I absolutely love my Steam Deck. I’ve gotten hundreds of hours of use out of it, and up to this point, it’s been the primary way I’ve enjoyed my Steam Library. I still have a mid-tier gaming laptop from 2019 docked to my desk setup in my office, which is currently the machine I use for my day job and for game development. While I indeed used it a fair amount for gaming, it was never a natural fit to play games at my desk. I was raised as a console pleb, with the skin of my ass halfway grown into the fibers of the couch. Couch and handheld gaming are my favorite ways to play.
While the Steam Deck runs a very large chunk of what I’ve thrown at it admirably, its power level is still nowhere close to what you can get out of a stationary PC or console. With the Deck being my primary door into the massive Steam library I’ve procured over the years, it could feel a bit claustrophobic knowing there was a significant portion of my collection that is functionally inaccessible due to the limitations of the handheld. Local multiplayer is also extremely valuable to me. The Steam Deck easily runs most of the local multiplayer games I enjoy with friends, but docking it to a TV has never been a very seamless experience. Spotty Bluetooth connections for controllers, finicky resolution settings, and wear & tear on the battery have all been concerns that can put a damper on the fun. For these reasons, having a beefy enough PC entirely dedicated to gaming was a very appealing prospect, especially if I could configure it to offer the same style of controller-friendly, console-esque interface that the Steam Deck provides.
What I Got
What I eventually opted for was a MINISFORUM Neptune HX99G. The version I got packed a Ryzen 9 6900HX, 32gb of DDR5 RAM, a 1tb SSD, and a dedicated graphics processor in the form of an AMD Radeon RX 6600M. Especially for the sub-$800 after-tax price I got mine for, the little machine is a BEAST. It’s not going to hit native 4K 60fps for demanding games, but it runs nearly everything I’ve thrown at it like a champ at 1080p with silky smooth frame rates.
Once I received the device, I made a bootable backup of the included version of Windows and promptly replaced it with the version of Bazzite that the project’s site recommended for AMD-based HTPCs. Installing the OS was a very smooth process, with only minimal tweaks to the BIOS to get everything going. Once it was complete, nearly everything just worked. I could log in to my Steam account, and the familiar Deck-esque interface with all of my recently played games was present on my TV in a crisp resolution. My preferred controller is the 8Bitdo Ultimate Bluetooth for Switch. Despite the mismatched button glyphs*, the controller is well-suited to make use of Steam’s controller-mapping features, including gyro support. For the times I have to use the desktop interface, a cheap little handheld keyboard with a touch pad gets the job done. After adding this startup video as the pièce de résistance, the device was ready to game.
How It Works
Aside from a minor learning curve getting used to the quirks of Bazzite and how it updates, the system works great. One of my first desires for the PC was to finally give Indiana Jones and the Great Circle a go. The hardware is definitely on the low end of the recommended specs, but I thought I could at least run it with quality levels close to the Xbox Series S version, since the graphics card should, in-theory, support some very modest ray tracing. But alas, nothing I did could get the game past the logo splash screens; it would just soft-lock in a black screen before ever reaching the main menu. I tried many of the suggested fixes across Reddit and other forums, but no dice. I don’t know if it’s due to hardware compatibility issues, issues running on Linux, or something else entirely, but I ended up giving up and refunding it. I guess I’m still just waiting for the game to come to PS5 for now
Aside from those small complaints, every other game I've used it for has been a joy to play. Eldin Ring and Resident Evil Village both run pretty much flawlessly at 60fps, and Helldivers 2 is completely enjoyable with some graphics tinkering. Wirelessly connecting Switch and PS5 controllers has been pretty seamless, making couch multiplayer a painless and jolly old time; my wife and I have been enjoying some good Co-Op games, including Innchanted, Bread & Fred, and Moving Out 2. We plan on playing through Split Fiction on it in the coming weeks.
VR is Currently a No-Go
A secondary value-add prospect was having a beefy enough machine to tether my Quest 3 to in order to play Steam VR games. Unfortunately, wireless connections are proving troublesome at the moment. The version of Bazzite I installed makes the computer identify as a Steam Deck, which the Steam Link app on Meta refuses to connect to for VR games due to the Deck’s inability to support VR. I can tinker some more with it, as maybe a wired connection could get me up and running, or there could be alternate methods of setting up wireless connections. I’m still a Linux novice, so hopefully the path forward will become more clear as I get more familiar with the OS. In the meantime, however, I’m stuck with all-in-one VR.
Final Thoughts
I’m very happy with how it all ended up. I know I worked backwards from where many long time Steam users did when adopting the Steam Deck, going from Deck to stationary instead of stationary to Deck. The Steam Deck was my sole door into the Steam ecosystem for quite a while, but over time, I have amassed a library that includes things it’s not well suited for. With the GabeCube in my living room, it’s been great being able to enjoy my various games in the ways that best suit them. My Steam Deck is now my main machine for single player games of low-to-medium graphical demands, and the GabeCube is my go-to for couch multiplayer and high-demand games. For some games that are well-suited for both, like A Hat in Time and AntonBlast, I’ve been swapping between the two setups for my playthroughs. It’s not as seamless a purpose-built hybrid for both docked and handheld play, like the Nintendo Switch excels at, but Steam’s cloud saves make it about as seamless as it could be while still using multiple devices. Fun times were had by all and everyone clapped.
*I’m familiar enough with every common style of button layout that I don’t have to look at my controller to know what is where. But just knowing that there is a mismatch of button glyphs does cause some persistent discomfort for my OCD brain when using a Switch controller for an Xbox layout. On a pragmatic level, this should not be an issue in any way, since the controller works perfectly fine for everything I want from it. But because I have the Too Much gene, I must embark on a pointless quest to remedy this completely stupid complaint. My current idea is to make a silicone mold of the buttons and create some custom, solid-colored resin buttons with no glyphs at all. I feel like that’s a nice middle-ground, as I can make sure that the colors will match the Xbox-style prompts, and I think I’d rather have no glyphs than mismatched glyphs. Yes, it’s a lot of time, effort, and money being thrown at a solution to a problem that doesn’t really even exist. But alas, such is the living hell of waking up every day and having to be me. Mismatched glyphs CAN be a real issue for friends who are more casual players and aren’t as familiar with the different layouts. For these cases, I’ve been considering getting these button decals for my DualSense controllers. But they might actually be more confusing than helpful for some people.