Steam Deck Lifespan

[The Bronco Kid]

My computer died from bad hard drive few months ago, was considering getting steam deck and cheap chromebook to replace my dead old PC. How many years would get out of steam deck before it would need to be replaced?

[The Bronco Kid]

Replace it because the steam deck itself died, or replaced because the tech would need to be upgraded to play newer stuff.

[Haruspex]

Why not just replace the drive in that PC of yours?

[The Bronco Kid]

It was PC from 2013, so to me it wasn't worth replacing the hard drive, beside give away the parts to friend.

[Haruspex]

Well, the Deck has only been out since 2022, so there won't be much data there as to how long it will last you.

I'll say I have three of them in my house, one of which was among the first batch of Decks shipped. All three are working great still and see daily use by my whole family. Mine is an OLED.

Personally, although I love the Deck, I don't really recommend it if you're looking for a "main" PC. It's great, but it's main purpose is as a portable handheld gaming system that happens to play Steam games. It's powerful for what it is, but it's still a battery powered APU with a 15 watt TDP. It's not made of miracles, and you will not be getting desktop-level performance out of it. (Unless by "desktop level" you mean a mid-range desktop from 2017, which the Deck is roughly equivalent to.)

There's also the fact that the Deck is running Linux, which is fantastic. However, you should do a reality check as to what games you want to play. Most games work fine, but a few won't work no matter what, particularly multiplayer games with aggressive anti-cheat. If you get a Deck expecting to play a newer Call of Duty game or Destiny 2, you're going to be disappointed. If you think "I'll just install Windows", note that while the Deck can run Windows, it was really meant to run Linux, and you'll get a sub-optimal experience running an OS it wasn't designed to run.

If you want a more general-use PC that can play games. You'll probably still want a desktop, or a laptop if you really need the portability. If you want a handheld gaming system you can play anywhere that you can treat a bit more like a console, albeit a console that's a PC, a Steam Deck is a fantastic choice. If you like the idea of a Steam Deck but you need Windows for those games that the developers refuse to support on Linux, or for the extra performance at the cost of battery life and efficiency, check out the ROG Ally or Lenovo Legion Go.

[D. Flame]

If you mean how long will the hardware physically last. Probably at least a decade.

If you mean for playing AAA games, then it is already outdated.

How can they fix this with the Steam Deck 2? Offer a GPU dock. AKA a dock' that lets you put in your own upgrade-able GPU, so you can use it to play higher end games when docked.

[invision2212]

Steam deck is basically a pc from 2013 so not much of an upgrade for you

[MISO4EVER]

It’s not built to last it’s pretty under powered and has so many issues I honestly regret mine and when it’s time for a new hand held pc I won’t be buying another there are way better out there now and steam os is garbage

[That Fish Guy]

Not sure what invasion or miso are on about, actually I am sure, they're trolling.

As someone who last built their own PC in 2013 (I've since had 2 different laptops, 2016 and 2019), the deck is more powerful than the 2019, which was much more powerful than the 2016 which was pretty equitable to the 2013 home built desktop.

And it was about the same price as the graphics card that I put into the 2013 rig.

It's not under powered, it's not breaking constantly or full of bugs. It has a few small nagging UI issues, but it's much quicker and more powerful enough (at a quarter of the price) to make it absolutely an acceptable replacement like you're looking for.

[Jcee]

Hardware typically last 10+ years its likely the steam deck will too, though battery life may not.

Personally If you dont need mobile computing I would consider dropping the chromebook. You can get a $10 usb hub with hdmi on amazon, paired with a cheap keyboard/mouse and the desktop mode on steam-deck and you have a pretty capable linux computer.

The GPU performance is roughly on-par with a 1050 ti which is indeed 10 years old. luckily crypto happened so many people haven't been able to upgrade and as a result games themselves have largely stagnated in their minimum requirements. so most modern titles will still play (at 45 fps and low-medium settings) However whos to say what the future will hold and there are certainly more powerful handhelds on the market today. If you want to play the new releases in 4-5 years you probably wont get that with the steam deck. If you want to play mostly older titles then you should be fine.

as for CPU/general computing. the steam deck has plenty of horsepower for regular computing I dont expect it will have issues with surfing the web even in 10 years.

[Mahjik]

I don't think a lot people understood Valve's direction with the Steam Deck. It was never designed to be the most powerful thing on the planet. OneXPlayer and AYANEO already had fairly powerful offerings out there for PC handhelds. Valve's goal was to create a handheld standard that devs could optimize for.. The hard is actually perfectly fine for playing at 720/800P. Developers have just gotten lazy and no longer optimize their work. They just expect people to continually upgrade hardware (which shouldn't be a thing).

Valve was hoping to break that cycle. Now, folks may not care and/or may not agree with Valve's direction and that is fine. But I don't think people understand this before their purchase.

[deaddoof]

Originally posted by The Satellite Man:

Replace it because the steam deck itself died, or replaced because the tech would need to be upgraded to play newer stuff.

Steam deck is essentially around PS4 level performance. Anything that can be release on the PS4 can be played on the steam deck. As you can imagine, high fidelity PS5 games are pretty inaccessible, but games like journey to the west is pushing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDpSxBa-VZ4


If you need a windows PC for applications, go to devices like legion go. You will be outside Valve support structure.

https://www.ign.com/articles/lenovo-legion-go-gaming-handheld-early-black-friday-deal-2024

[His Majesty's strawberry cart]

my opinion is do not install multiplayer games such as ea's battlefields or overwatch2 you should be ok. there is a large library it will play though, games with large multiplayer arenas might not be it's forte/

[steven1mac]

You'd probably get around 5 years on the battery, give or take a little. Hardware wise, you will be struggling with unoptimised AAA games, and games will become more demanding over time.

By the time you got a chrome book and a deck, you'd be spending about the same as a cheap gaming laptop. So it really depends at that point do you prefer the mobility of a handheld if so go for the deck, otherwise go for the cheap gaming laptop.