on its surface the steam deck OLED doesn't really seem like that much of a change from the steam deck LCD but let me tell you as someone who has put well over a th000 hours into their steam deck LCD the steam deck OLED is a lot more than meets the eye if you're just listening to what valve says about the steam deck OLED you would think it's probably not that big of an upgrade because if you go to their website it says all the things you love about steam deck Now with an OLED screen better battery life faster Wi-Fi and more and it's that and more part that really gets you given that this is a midcycle refresh meaning it's more of a 1.5 update rather than a 2.0 update and generally speaking midcycle refreshes from other companies kind of suck think like the PS4 slim versus the PS4 you didn't get any better performance it was just a little bit of a smaller package and the amount of value that it was offering the customer is minimal at best but I am so happy to say that valve was massively underselling what the ACT ual changes that were made to the steam deck OLED versus the LCD and it is a significantly better product and it improved on basically every problem that I had with the steam deck LCD except for one and we'll get into that one in a bit but probably the most important Improvement for me was battery life so let's talk about it my biggest problem with the steam deck LCD was battery life I made a video on it almost 2 years ago now where I said this and the worst flaw for me personally has been what I would call pretty terrible battery life when you're playing demanding games and yeah 2 years later I still stand by what I said when you're playing triaa demanding games the steam deck lcd's battery life sucks there's no defense of it it just sucks for example running Elden ring on the LCD steam Deck with Max brightness and the full 15 wat TDP and the frame rate uncap which is generally getting between 30 and 40 FPS so it's not like we're getting crazy FPS here but running that test I got just over an hour I got 1 hour and 11 minutes to specific and before you say well that's because your battery is degraded massively and that's why you're getting such bad battery life that may be part of it I'm sure the battery is degraded it's you know 2 years old or something like that at this point but I ran that same Elden ring test when I first got the steam deck and I got the exact same time or within 1 minute of the same time when I'm playing Elden ring on battery I'm getting just over 1 hour so while the battery might be degraded it doesn't seem to have a significant impact on it overall battery life now if we do that same exact test with the steam deck OLED so again frame rate uncapped smack screen brightness full 15 wat TDP on the steam deck OLED I got 2 hours and 27 minutes which is over double the battery life of the LCD steam deck now valve says on their website they say a 30 to 50% Improvement on battery life but in that testing the Elden ring test that I personally ran I'm getting over over double so valve is massively underselling the Improvement here and that's awesome I would so much rather have a company undersell it and then you get to be pleasantly surprised versus they oversell it and you're like oh man it's not as good as I was hoping and yes I have a lot of people tell me Well Sam that's a worst case scenario no one is actually going to use their steam deck LCD like that so you're not actually going to get that bad of battery life and while it is true that you can do a lot of things to increase that battery life like capping the frame rate lowering the TDP or lowering the brightness the fact of the matter is that's exactly how I like to use my steam deck I like the brightness on full because I don't know maybe I my eyes are bad or something I like having the frame rate as high as I can get it because more frames are better frames and so while you can say yeah just lower some of the settings I don't like to do that I like to get the best performance I can and so that's just what it is and yeah that is Elden ring running in the background on my steam deck on the projector so just for fun oh and by the way speaking of Elden ring I beat Elden ring entirely on the steam deck and I did a lot of extras I think I put around 120 hours into it and as of filming this video right now the Elden ring DLC just came out a few days ago and I'm planning on beating the new Elden ring DLC on my steam deck as well I just haven't had enough time to get around to it yet but this is just to say for all those people that say you can't play Elden ring on the steam deck I played Elden ring on the steam deck and I beat Elden ring on the steam deck so you definitely can do it and I had a great time and even better than that while valve could have stopped at just some simple improvements like the bad battery in the screen they improved basically everything they improved the performance The Thermals the fan noise basically everything that I and most people care about they made positive improvements towards and we're going to talk about that in a sec but before we do if you're looking to charge your steam deck on the go then Channel sponsor ugreen has you covered with their 25,000 milliamp nexe power bank that can charge it up to 145 Watts not only can you easily top out the steam deck 45 wat Max charging speed but you can also top off your laptop and phone all at the same time all from the same power bank and if you have a beefy laptop like me with the 16-in MacBook Pro you can get from 0 to 56% in just 30 minutes it's got enough juice to charge my iPhone 15 Pro about five times or the steam deck OLED about one to two times depending on if you're using it while you're charging and what sorts of games you're playing I also really like that ug green includes this little screen so you can see exactly what the percentage of the battery bank is so you just know how much power you have left and when it to top up your power bank and your steam deck and your laptop and your phone all at the same time ug green also as you covered with their 100 wat nexo charger this charger is remarkably powerful for its size it can do up to 100 Watts which means you could charge an M2 MacBook Air from 0 to 55% in just 30 minutes it's also compact especially when compared to the Chargers that apple is shipping with their products and yet it also has the ability to charge up to four devices at the same time also I got to say I love that you green keeps including at least one USB type a port for all those cables that just haven't switched over to type c because I know you have them because I have them too and it's just nice to have a charger that's got you covered for everything if you're interested in either the charger or the battery Bank check out ug Green's Prime Day deals which are up to 41% off I'll leave links in the description and thanks again to you green for supporting this channel so I can keep making videos like this one all right let's get back to the steam deck OLED so yes the OLED does have better battery life than the LCD but one other problem that was actually a pretty ific problem for me with the steam deck LCD is the fan noise whenever you were doing anything including just downloading games or if you were playing games like Elden ring or whatever AAA games you were playing the fans were pretty loud and not only were the fans pretty loud but the temperatures were also hot while the fans were loud and for something like a desktop maybe you don't really care if the fans are running loud and hot but for something like a handheld where you know it's going to be within Arms Reach of you most of the time the amount of heat and noise out output is significant and it does impact the amount of joyment that you'll get out of the device but with the OLED valve has completely solved these issues if you look closely during this Elden ring test you can tell that the OLED is getting between 10 and 20% better fps than the steam deck LCD which that might not sound like that much but that's actually going to make a pretty significant difference especially when you're struggling to hit the 30 or 40 FPS cap in games like Elden ring and not only are we getting 10 to 20% better performance but at the same time the fans are running quieter and the chip is running about 10° cooler for those of you that don't know 10 degre cooler is such a significant difference on something like a handheld I mean like that in and of itself if Apple had made a change like that where their devices were 10 degrees cooler it would be all over all over their marketing but valve doesn't even include it they like don't even mention that it's like hey yeah guess what the fans AR going to be nearly as loud and it's not going to be burning your hands not that it was okay that was a little too far it was never burning your hands but it was warm it was warm for sure so yeah for me the biggest Improvement is kind of all those things together where it's like battery life yes is the biggest Improvement but then thermals and performance and fan noise all kind of run in Tandem and the valve improved all of those in such a meaningful way that they're no longer issues for me they were issues on the LCD and things that annoyed me and made me enjoy the deck a little bit less but on the OLED they're no longer issues and I don't think about them at all and one of my favorite Parts about the fan noise is you almost don't hear the fans anymore on the OLED or at least I don't they do still ramp up and if you're playing a demanding game like Elden ring yes you will still hear them but it's not nearly as bad as the LCD it's much much quieter oh and yeah I can't believe we've made it this far in the video without talking about the screen but the screen is it is just chef's kiss the steam deck LCD I'm kind of a screen snob I guess a little bit just a just a little little bit or I just like a nice screen and the steam deck LCD it was fine there was nothing wrong with it you could still play your games but it was not pretty to look at it wasn't pretty and a lot of that came down to the color accuracy the brightness and then if we're being honest I thought it was the resolution but now we have the steam deck OLED and it has the same resolution but with dramatically better color accuracy and brightness and contrast and what I thought was resolution was actually those things it looks to me this is going to make me sound silly but it looks to me like this screen actually has a higher resolution than on the LCD but it's not it's just crisper and sharper but that's not coming from more pixels I didn't know that was a thing I know it's a thing now and like one example that makes it really clear is in a lot of games with the LCD I would struggle to read the text because it's just small on a small screen like that but on the OLED I don't struggle to read the text nearly as much and I think a lot of that comes down to the color accuracy and the contrast ratio and well and I guess I should say it's also about 12% bigger so having something be 12% bigger is obviously going to make it easier to read small text so yeah that helps too ooh and it also has a 90 HZ refresh rate which is awesome for playing games a lot of games like Elden ring you're not going to be hitting that 90 HZ refresh rate but what you can do is Target the 45 HZ refresh rate which is exactly half of 90 and then that's actually going to be really nice too but then when you're playing indie games where you actually can get that 90 HZ refresh rate like for me one of my favorites is dead cells or actually right now I'm playing through Hades uh which is a really good time and both those games are indie games where you can easily hit your 90fps cap and 90fps does look dramatically smoother at least to my eye versus 60 FPS so that's another change that does really help the overall experience of the steam deck the screen is just knocked out of the park it's fantastic whereas on the LCD it's okay it also has HDR it's got lower input lag as tested by digital Foundry and people don't talk about this but the touchcreen is much more responsive at least for me in my testing it used to be when I had to use the onscreen keyboard to type in whatever cuz sometimes you have to the LCD version it was really clunky and annoying to use it felt like a tablet from like 15 years ago where they're just trying to figure out how the touch sampling rate works whereas the OLED it feels much more like a modern tablet or smartphone and you don't really notice it it also has Bluetooth 5.3 instead of Bluetooth 5.0 which is great and it has faster Wi-Fi with Wi-Fi 6E which is going to give you up to three times faster Wi-Fi my Wi-Fi isn't that fast so I wasn't maxing it out to in the first place but I do notice that I get less drops and like little lag spikes when I'm playing online or using Wi-Fi so there is some improvement there it's just a little bit harder for me to measure also the whole package is a little bit lighter and I thought this was going to be something that I wouldn't be able to notice but every time I have the LCD and the OLED and just by picking it up I'm immediately aware of which one I picked up cuz visually they're very similar so you can't really tell a difference visually at least not from a distance or not if you're not paying attention but every time I pick it up and I'm like oh that's the LCD oh that's the OLED like it it's just clear as day so it does make a difference but now we got to talk about buying decisions because when the steam deck first came out years ago at this point it was kind of the only thing in its category I mean yes handheld existed but it was the only thing really trying to make its own operating system and trying to make it more of a consol like experience these days fast forward a few years and you have companies like Asus or like Lenovo or like MSI I guess if you want to include them and they're all trying to create their own version of they're doing it with Windows but they all are creating their own custom software to make it a little bit more palatable to use Windows on a handheld and so the handheld space is a lot more flushed out than it was when the steam deck first came out and so you kind of have to ask yourself you have to say even though the OLED is a significant improvement over the LCD and it is in basically every way is it good enough to justify its place against the competition where it's number one weakness versus the competition I'm sure you already know its performance its performance is pretty bad when compared to something like the Rog Ally or the Lenovo Legion go and I bought both of those devices and I tested them immensely against the steam deck OLED and uh yeah both the legion go and the Ally depending on the game and circumstances get anywhere between 0% better performance and up to 100% better performance and it is wildly dependent on the game because some stuff isn't optimized and you know there's a bunch of other factors but it's just to say whereas a few years ago the performance might not have been as much of an issue because there weren't very many other good options on the market there are other good options on the market now so that puts the steam deck in a trickier position than it used to be in so I would say this if you're on the fence about buying a steam deck or a steam deck OLED or if you're looking at buying a different handheld like an Rog Ally or something like that I would say this I would look at if you're someone who plays all types of games all the time then maybe you just need the flexibility of an RG Ally or a legion go but if you're someone who mainly plays like five main games or 10 main games or whatever it is I would look at what the performance is on those games particular for the steam deck versus the Ally or whatever you're comparing it to and then if the steam deck can get performance that you're okay with I would go with the steam deck I much prefer the steam decks ease of use operating system the way it navigates I much prefer using the steam deck but sometimes the performance does stand in the way like with Elden ring for example I would love to get a locked 60fps I would love that that really does improve my gaming experience on eldering because you do a lot of Twitchy stuff you got to you got to react in real time and so having those extra frames actually does help the experience but the steam deck just can't do it but if you're someone who plays a lot of Indie Games you're playing more like dead cells or stardew Valley or things like that the steam deck is going to be hands down the best option for you so what I would say is look at the games you're wanting to play look at the performance on those games if the steam deck has good enough performance for you on the games that you want to play then pick up a steam deck because I do think it's better if you're not constrained by performance hopefully that makes sense if you have any questions let me know in the comment section below I can usually get to all the comments but yeah the steam deck has been one of my favorite pieces of technology in the last decade it's actually changed my life in some really cool and positive ways and it's allowed me to play video games in little moments that I have throughout the day whereas before I just kind of stopped playing video games as an adult because I just didn't have the time to really like sink it in in a big chunk of a couple hours at a time and now I mostly play video games for 20 minutes at a time and I really enjoy it and I actually think that's a healthier work life work Play balance for me personally if if you made it to the end drop what your most played game is currently on your steam deck or on your handheld device I'm curious to see what you guys are actually playing all right I'll see you guys next time peace