Deciding which model to buy.

[SState71]

Hey all!

Looking to get a steam deck and I’m torn on which model to get, the 256 GB model in my neck of the woods is $751.99 with taxes included.

Now the 64 GB model is $568.03. At that price I could slap in a 512GB A1 Sandisk memory card for $67.26. Total is $635.29.

The question I guess for any steam deck owners that may have had both or experienced both, is the extra 120$ worth it for the 256GB model? I’d be at almost 600GB for less, but I don’t know how poor things run off of a memory card and if the boot times are that much longer running off the emmc drive vs the nvme drive.

Thanks for any insight!

[Xedhadeaus]

...
If you're fine opening it up and upgrading the SSD yourself, the only long term difference you're most likely losing is the steam profile that comes with the higher two tiers.

Some people don't feel comfortable doing that, and if you're one of those people then you might want to get the 256. For the sake of shader caches not running you out of internal storage.

[SState71]

Originally posted by Xedhadeaus:

...
If you're fine opening it up and upgrading the SSD yourself, the only long term difference you're most likely losing is the steam profile that comes with the higher two tiers.

Some people don't feel comfortable doing that, and if you're one of those people then you might want to get the 256. For the sake of shader caches not running you out of internal storage.

I’d probably put myself in that category of people. I mainly console game, haven’t had the best experiences with pc gaming in the past but want to dip my feet in with the deck. The info about the shader caches is much appreciated! The exact kinda info I was looking for.

[invision2212]

I owned the 64gb model and used it like that for a while before I upgraded it. So here’s the deal with it……

As long as you don’t install and keep a ton of games on the SD card you will be fine. The issue that starts to happen is every game installs the shaders to the internal storage so the game runs better. If you install too many games the storage drive will get full.

I think you get 48gb of usable storage and you can install about 15 AAA games before you need to worry. So as long as you delete games after you finish them you will be fine.

Make sure you buy a good SD card like a Sandisk extreme or Samsung pro. Ignore all other SD cards as they have awful write speeds compared to those.

[thetargos]

Not sure how the Deck client varies in regards to the desktop, but having allmy library games installed uses less than 30 GiB of Shader data. Still the 64GiB version is a tad tight. I wish it were available for my country

[[?]legit]

I can highly recommend the 64gb version, it has by far the best price performance ratio. The other versions aren't really worth it, because replacing the ssd by yourself is a lot cheaper than getting the more expensive steam decks.

The question is if you need to do this though, maybe a 512GB SD card would already be sufficient. Yes, SD Cards are slower, actually significantly slower in benchmarks compared to the internal SSD, but in the real world it doesn't really make a difference. At least in my use cases.

I'm pretty sure that the cpu is a big bottleneck in the deck and therefore the loading times get slowed by it more by the cpu than by slower storage . I tested warzone, black ops 3, skyrim and dishonored 2 on the internal ssd (on the 256gb model) and then on a SD card. The difference in loading time was... small. A few seconds maybe? I have all my games on the SD card now. And I don't even have an expensive A2 SD card. Just a regular class 10.

[TheRealRws]

get the 256gb the 64 one will be annoying to deal with at times even with a big sd card.
The game need a shader cache and that will always get on the internal storage unless you do some messing around. But if you are already messing around you might as well install a bigger ssd.

If you dont want to do that just get the 256gb one.

[golephish]

thought about this for days then went for 512 as I wanted the glare screen. I even waste half of the drive for windows 11. I know money is unlimited, but worth it.

[SState71]

Thanks for your help everyone! Really appreciate all of the insight. Hadn't even though about the Shader Cache. As someone who console games almost always, I didn't know what to look for really.

I've decided I'm going to go with the 256 GB model. I have a 200GB memory card I'll use with it for now and probably pick up a 512GB or 1TB memory card after the holidays.

[raventhehunter]

For a memory card recommendation, I'm using the Samsung Pro Plus model (512 capacity), and it's pretty solid performance so far. I get 468 GB of usable capacity, and I can't tell any difference in performance between running a game off of the card and off the internal storage.

If you decided to juggle memory cards for your games, I recommend going into the properties for each game on the card and selecting the "Update on Launch" option. Otherwise, every time you swap cards, you'll have to do a bunch of mandatory shader cache downloads for the games on the loaded card.