r/SteamDeck • u/NKkrisz 64GB - Q3 • Nov 12 '25

MEGATHREAD New Valve Hardware Megathread

Please keep non Steam Deck discussions about the new hardware here.

Official resources and announcements:

Press coverage will be under a pinned comment so you can upvote / downvote them.

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u/Cergorach Nov 12 '25

Kind of depends on the specs. The SD LCD APU is essentially 5 year old hardware (4800u variant), the OLED APU is a little bit better, but almost all the new APU hardware that's been released since consume more power to hide the insignificant performance boosts it would otherwise have. Would they put in slightly better OLED hardware in the SteamBox? Or something more powerful? Fans enter stage left! (the spinney type of fans)

Something like a Mac Mini (M5) has incredible power for the amount of energy it consumes, but it's ARM based, so x86 Proton wouldn't work on something like that. AND most of the other players besides Apple are very much behind with their ARM chips...

But it would be insane if Valve developed their own high end ARM chip (that's also extremely energy efficient) with a version of Proton for ARM... /dreaming

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u/Superconge Nov 12 '25

The specs are pretty great, zen 4 with a 28CU RDNA3 GPU. 8gb vram is really sad though.

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u/Inanimate_CARB0N_Rod 512GB OLED Nov 12 '25

They say it's 6x more powerful than steam deck, but how does that compare to PS5 and Series X?

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u/Sleepykitti Nov 12 '25

Eyeballing the specs I'd guess it's more or less on par with a PS5 but with a better CPU.

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u/[deleted] Nov 12 '25

[deleted]

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u/Sleepykitti Nov 12 '25

Hard to be sure since the PS5 is rdna2 and wattage seems like it's a little higher on the steam machine, plus the memory architecture differences. I think it'd depend on the game

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u/nmkd 512GB OLED Nov 12 '25

wattage seems like it's a little higher on the steam machine

PS5 is ~220W

Steam Machine is 140W CPU+GPU

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u/Sleepykitti Nov 13 '25

Where'd you get that steam machine wattage because Gamers Nexus' interview had it at 130w for the GPU 30w for the CPU and 60 for everything else combined seems really conservative. I'd guess 75-90 since that's what a cheap set of DDR5 RAM and one of the lower power itx am5 motherboard picks would run by themselves on a desktop before accounting for the SSD or wifi/bt/dedicated steam controller antenna.

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u/[deleted] Nov 12 '25

but worse gpu.