The Steam Deck OLED in 2026 Vs. The Competition

Despite all of the new handheld PCs coming out, with their fancy new Z2 Extreme chips and Intel processors, the Steam Deck OLED remains a thing and is still quite affordable. The question is: given how crowded the market is, how does the Steam Deck OLED hold up to all the new competition?

My own Steam Deck OLED as well as my original Steam Deck have both had hardware issues, meaning even if I wasn't stupidly obsessed with these handheld gadgets I would have had to upgrade at some point. The original Steam Deck had a HDD failure, so its toast without taking some time to repair. The Steam Deck OLED still works, but for reasons unknown if I leave it alone for a couple days I can only restart it by force booting into Bios half the time, and I have no explanation for why this is so. It is not impossible that the hardware in these devices is, similar to laptops, given to a shelf life of only a few years. Either way, it has made the Deck a frustrating experience last year, as I spent a fair amount of time researching online for solutions to the problem which often felt like they bordered on magical ritual.

So given that.....what to do when you think you need to upgrade?

We're going to ignore the expensive and prestige machines for purposes of this comparison because I am going to assume that if you are tired of the old Steam Deck OLED's level of performance you will find the funds to upgrade to one of the fancier new machines. So the real question is: does the Deck hold its own against other lower-priced models, specifically the Xbox ROG Ally base model, Lenovo Legion Go S, and other last generation models such as the older ROG Ally X and MSI Claws? 

Well, the very short answer is: absolutely. Steam Deck OLED holds up just fine in the current market, even if it is getting a bit long in the tooth. At least part of this is due to the fact that so many SteamOS compatible games have been released with deliberate Deck optimization, and it also helps that despite new and fancy tech like DLSS 4.5 coming out, the actual state of computer games has been fairly stagnant for the last four or five years now, meaning that while you can get games which don't run on Steam Deck or have suboptimal performance, it doesn't happen nearly as often as one might expect. As a result, if you just want some on-the-go playtime with your Steam library, odds are the Deck will cover you just fine.

Now, if you are looking at the Steam Deck from the perspective of "does this hardware feel long in the tooth, and should I upgrade anyway for a more modernized experience?" or you are thinking, "I would really like to play some games that only work on Windows 11," then yeah, maybe you would like to take a look at the alternatives. Assuming you are sticking to a similar budget in terms of cost, you will find that the top competition for Steam Deck OLED space is the Xbox ROG Ally base model (the white one), and I have had this device for about two months now and continue to play on it. While the XRA is a Z2 Go chipset and therefore closer in functionality to the Steam Deck OLED, it has a lot of modern features that make it stand out. For one thing, despite loving the old 720p OLED screen on the Steam Deck, I much prefer the nicer and newer looking 1080p 7 inch IPS screen on the XRA, which for whatever reason just looks and feels better to me with the extra resolution. It can run some games that the Steam Deck can't, though more graphically intensive titles may have long load times due to shader caching, though these games often have the same lengthy load and cache times on the Steam Deck. 

Although the Steam Deck has a pretty decent ergonomic design that I really like, the XRA and its bigger cousin (the "XRAX") beat all handhelds in this department with their controller-style grips, so that's a no brainer of comfort in play is your goal.....but noting that the Steam Deck grip feel is still really decent.

You can find the XRA for as little as $489 on sale right now, which makes it price competitive with the Steam Deck, too. 

The other competitor in the new handheld space is the Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS edition. This one I will review more shortly, but the short version is: you get a SteamOS experience (if you buy the Steam ready edition), and if you get the Z1 Extreme chip version you get the best last gen chipset you can find, along with 32GB of RAM (who knows if that will still be the case going forward, though), and that extra power essentially smoke the Steam Deck in terms of performance. The grip of the Legion Go S is also very comfortable....not as amazing as the XRA, but as good (imo) as the Steam Deck in feel. It's biggest drawback: the price varies wildly, though patience will usually net a sale where it can drop to as low as $650 for the Z1 Extreme model. If you can snag that version for a good price, grab it, it's worth the upgrade.

Finally, you don't have to buy new to get a decent replacement for an aging Steam Deck. If you are willing to brave the marketplace, I have found that there are a metric ton of decently priced used-market handhelds out there. Worth taking a look, as you might even be able to get a deal on a newer generation handheld. 

So, given that, if I had only picked one budget device to replace my Steam Deck, which one would it have been? The short answer would be the one I actually did pick to replace it originally: the Steam Deck 2.0, alias the Lenovo Legion Go S. With that said, I am surprised at how much I have enjoyed and continue to use my base model Xbox ROG Ally, which deserves more respect than it has gotten from the online community.....its a robust and comfortable handheld, even with a weaker processor.

Okay, next, time to talk in more depth about the Legion Go S!

The Monthly Blog Post!!! - Cypher System, Tales of the Valiant, Steam Deck OLED and Future Plans

 Wow, I have gone almost a month without bothering to post. In my defense I have had an enormous amount of work going on, and with that a lot of business travel, so time has a way of escaping under such circumstances. Still, I managed to have a bit of fun in the travel (which is all in-state, at least, so not horrible; New Mexico is if nothing else a very pretty region to drive through). 

My highlights this month include finally getting my hand on the Steam Deck OLED edition, which is noticeably an improvement over all the other prior handhelds I have gotten my hands on; enough so that I plan to sell my original Steal Deck and the Asus ROG Ally-- but not the Legion Go! That machine may have crappy battery life but all its other components make up for it. The Steam Deck OLED is not a maor leap, but its noticeably improved battery life (I took a trip from Albuquerque to Carlsbad and did not kill the battery the entire way, even playing games such as Crisis 2 on it), its screen improvement (I am a big fan of OLED screens), and its minor tweaks and improvements all led to the best handheld travel experience I have had so far with a PC handheld. 

This month is so crazy I have gotten almost no gaming in, and have so far had to postpone my live games until the end of the month. I managed to get one of the two campaigns to a decent pause point, where the PCs could rest, recuperate, scheme and also the players could decide what they want to do next. I am all for continuing the campaign which paused at level 14 (D&D 5E) and get them all to level 20 with a final glorious story arc, but I am also keen to try something different, such as Cypher System or Dragonbane. We'll see what happens when we resume gaming around Halloween.

On the Saturday group the story paused one session away from the big resolve, kinda annoying, but we'll get to it eventually. After the plot arc finishes (it[s D&D 5E in the fictitious not-Japan region of the Realms of Chirak setting), we'll see if the group wants to continue or we do something different. I am keen to try Tales of the Valiant, possibly on this night, as a focused campaign using only TotV books for a decently purist experience. My worry is that, since TotV is just a new iteration of D&D 5E, that my group will find that too restraining, as I notice some of them seem to go almost exclusively for weird 3PP stuff they find online these days to make characters, and a couple others in the group are really, really into D&D traditional, so TotV might be one step removed from their comfort zone, simply because it is not a WotC product. So I am unsure if this will really happen or not.

Saturdays have been rough for me as it is, as I've gotten older and had less overall time for things, it has made Saturdays harder for gaming. I have been more or less trying to regulate by doing every other week, but it is possible down the road I may consider other options. The thought crossed my mind that Sundays might be better for gaming....but traditionally I use Sunday as my "home maintenance day" so I'd have to switch that to Saturday if I tried gaming on Sunday. There is also the problem that I bought my house a roughly 30 minute drive from the city, where the group normally meets, and I often find myself a lot less interested in driving on the highway back to the city to run a game. Oh well...it will sort itself out eventually.

I may have my priorities backwards, too. I should consider Cypher System, a ruleset which is better for shortform campaigns of 10-20 sessions at the most, on Saturdays, and propose TotV for Wednesdays. I have a lot of really great Cypher books I have yet to use, as most of my original Cypher campaign time was with 1st edition and not the revised edition. I regret to say that, much as with several other games, the revision did not click as well with me as the original did, so I have only run a couple campaigns in the newer edition. I ran into this same problem with Unknown Armies, where I loved 1st edition but found that the subsequent revisions fell flat for me. Sometimes, that initial rough magic of the original game gets lost in the efforts of the designers to rethink/repackage/reimagine the system for later editions. In Cypher's case it's tolerable....I see why they changed character design the way they did to be cleaner and more generic, but in the process they lost the charm and suggestive flavor of the original's approach. This can be worked around, but it has forever left something behind with the original that made it a better overall evocative experience, in favor of a more organized and mechanically consistent experience....so a trade off, I guess. 

Anyway, this post has served mainly to remind myself that I should be blogging more often. More to come!