The Steam Deck with an external graphics card is significantly more powerful.
The Steam Deck has quite a bit of computing power for a handheld console. After all, you can even play some current AAA games at 30 or even 60 frames per second, even if not with all the details, as our Steam Deck test shows.
For the hardware YouTuber ETA Prime However, this is not enough computing power. Therefore, he connects his Steam Deck to a Radeon RX 6900 XT and can actually play some titles in 4K with well over 60 FPS – but a big bottleneck remains.
This is how he connects the external graphics card: The external graphics card is actually not that easy to connect to the Steam Deck. Since the USB-C port does not have Thunderbolt, ETA-Prime uses the Steam Deck’s M.2 slot to connect the high-end card via an adapter.
The choice fell on a model from AMD, since graphics cards from Nvidia simply did not work in this experiment. In his tests, the YouTuber only got a black screen here.
Of course, the graphics card also needs to be supplied with power. Since the high-end card draws a lot of power via three 8-pin connectors, it gets its own 750-watt power supply in the experiment. However, the standard version of the 6900 XT only needs 300 watts.
To get the games running, the hardware expert uses Windows 11, which he booted via an SD card. If you’re still waiting for your Steam deck because you want to do wild experiments with it, Valve has good news:
Steam Deck:
Valve has good news for Linknow customers
This is how the Steam Deck with graphics update performs in games
The first game ETA tested was Prime Witcher 3 with high details and a 4K resolution. Here he averaged 108 frames per second. In GTA V, also with high details and 4K, the Steam Deck achieves around 74 FPS.
In Elden Ring, however, the performance decreases. Here the deck comes in at just 46 FPS at a 1080p resolution with maximum details. The seemingly strange thing here is that the game with the same setup on the much more demanding 4K resolution only brings about 4 frames per second less.
The CPU is limited: The reason for this is that the Steam Deck’s processor is the bottleneck here and simply doesn’t allow for more performance in a processor-heavy game like Elden Ring. This is also confirmed once again by the test in God of War. Around 40 to 50 frames per second are achieved in both 4K with maximum and 1080p resolution with low details.
It should also be said that the RX 6900 XT cannot access the full performance via the M.2 port, but the high-end graphics card from AMD has sufficient performance for most current games. You can see the whole video here:
link to YouTube content
With the upgrade, Steam Deck loses its most important property
Of course, in most cases it makes little sense to connect an external graphics card to a handheld console, as it loses its portability.
ETA Prime also says himself that he is doing the experiment purely out of interest and not because he actually sees a useful application for the Steam Deck in it. Nevertheless, with the setup you get a console that shows quite decent performance. You can find out how Valve’s handheld console performs in our test in our test video:
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What do you think of the Steam Deck and such experiments? Is the handheld PC the future of portable gaming, or do you prefer a closed system like the Nintendo Switch? Your opinion matters!
