I love my steamdeck oled.

I use it primarily for upscaled emulation using retrodeck, (it runs PS2 upscaled to 4k, with all the beautification hacks switched on no problem) and in-home streaming which it excels at because of specialized hardware - sub 15ms 2k frame decode time over wifi (indistinguishable from being in front of your PC).

It can run large amounts of the steam catalogue, but very modern games that are quite demanding are going to struggle a lot, even at the native 800p. I prefer to stream them from my PC which it does very well.

Definitely get the oled model. Still might be the best screen I own. No ghosting and very good visual clarity. It’s still 800p though. I got the 512GB model and upgraded the SSD to 2TB myself. It was a little bit delicate, but nothing really major.

Worth noting that despite hating games running less than 60Hz, and preferring 120+, the performance target of the switch is actually 45Hz. With the 90hz display, locking the fps in for vsync at 45hz is actually perfectly acceptable for most games. Not allowing screen tearing is enabled by default for everything, and the frame limiter is available for changing/switching in game via a quick menu.

That said, if I wanted it as my sole gaming device, I would get something else.

I keep a USB-C dock behind my tv and when the tv is mine for an hour, I plug it in and grab my controller, and I’m in my game in less than 30s. If the tv is not mine for an hour, I can still get a bit of game time in handheld on the sofa.

Currently replaying unfinished games from my childhood - or ones I wanted but never got to play.

Battery life is highly variable. For emulation, you’ll get ages - 6+ hours. Same for much older steam titles. I played half life for 7 hours during a hurricane power outage once. Elden ring gets maybe 1hr20m.

I did get a Killswitch kit from dbrand, and would recommend that. It makes slinging it in a bag much easier and friendlier size wise compared to any case you can buy. It’s the best. The stand is surprisingly useful too. Fair warning, the deck is heavy enough without this extra mass, it’s not easy on the elbows for extended play on your back in bed e.g.

The killer features are:

• the overall simplicity
• steam in-home streaming hardware performance (outperforms theoretically much beefier hardware in all scenarios)
• screen

Bummers are:

• lackluster performance in modern titles.

Note: I am holding out hope for the recent Wine 11 ntsync patches being ported to proton - steams version of the windows compatiblity layer. With the recent fps improvement numbers, I’m hoping this will have a big impact.

The reason being, on the deck, the performance being poor isn’t all across the board, just for lots of newer titles. The Halo Master Chief collection will run at 120Hz at 1080p no problem.