As we already told you, last Thursday Valve He surprised us all with the announcement of the new Steam Deck OLED. It was quite a surprise, because until now the latest news we had about Valve’s plans to update its portable console was pointing to 2025 at the earliest with the highly anticipated but still distant Steam Deck 2. And in reality, nothing like that has changed, but of course we didn’t expect and Restore like the one that took place.

And it’s important to make it clear, The Steam Deck OLED isn’t Valve’s second-generation laptop, we are not talking about an evolutionary leap of this level. Rather, at least in my opinion, we are faced with a rather intelligent move by a company that saw how the Steam Deck was a real catalyst for the portable console market, which until this risky but successful bet was a shrinking niche.

In just over two years since its announcement, we’ve seen the arrival of new models from other manufacturers, further diversifying the options considerably, as we have everything from cloud gaming devices like the Logitech G CLOUD to real beasts like the ASUS ROG Ally, with transitional designs like the very balanced and interesting Razer Edge. The market isn’t what it was when the Steam Deck was announced, and wisely, Valve must have thought its console was getting oldcompared to these other newer models and decided to update it with this new version in response.

Although there are still a few days until its arrival on the market next Thursday, November 16, the company has already given away some pieces, which allows us to start seeing the first reviews. And as we can see in the one done by Dave2D, The Steam Deck OLED is a significant improvement over the original model. Improvements led by its new 7.4-inch OLED screen, of course, but they are not limited to this point, as we can see in the given analysis, in which the console is also broken down.

As we already told you at the announcement, the Steam Deck OLED has a faster memory than its predecessor and a battery with a larger capacity, but thanks to this disassembly we found that the fan has also been replaced with a new one, larger in combination with one heat pipe. These changes, in addition to the improved SoC (6 nanometer photolithography compared to the 7 nanometer of its predecessor), according to the tests carried out, are manifested in the fact that This model is quieter, reaches lower temperatures and has more autonomy than the original model. All this, of course, without taking into account the image quality, which has improved exponentially with the jump from LCD to OLED.