Steam Deck OLED or Windows handheld? Not just a question of taste

Over the past few weeks, we have reviewed four powerful handhelds that utilize a powerful processor, namely the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U or the AMD Z1 Extreme. These handhelds and competitors to the Steam Deck are the Ayaneo Air 1S, Lenovo Legion Go, Ayaneo Kun and OneXplayer 2 Pro, which, despite their strong performance values, were never quite convincing in one area: battery life. Here, Valve's gaming handheld is simply unbeatable compared to its Windows counterparts. Besides, all games that we tested on the Windows handhelds run just as smoothly on the Steam Deck.

Valve has obviously made an effort to create a very balanced system and ignored the mainstream in doing so. The Steam Deck OLED does without 2K resolution, RGB lighting, overly powerful hardware and Windows, meaning a lot of saved energy during gaming and thereby increased battery life. But not everyone likes Linux. As we explain in our recent review, the changeover was quite easy for us. Probably also because Valve provides Steam Deck users with strong tools that allow users to easily navigate Linux. The 800p OLED panel in the Steam Deck also looks old-fashioned at first. But upon closer look, you quickly notice that the 7.4-inch display with 1280 × 800 has solid DPI of 200. This is significantly higher than the pixel density of many a laptop display with full HD or 2K resolution. As a result, users can barely make out individual pixels on the Steam Deck.

When looking at the individual benchmark results of the Steam Deck OLED, it is immediately clear that the AMD Custom APU 0405 falls far behind conventional processors. No matter how you look at it, the Steam Deck fundamentally remains a gaming device. In contrast, we found the Ayaneo Kun and the OneXPlayer in particular to be multi-talented devices that could replace a computer in everyday life. Of course, the Steam Deck can also be used productively, but with its meager range of connections, even for a handheld, it is clearly inferior in this regard.