Valve begins shipping some Steam Decks with slower SSDs but says performance is unaffected

In a nutshell: Steam Deck creation is on the rise but functionality may be trending in the reverse way. It was recently found that Valve at some level quietly updated the tech specs on its Steam Deck merchandise site to mirror a change with regard to the stable-state travel utilized in the handheld. A observe beneath the storage classification indicates that some 256GB and 512GB types ship with a PCIe Gen 3 x2 SSD.

Beforehand, all of these models arrived with a PCIe Gen 3 x4 SSD.

A Valve spokesperson told IGN that many Steam Deck parts occur from several suppliers for enhanced redundancy and output potential. Especially, one of their SSD suppliers presents PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe SSDs even though another delivers an x2 (two lane) variant.

The rep said they have examined the two factors thoroughly and identified there is no affect on efficiency between the two.

"SSD performance is at this time gated by factors not similar to PCIe bandwidth," the rep mentioned. "In incredibly uncommon circumstances, differences in study / compose velocity caps could minimally effect file transfer speeds, but OS overall performance, loading occasions, match performance, and match responsiveness are equivalent in between the x2 and x4 drives."

[embed]

Valve introduced before this 7 days that it was extra than doubling Steam Deck shipments moving forward.

There would not surface to be a way to request which sort of travel your Steam Deck will ship with. People unhappy with an x2 design could update the push at their price but Valve does not endorse carrying out so. What's a lot more, a high quality microSD card could get you additional storage with considerably much less headache and only a minor efficiency hit.