Some Steam Deck Models Appear to Have Been Downgraded

[banglabhai420]

Released in February, the Steam Deck is currently being enjoyed by millions of players around the world, and has the potential to represent the next step in mobile gaming. With Valve doubling production of its handheld PC, more people will be able to get to grips with the hyped device. However, it looks as though there's been a quiet change to some of the models, which may see storage capacities be given a bit of a downgrade.

That's according to a recent report from PC Gamer. A quick look on the official Steam Deck section of the Steam website shows that the 256 GB and 512 GB models will ship with PCIe 3 x2 solid-state drives, rather than the PCIe 3 x4 variants that they originally featured. It does say that not all of these models will have the different hard-drive, and it does stipulate that the company found no difference in game performance between the x2 and x4. However, there may be some reading who have a Deck on order that may be a little concerned about this.

Indeed, the report goes on to say that a look on the Wayback Machine, a database that shows past iterations of websites, the message about some of the 256 GB and 512 GB models sporting the x2 SSD is not to be seen on the Steam Deck page even just a month ago. Instead, it shows that they will all have the x4 as originally planned. Given Valve's track record for hardware in the past, the company may not wish to find itself having to deal with a little backlash from the community, especially from those who have ordered a Deck. The report from PC Gamer goes on to say that, as it's not all models that are being altered, it may not be possible to be able to tell which version buyers will be getting.

Valve insists that, outside extreme circumstances, users won't notice the difference. There was already a bit of controversy last summer when it transpired that the cheapest model of the Steam Deck may have a much slower hard-drive than the others. Consisting of an eMMC, the 64 GB version differs to the NVMe storage capacities of the more expensive models, but it doesn't seem to have caused people much anguish.

Recently, Valve has also warned against modding the Deck's SSD after one user managed to put in a bigger hard-drive, seemingly with no drawback apart from it being a bit hotter. In general, it's likely that future Steam Deck owners may not even be aware of any differences between the x2 and x4 storage capacities, but some may wonder why the change occurred in the first place.

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