We Built a PC for the Price of a Steam Deck!

need to game on a budget normally the answer is obvious find an empty corner of your room and plunk a DIY PC in there but and I can't believe I'm saying this with the incredible performance of valve's steam deck handheld console not to mention it's aggressive pricing it might make more sense to forget all that Hassle and pick up one of these instead but can it possibly keep up with the performance of a custom gaming PC obviously as the build a PC guy my instinct is to side with jackery who spons

ored this video do whatever it takes to game on PC but if you care about portability at all that might not be the best idea and even if you don't valve's new dock accessory turns the steam deck into a Bonafide desktop and besides there are other options for portability like this eBay special gaming laptop so we're gonna take all three and put them to the test to see what deserves your hard earned money the challenge was simple take the budget of a steam deck you know the one with the storage tha

t people actually buy and stretch it as far as we can to build a full ready to game desktop including monitor mouse and keyboard then drag race our custom PC against both a 256 gig steam Deck with the latest updates and the best gaming laptop that we can find for five hundred dollars and I gotta be real with you guys the results are both surprising and also not we settled on a mostly new gaming PC with a core I3 12100f two eight gig6 of memory at 3200 Mega transfers per second a 256 gig SATA SSD

so it's not fast but look with motherboards cases and power supplies being as expensive as they are some sacrifices had to be made in order to afford our second hand GTX 1070 without going even farther over our budget seriously though there was a chance custom PC was going to lose this fight if we went all new so I have no regrets the 12 100 KF may only have four processing cores but that's actually on par with the steam deck and the cooler it comes with weighs almost as much as the steam deck

so I consider that a win it's reassuringly heavy foreign important note because this is a SATA m.2 SSD it actually won't even work in this top slot that uses the PCI Express Lanes up to CPU but it will work in this bottom slot yes yes this is really not a great case but sometimes compromises must be made cyber Brawn more like cyber Brawn we overlooked something we don't have audio crap that's gonna cost us what like 10 bucks five bucks dollars for earbuds yeah sure that's a budget come on buddy

hey there it is okay look it's not gonna wow your bougie friends but I'm actually pretty happy with this our motherboard gives us a decent upgrade path and most of the parts in here are new with warranty that's usable that's usable we don't have to cheat on audio which is good because we ended up cheating on a controller I'm pretty sure I told ploof that a controller had to be part of the budget of a computer that competes with the steam deck but here we are secondhand Xbox 360 controller let's

go we don't need no stink in frame rate counter this has got to be near 60fps though as bad as the speakers might be this is 100 playable like smooth and not only that but our system manages to comfortably game at 1080p Ultra on our scepter 22 inch monitor pretty much across the board like we're talking 60 FPS or better in multiple AAA games that we tested Plus it's a freaking computer you can use it for all sorts of tasks like sending email editing video or browsing the web it's not really all

that portable though is it obviously we're not going to be gaming on this thing unless we're plugged into the wall or we happen to bring a jackery power station with us on the family camping trip and even if we just want to pick it up and bring it to a friend's house I would say you could pick up a high quality Tech backpack at ltdstore.com but I think you're actually going to need something bigger we also built this PC without factoring in the cost of Windows to be clear you can indefinitely ru

n Windows without a license key but if you're daily driving this machine you might want to remove the pesky Watermark and get full access to system personalization at some point but laptops come with Windows licenses unfortunately after checking to see if you can find any brand new gaming laptop at this price we concluded that no you cannot thankfully one of the first things that showed up on eBay it's fine was this the Dell g515 it's heavier than I was expecting but it's got a core i5 10300h an

d a GTX 1660 TI outputting to a 1080p display it's not nearly as upgradable as our cobbled together desktop but it actually came in slightly cheaper has a proper Windows license and only fell behind our desktop by about 5 to 10 FPS it might get a little hot it might get a little loud but it's a perfectly viable option if you're looking to game besides a little TLC is all this needs isn't it maybe some repasting a battery swap pop in a bigger drive so you've actually got some room for games and y

ou're laughing all the way to the bank like I'm laughing thanks to our sponsor jackery thanks to jackery for sponsoring this video from November 24th to 28th jackery is offering up to 1080 US dollars off of some of their products for their Black Friday Cyber Monday sale popular products like their solar generator 2000 Pro 1000 Pro and 1000 will be eligible for solid discounts the sg2000 pro has a huge 2160 watt hour capacity for all your camping appliances the 1000 Pro can be charged to one hund

red percent in just 1.8 hours using either a wall plug or solar and the normal 1000 weighs only 22 pounds making it carry friendly with an easy carry handle jackery and black series will also be giving away a travel trailer during their 250 000 giveaway during their Cyber Monday live stream click the link below and keep a close eye on jackery's website and social handles to make sure you don't miss anything this is not bad I mean it's hard to compare the portability of a laptop to the steam deck

I mean obviously it's easier to go from desk to couch than it is with our desktop PC without shelling out for our long HDMI and USB cable or something like that but you're stuck with either a trackpad or trying to use a mouse on an uneven surface like a couch cushion or a younger sibling you can plug in a controller for gaming but that's a whole other peripheral that you need to carry with you alongside your B power brick also you don't want to be that guy trying to chat on a terrible integrate

d laptop mic so you'll probably need to carry around a decent headset something you won't have to worry about with the steam deck whose integrated microphone is shockingly good trying to game on the train or a bus during your morning commute we've made fun of how big the steam deck is compared to smaller handhelds like the GPD wind Max 2 and the eye Neo air but let's be real it's a lot easier to whip this out on Transit than this honking thing I mean imagine sitting on a packed bus and trying to

make enough space for this thing so you can spend 15 minutes to the next stop killing demons and do maternal and those other handhelds that I just mentioned as much as I adore those they've got their own problems too that completely disqualified them from this video for one they just outright cannot compete on price with most of them costing at least a few hundred dollars more than the steam deck and secondly the performance on them kind of Hit or Miss actually I mean sure the GPD win Max 2 act

ually can outperform the steam deck at certain wattages but it's almost 400 dollars more than our 256 gig model here for their base model and the entire eye Neo lineup at least at the time of filming still isn't shipping with rdna2 Graphics meaning that you could struggle to play Modern AAA games so steam deck then there is a lot to like here still for starters since it's brand spanking new we're getting a warranty with our purchase if that GTX 1070 or that entire laptop kicks the bucket that's

it time to go buy a new one as for performance it does fall short of the competition but honestly not by as much as you might expect we tested everything at 720p to make it fair because that's the resolution of the integrated display and while we're consistently getting around or over 60 FPS on our alternative machines our steam deck performs admirably reaching playable frame rates usually in the low 30s remember guys we're testing it Ultra or high settings too except for Tiny Tina's wonderlands

which crashed on Ultra though In fairness it's not officially supported on the steam deck anyway more on that later the point is that all of this means that even though the steam deck has no real upgrade path it a fraction of the size and you can easily turn down the settings to something more reasonable like high medium or even low to keep gaming as new titles get more demanding in the years to come but there is a big caveat I just mentioned the lack of support for wonderlands and while this l

ittle device has been a major Boon to Linux Gamers with proton DB currently listing over 6 000 verified or playable games it's not all sunshine and rainbows we actually wanted to use F1 2022 instead of Forza Horizon 5 for our racing game because Forza takes up nearly half of the entire Drive of all of these computers but unfortunately despite being a verified game on Deck F1 simply refused to launch at the time of testing the reality if it is then you're not guaranteed that the game you want to

play is going to work on valve's shiny new toy however and it might be exceptionally rare but this is a two-way street the person who won our space cadet table challenge at whale land did so on a steam deck running a ported Linux version of this 1995 classic and Not only was the frame rate buttery smooth but the controllers actually mapped properly for whatever reason I was not able to achieve the same thing on an eye a Neo device running Windows when I tried of course while the portability of t

he steam deck is its biggest strength it also contributes to its biggest weakness not everybody wants to game on a tiny low resolution 7-inch display thankfully that gives us a perfect opportunity to test out a steam deck dock those guys right it puts significant strain on our limited budget at ninety dollars plus obviously all the peripherals we're going to need now but this little guy right here turns the steam deck into a full fat desktop with display poured out HDMI out USBC for power ethern

et and three USB type A ports let's give it a shot move aside desktop now because of valve's awkward positioning of the USBC port on the steam deck it's got this kind of flopsy doodly cable hanging out of it and then it just kind of sits in here it doesn't actually dock to it like the Nintendo switch but I mean I guess that was that was easy enough that process all right docking station updated oh updating doc firmware one moment please that was actually surprisingly seamless after a firmware up

date it went straight from the integrated display to the external one and my controller uh keyboard and mouse are immediately working kinda sick oh we'll just have oh I went off course I mean there's nothing it can do to make you a better gamer oh wow this is the most pathetic Big Air jump ever Graphics I guess uh why don't we just turn that down to medium then oh oh she needs a minute here she she needs a minute the walkway works oh wow we just crashed this boy yikes well that's a little awkwar

d my keyboard doesn't work 10 to my pin let's see if I can at least use this okay I'm at least able to use the controller but that was that was not optimal you know what though this gives us a perfect opportunity need to check out the desktop experience switch to desktop wait what the that's my primary display uh okay got some feedback for valve so far that should not be but we'll get that addressed hey there we go we can just disable the steam deck screen hey look at that keep this configuratio

n boom look at that we are on the web okay not the world's fastest computer but I can get Tech tips look at this Tech tips who needs Nvidia gpus boom 4K not bad not bad I don't see any like bitrate disadvantage or anything like that that's obvious I don't know if there's much else I would want to do from here but hey if you want to be able to just have one computer and all you really do is game handheld or switching back to gaming mode Let's see if it handles it a little more gracefully this tim

e oh oh okay okay that was not an actual crash are you sure uh-huh okay well at any rate it may not be perfect yet but the steam deck dock is a viable way to take your portable only steam deck experience and use it for you know browsing the web or just basic desktop use and you've got to give it credit with or without the dock it's a pretty convincing little package we definitely bent the rules a little bit today but I think we were able to draw some pretty solid conclusions if you want to buy a

ll new no laptop can come even close to standing up to the steam deck and even a desktop might have to make some pretty uncomfortable compromises like settling for a slow cashless SSD or choosing a GPU from a brand you've never heard of not to mention that you will need to assemble the whole thing yourself and you might end up spending a bit more valve's portable gaming machine almost is the one that makes the most sense here then at least until you want to use a keyboard mouse and monitor at wh

ich point the price starts to get a little less attractive and I gotta say the performance and lower details hit a little harder on the bigger screen also the steam deck has some pitfalls that you simply won't encounter on either of our other machines like imperfect game compatibility especially in cases where Windows specific anti-cheat is required for multiplayer whatever route you go we're going to have everything that we talked about today Linked In the video description and if you're lookin

g for something else to watch maybe try out some of our other handheld videos how about this review of the Aya Neo air