Rare Steam Deck prototype revealed in new video with a third the power of an Asus ROG Ally
Around two months have gone by since a rare Steam Deck prototype sold on eBay. To recap, 'Engineering Sample 34' sold for $2,000 to an unknown eBay. From the listing, it was clear that Valve was prototyping the Steam Deck with an AMD Picasso-based APU, 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage around two years before it began offering the handheld we now know.
At the time, we were unsure whether Engineering Sample 34 would ever re-appear. As it turns out, the eBay listing was snapped up by none other than Bradley Lynch, who operates the SadlyItsBradley YouTube channel. Apparently discovered at a Seattle Goodwill, Engineering Sample 34 has now ended up in the hands of Bringus Studios, who has started the process of archiving the device.
For instance, Bringus Studios has already posted a Linux probe online. On top of that, the YouTuber has managed to get Bazzite working on the system, a run through of which you can find in the video below. While the prototype was finalised in February 2020, it seems that Valve manufactured it months earlier in November 2019. Bringus Studios goes onto demonstrate that the APU powering the sample is none other than the Ryzen 7 3700U, albeit a customised version of it.
Thus, Engineering Sample 34 has four Zen+ CPU cores at its disposal, as well as eight threads and a Radeon RX Vega 10 iGPU that has access to just over 5 GB of shared RAM. As a result, the prototype musters about a third of the performance of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme that powers modern gaming handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally (curr. $639.99 on Amazon). Unsurprisingly, Engineering Sample 34 struggles in many games, more so than Pierre-Loup Griffais suggested a few years ago. Please see the video below for more details.
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