Valve's Steam Deck Makes PC Gaming Truly Portable

MOBILE GAME SYSTEMS HAVE LONG BEEN VIEWED AS inferior to gaming computers and consoles. That's because their smaller components are often too weak to keep up with the rising graphics demands of new titles.

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Traditional graphics cards and processors needed to handle the workload are expensive and large and run hot-relying on the space and power supply of a desktop tower. And if you want comparable strength on the go, you're looking at bulky gaming laptops with poor heat dissipation and battery life.

But the arrival of Valve Corporation's Steam Deck redefines what a gaming computer can be by creating a whole new category: affordable handheld gaming PCs. The Steam Deck condenses a powerful rig into an 11-inch portable system that weighs just 1.5 pounds.

How Valve Keeps It Cool

Computers require proper thermal management to remove excess warmth, Overheated components throttle gaming performance with lag and lost frames. The cramped guts of mobile devices can't withstand high temperatures nearly as well as the larger confines of desktop.

To address this, Valve built a thermal management system into the Steam Deck that uses a mix of software and just a single fan to cool multiple parts by specific amounts. "We can essentially allocate our cooling budget to each component by controlling the airflow path over the motherboard and the thermal coupling from that component," says programmer Pierre-Loup Griffais.

This draws less power and makes for a lighter console without creating a distracting amount of noise.

Thermal control is left in your hands so you can toggle the energy usage limit directly from the Steam Deck's quick settings. This restricts how much wattage the processor uses.

Lowering its levels keeps the heat down and extends battery life at the cost of performance. But for even deeper control, you can individually cap frame rates and refresh rates directly from the Deck's software.