Oh and the battery can drain out pretty fast too.
Depends if you have the OLED or the LCD model. The OLED has been surprisingly good with battery. For really high end games that max out the deck it’s maybe 2.5 to 3 hours, but for most games I’m getting between 5.5 and 8 hours battery, and for low spec indie games and lower end emulation like GBA it can run for up to 12 hours in some cases.
I bought the 512 GB OLED back in May with no regrets. I’m surprised how quick I am to turn in the Steam Deck now instead of booting up my gaming PC. I wouldn’t say it’s changed how I play, since I already tend to game with a controller, but it’s great fun, and so far I don’t think I’ve encountered a single game in my Steam Library that wouldn’t run. Plus, I love handhelds and portable devices in general.
A few games have needed minor tweaks (proton version, a fix that would also be needed in Windows), but everything has worked. As a disclaimer though, I don’t play online competitive games, just single player and co-op stuff with my wife, so YMMV.
On the other hand, I’ve found some games work that I couldn’t even run decently in Windows. Like Rainbow Six: Vegas. On Windows it would never properly work with a controller but on the Deck it was no problem. And Silent Storm ram out of the box, no tweaks at all. Linux is awesome like that for older titles.
It’s also been great for emulation, at least through PS2 and GameCube, I don’t emulate much above those. Emudeck is nice, and I was already familiar with EmulationStation since I use that on a Powkiddy X55, so that was nice.
One thing I will say is a game changer is the suspend function. Being able to tap the power button and sleep it at any time and then pick up where you left off later is amazing. Reminds me of the old Nintendo DS, just shut the lid and get back to it.
All told, I’m really happy with it.
My understanding is Retrodeck is a cleaner install, being self contained as a flatpack… and that is.
Emudeck works with standalone emulators that are just hooked into EmulationStation. That means more frequent updates. Also, Emudeck supposedly had better performance due to this, but take that with a grain of salt.
You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.
For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.
Use the latest proton GE and set the following launch options:
PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 %command%