With the OLED after arriving, and the LCD reduced in price I’m considering getting the 64gb deck with a micro SD for additional storage as a gift for someone. I absolutely cannot afford the OLED devices as much as I would like to.
I suppose my question is, do you think it’s worth paying the money for the LCD or should I wait until I can afford the OLED?
It’s not for me and I’m not super knowledgeable about specs etc so any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks :)
Technically it is different. SSDs are better. BUT in practice, the performance is mostly the same, the biggest difference is in few more seconds of load times. Negligible. If your top consideration is price, then just go with a 64gb one and a sdcard. It is fine.
If the person you are gifting this to is tech savvy, then 64 GB is even better option because they can pretty trivially upgrade the SSD on their own time. By far, the best bang for your buck option is buying the 64gb and upgrading the SSD. If the person you are gifting this to has ever built a PC for themselves or opened a phone or did any other small electronics repair, then they’ll be capable of upgrading the Steam Deck by themselves.
If you can spring the extra for the 256 version, especially if the gift recipient is not tech savvy, it is worth it to do so.
Additionally, look at the refurbished units from Valve. They’re used, but come with warranty and are very much like new. Very good option if you’re on a budget.
Also, don’t ignore the direct used market. With the new OLED version, a lot of people are dumping their ‘old’ Decks, there are some nice deals to be had.
I would say you miss one important point : for game. Yes. But for the write speed, it’s the worst. So when you download a game directly on a sd card it’s so fucking slow if you have a decent network connectivity (like 2gb/s) because the write speed is limited.
In game, no difference, but the writing speed is a no go for « only » sd card deck
Yeah, that’s true, I experience this since I have 1 Gbps down and 600 Mbps over WiFi.
However, for most people this doesn’t matter because they don’t have an internet pipe big enough that can saturate their sdcard write speed.
The only time this really matters is if you’re moving a game from SSD to sdcard. Then it’s just pain.
Well the limite of the steam deck writing on a SD Card is 100 MB/s so it’s pretty limited depending of the internet bandwidth. I more between 250-300 when I download on steam