7mo ago

Steam Brick: A DIY cut-down Steam Deck, sans input and screen

GitHub - crastinator-pro/steam-brick: Modifying the Steam Deck into a compact, mobile, AR gaming device. Not endorsed or supported by Valve and is likely to brick your device...

10 comments

Is it not much easier and cheaper to buy a mini pc and run Steam with an OS of choice? (You can chose between any number of Linux distros, I use Arch btw). Steam can just launch on boot into big picture mode, it's pretty much a console at that point.
- Mini PCs usually don't have a battery. The use case for this conversion is on the go with AR glasses.
- I think it would be hard to find a NUC that costs the same or less and still performs the same as the Steam Deck. You could maybe get there with a custom-built SFFPC, but it would be tricky.
  
  I'm not sure what a Steam deck costs? $450 - $550?
  A Minisforum UM870 with 32GB of memory and 1TB SSD is around $500. That has an AMD Ryzen 7 8745H CPU. 8 cores 16 thread 4.9ghz boost Zen4. Gpu builtin Radeon 780M with 12 RDNA3 2.7ghz cores. That could give the Steam Deck a round for it's money I think.
Seems like a cool project I might try if valve doesn't release a steam console soon
- i think we're getting there. The new ASUS ROG Ally is shipping with Steam OS and official Steam OS support, and I think this is just the beginning. If this partnership goes smoothly, I think Valve will open up the floodgates to other manufacturers doing similar stuff. And I think this will include a new wave of "Steam Machines".
- Could always just buy a NUC?
  
  They don't have HDMI CEC
  The new steamos release for x86 is a nice start though. I was trying to run stock KDE before and and nothing worked with HDR and I couldn't get any sound out of my TV's TOSLINK output. Being able to run steamOS is probably a big improvement for out-of-the-box setups.

10 comments