Disassembly of $3,000 Steam Deck Prototype Reveals Discrete GPU Support, Compact Joysticks, and Circular Touchpads

Sure thing! Let me give it a whirl.

—

So there’s this YouTuber who somehow got hold of a super early version of the Steam Deck. I mean, it’s basically like getting your hands on a dinosaur bone (okay, maybe not, but still cool). This was an engineering sample 34—or something like that. Some guy, who I think goes by SadlyItsDadley on X (or maybe it’s still Twitter in some people’s hearts?), let Jon Bringus of Bringus Studios mess around with it. Honestly, trust issues much? But I digress.

Anyway, Jon couldn’t wait to tear the thing apart. Literally. He ripped the cover off and, surprise, there’s a slip of paper inside saying “POC2-34 Control 163.” Not gonna lie, that kinda sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, right? Jon just kept tinkering with it, showing us how far Valve’s come. I got this wild sense of nostalgia even though I never owned one of these early monsters.

Oh, and those touchpads? Gigantic circles—like, awkwardly big! Why would anyone? And the joysticks seemed like miniatures compared to what’s on today’s Steam Decks. It’s almost like the designers were playing a joke or something. Well, maybe not, but who knows. And! Get this—the BIOS showed it had an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U chip. Plus, 8GB RAM. Am I rambling? Probably. But how can you not when there’s a tiny, secret world inside this gadget?

Okay, here’s the juicy part. Jon tried cloning the original SSD. A piece of history in silicon form. Popped it in, hoped for the best, and bam—an early SteamOS with some accounts sitting pretty. Couldn’t access one account named ‘34’. Makes sense, I guess. They built this SteamOS back in 2020—kinda ancient tech-wise, but also, not?

Jumping timelines here a bit—Valve kinda shook things up with this device. Sure, Nintendo’s Switch turned heads, but the Steam Deck? Boom! Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of the portable gaming pie. Companies like Asus or Lenovo were like, “Hey, we can do that, too!” And maybe they can, maybe they can’t. I said it.

Anyway, back to feasting on tech tales—or not, your choice.