A cool bit of game gear past has come up, all thanks to a YouTube creator. Jon Bringus of Bringus Studios just got an early Steam Deck model, named engineering sample 34, and took it to bits on film to show us what's inside.
The unit came from X (once known as Twitter) user SadlyItsDadley, who thought Bringus was the best guy to show off this early take on Valve's hit carry-along. A note with the device, tagged “POC2-34 Control 163,” showed it's proof-of-concept 34. Jon also tried to play games on it, pointing out the big steps Valve took before they put out the final Steam Deck.
This sample has some clear changes from the Steam Deck we know now. The touchpads, for instance, were big, round ones not the sharp square ones on the sale model. The joysticks were smaller, and there were slight changes in the palm rests.
Inside, its BIOS showed an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U chip and 8GB of RAM. It also had a 256GB SSD and an Intel Wi-Fi chip. It seemed to support a separate GPU, but Jon couldn't check this part.
To keep the first data safe, the YouTuber moved all from the SSD to a new one. When started, he found an old SteamOS with three user accounts set up. Getting into the '34' account, likely a test one for this model, was locked. This SteamOS was from September 30, 2020, showing this sample came about a year and half before the Steam Deck hit the shops and giving us a look at how it was made.
Valve's Steam Deck has been key in making carry-along PC gaming big. While the Nintendo Switch set up some bases for this, the Steam Deck really got the eyes of big PC gear makers. This led to new items like the Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw, as firms saw a big want for playing PC games on the move.
