dependent”… and based on my own testing, they’re not wrong. Newer and more graphically intense titles saw the battery life sit more at the three or so hours of battery life, while some older titles could see it stretch out to 8 hours or so, though I’m yet to find the games that will enable that full 12 hour stretch.

The key aspect here, really, is that this is markedly better than the competition in this PC-to-console space sits, and by a decent margin for quite a few games. While Asus did improve on the battery life in the ROG Ally X by upping its battery to a hefty 80Whr, it does so typically offering three hours of real world battery life at best. That’s quite the difference.

The Steam Deck OLED Australian version comes with a charger with an Australian plug and a nicely long charging cable, but it’s also quite happy with most PD-compliant chargers if that’s all you’ve got.

Steam Deck OLED: Alex’s Verdict

Like the comparable ROG Ally devices, there’s no getting past the fact that the Steam Deck OLED is an indulgent purchase, even though it’s markedly less expensive.

It’s interesting what you get for that lesser asking price, however. It’s a less powerful system, and that will have some impact on which games you can play on it, compared to the full Windows approach of its competitors. Mind you, you’re also avoiding most of the pain points involved with Windows getting in the way of your gaming, too.

I can't ignore that in some ways this is Valve's take on a Kindle, which is to say that's it's also meant to be a way to keep you happy and buying games within the Steam ecosystem for the most part, because that's clearly where the big profits for Valve lie.

The sweet spot here without a doubt are games that are just slightly older, because they will run very nicely indeed, and for an extended period of time thanks to the Steam Deck OLED’s excellent battery efficiency.

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Steam Deck OLED: Pricing and availability

The Steam Deck retails in Australia with availability from 19 November 2024, priced at $649 (LCD 256GB), $899 (OLED, 512GB) or $1,049 (OLED, 1TB).

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