Steam Deck OLED with Better Battery Life, Faster Wifi Revealed, Reservations Live Next Week

Steam Deck OLED

Valve has recently said they aren’t quite ready to upgrade the Steam Deck’s processing power, but it seems they do in fact have a bit of an update in store. Today they announced the Steam Deck OLED, which features a bigger, sharper screen, better battery life, faster Wifi and other features. The Steam Deck page has been updated with information about the OLED.

Here are some of the new Steam Deck OLED features…

Brighter colors, blacker blacks - Steam Deck’s HDR OLED display is designed from the ground up for gaming, with striking contrast, brilliant clarity, and a larger picture. With more colors, pure blacks, and amazing motion rendition, you’ll see your games in a new light.

More time to play - Steam Deck OLED has 30-50% more battery life. We fit a bigger battery into the case, and the OLED display draws less power. Add in an updated, more efficient AMD APU and you have way more time to play your favorites.

Faster downloads - Comes with Wifi 6E, offering increased bandwidth and lower latency. This means faster downloads (up to 3 times faster!) and stable online play.

Lighter, cooler - Thanks to a bigger fan and updated thermals, the system runs cooler. It weighs 30g, or ~5% lighter than the LCD model, due to the screen.

...and here are the key tech specs for the Steam Deck OLED.

Processor

6 nm AMD APU

CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)

GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.6GHz (1.6 TFlops FP32)

APU power: 4-15W

RAM

16 GB LPDDR5 on-board RAM (6400 MT/s quad 32-bit channels)

Storage

Steam Deck 512GB NVMe SSD

Steam Deck 1TB NVMe SSD

Both include high-speed microSD card slot

Display

Resolution - 1280 x 800 x RGB

Type - HDR OLED

Display size - 7.4” diagonal

Maximum brightness - 1,000 nits peak brightness (HDR), 600 nits (SDR)

Contrast ratio - > 1,000,000 : 1

Color gamut - 110% P3

Refresh rate - up to 90Hz

Response time - <0.1 ms

Touch enabled - High performance touch

WiFi

Tri-band Wi-Fi 6E radio, 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz 2 x 2 MIMO, IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax

Battery

50Whr battery. 3-12 hours of gameplay

Some outlets have already had the opportunity to go hands-on with Valve's new machine. Here's Digital Foundry's overview of the hardware.

The Steam Deck OLED will come in two models -- a $549 512 GB version and a $649 1 TB version. Valve is also cutting the prices of the original LED versions of the Steam Deck, which they seem to be permanently clearing out. A 256 GB Steam Deck LED model now costs only $399. Those who order early will be able to nab a slick limited edition with orange highlights.

Reservations for the Steam Deck OLED go live on November 16 at 10am PT, so check your time zone and prepare accordingly. Again, here's the updated Steam Deck OLED page for when those reservations go live.