$3,000 Steam Deck Prototype Teardown: Early Models Featured Discrete GPU Support, Compact Joysticks, and Circular Touchpads

Sure thing, let’s dive into this Steam Deck story with all the quirks and tangents you can imagine.

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So there’s this YouTube dude – kind of a tech wizard if you ask me – who somehow got his hands on an early model of the Steam Deck. Yeah, the kind of prototype thing that’s usually locked away in some vault or hidden cupboard. Turns out, it was one of those engineering samples, number 34 to be exact. And here I am, still figuring out how to organize my sock drawer. Anyway, a guy known on the internet streets as SadlyItsDadley handed it over to Jon Bringus from Bringus Studios, saying something like he was the go-to guy for preserving this quirky slice of gaming history. Don’t ask me why, maybe they flipped a coin.

Jon, not the kind of guy to just let it sit pretty on a shelf, decided to crack it open (not literally – I hope) and check it out for his YouTube channel. He even got this piece of paper labeled “POC2-34 Control 163” – like, imagine opening a cereal box and finding a golden ticket. Okay, maybe not that dramatic, but you get me. He fiddled with it, played some games. Classic Jon. I think I saw a squirrel while watching that video… or maybe it was just a tree branch. Distracted again.

This early unit looked a bit like the cousin of the Steam Deck we know today. Like, the touchpads were ginormous circles – not the slick rectangles we’re used to now. Think of big buttons on old-school arcade machines, but in a cute handheld. And those joysticks, tiny things – like pencil erasers. More peculiar was the BIOS. It had an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U and 8GB of RAM working away inside. Plus, a 256GB SSD and an Intel Wi-Fi chip, and even claims of a discrete GPU, but, meh, Jon didn’t get that far.

And here’s where it gets kind of sci-fi-y. Jon duplicated the original SSD (because data integrity is cool, right?) and when he popped in the copy, it had this early version of SteamOS. Bonus: three pre-loaded accounts. But the elusive little ’34’ account was off-limits. Reminds me of when I misplace my car keys just when I’m about to leave – always out of reach. The SteamOS date read September 30, 2020. Like, wow, this thing was already in the works long before it hit the shelves. Who knew?

The Steam Deck basically kicked off a new trend for handheld gaming folks. Sure, Nintendo had the Switch out in 2017 laying down some groundwork, but Valve kinda kicked the hornet’s nest and got the big tech players interested. Asus, Lenovo, MSI – everyone wanted a slice of the handheld pie. Suddenly, playing hefty PC games on the go was the new black.

Keep up with Tom’s Hardware if you’re into that sorta thing. Follow them on Google News, or else you might miss out on the next gaming revelation. Or maybe, just keep trying to remember where you put those cookies you baked last night. Priorities, right?

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How did I get to rambling about cookies? Never mind.