Over $400 steam surface portable games no Support for external graphics cards. Valve has been clear on this point for months – you can’t magically plug and play the dock Cyberpunk or elden ring 4K resolution. But since the company revealed that Steam Deck’s volumes plug into a (relatively) accessible M.2 PCI-Express x4 socket, the PC gaming community has speculated that an eGPU could fit perfectly in it instead.
right Now, YouTuber ETA Prime has already done itAdding an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT card, one of the highest quality graphics cards on the market.
It works, it runs, it plays games in 4K with maximum settings in vanilla frames that only Steam Deck could dream of. But no, you probably shouldn’t do this at home! Not only does it defeat the portable purpose of having a desktop graphics card stick out the back – not to mention an external power supply! – but a bunch of games seem to get bogged down by a relatively slow CPU and only four lanes of PCI-Express bandwidth for this fluid graphics card as well.
Oh, and you can’t close the Steam Deck either, which probably isn’t ideal for its longevity. And ETA Prime says the Nvidia GPU is not working.
Maybe some future Steam Deck will have a good external graphics compatible connector so you can simply plug in a ready-made eGPU box? Thunderbolt is expensive and exclusive to Intel systems, but AMD Ryzen 6000 processors support USB 4which includes the Thunderbolt 3 specification. AMD runs on Linux drivers Specifically to allow quick connection and disconnection of external graphic cards.
It might cost Valve more to incorporate the faster I/O that would be required to enable the dream of a single cable 4K graphics dock, but Valve might be up to it – it’s publicly said it’s not only interested in working on a successor to Steam Deck but surprised by the number of buyers who opted for the $649 premium model Instead of the basic $400 configuration.
Me, maybe I will just Stream my games from desktop to deck inside my house. It works fine.
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