We all wish we had a Steam Deck in our hands, because playing our favorite Steam games from anywhere is at least its appeal. However, and looking ahead to the second batch, it seems that cut the Steam Deck’s NVMe SSD interface to PCIe x2 instead of x4. Why this decision by Valve for your PC in the form of a portable console? Will this affect performance or is it more of a hidden improvement?
When we reviewed the Steam Deck’s hardware, one of the things we discussed was that using an M.2 2230 type NVMe SSD seemed like overkill. The main reason is none other than such a transfer speed has a counterproductive consumption for the battery of the device and especially for the whole thermal design. Well, it looks like Valve has solved this problem and in a way no one expected.
Valve cuts the SSD interface of its Steam Deck to PCIe x2
Well yes, nowat transfer speed with NVMe SSDfor models that have it, will be half in new Steam Deck Expeditions. And this is not a rumor or speculation on our part. It’s official from Valve, as they’ve updated the specs on the product’s website.
Before you dive in, let us tell you that in the case of the PC, no game takes advantage of the capabilities of SSDs at such high speeds. The DirectStorage API has not been used in any game released on Steam so far. That is, games won’t see a reduction, a performance for it. Since most of them are supposed to work fine on an HDD, which itself is slower than a SATA SSD.
Why would Valve have made this cut? The answer from our point of view lies in those on-chip flash memory storages that have appeared lately. Which cost less than NVMe SSDs, can be wired via PCIe x2 in the Steam Deck, and generate less heat than an M.2 because they’re designed for mobile devices. Let’s remember that Valve does not recommend changing the internal storage drive to its users. So it’s still a change to save cost and save battery.
A prelude to what will come later
There is no doubt that the use of SSDs has marked a before and after in video games, but games must be designed for it. Especially when it comes to scheduling data dumping to RAM. At the moment, and this includes consoles, no game takes advantage of such technology. On PC because the tools to implement it have appeared recently, on consoles because we are in an intergenerational period where games are designed for PS4 and Xbox One, i.e. for hard disk
When games that require if or if an NVMe SSD hit the market, that’s when a Steam V2 will make sense. At the moment we cannot forget that the basic model, which is the one that developers must take as a reference, has a 64 GB eMMC unit, without forgetting that many games are loaded from MicroSD. Which are all the same interfaces a little faster than the magnetic disk used for decades in our computers.
How can I make sure my model is using the old SSD?
The answer is simple, you can’t. Since you can’t go to a physical store and look carefully at the serial number on the box, since the distribution comes directly from Valve and they decide which shipment you will receive. The only way would be to open your console, but either way, since you’re not going to see any performance hit in games with the change, you shouldn’t worry about it either. Of course, we’d like to know if we’re going to see an increase in battery life with the newer models or at least less internal heating, which are still improvements.
