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Comment by parkingrift | Hacker News Reader

I’ve watched these reviews and their overall conclusion of the product seems completely divorced from all the details leading up to the conclusion. It runs hot, barely manages acceptable frame rates at 1280x800 on older games, and has pretty abysmal battery life. The performance, poor as it is, requires the most expensive model at $630.

But then at the end it’s the most innovative gaming PC in 20 years. Really? It’s an expensive handheld with poor performance and poor battery life for a niche use case of PC gaming on the go and a relatively small subset of the Steam library.

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Not sure I'd call it poor performance. The fact that it runs PC games largely unmodified at all in handheld form factor is quite a feat.

Relative to a mains powered desktop with massive thermal capacity it is poor performance yes but I'd say that is an unreasonable expectation.

And similarly using other handheld platforms running code designed specifically for it doesn't seem like a good comparison either.

That said I'm not buying one either. Mobile gaming doesn't appeal

I’d love to see mobile pc gaming get resource usage under control. It seems these days everyone is perfectly fine with gaming requiring 500w and 32gb of ram. Playing the switch is a real eye opening experience because you see how little having the latest graphics actually matter for enjoying the game. VR being the exception.

> completely divorced from all the details leading up to the conclusion

You seem to be the one completely divorced from anything that has been shown in these reviews. Hot, barely acceptable performance, abysmal battery, what?

Have you seen the competition, or are you just comparing it to some idealistic pipe dream of a handheld that just exists in your mind? I've seen nothing but cautious optimism and surprised at what Valve has managed to achieve with current tech and that price point.

Candidly, did you watch the reviews? Gamers Nexus thoroughly tested the device. 92C, 1-2 hours battery life in demanding situations, and consistently under 60fps.

The only difference between the versions is the screen and storage, so the performance should be the same in most cases.

and a portable PC for 420€ is not cheap, but an interesting pricepoint, especially compared to similar devices like the gdp win

The thing to compare it to is a NUC, and then add in the screen and $70+ for a controller. Add some more for the battery.

I have a lot of small computers, but nothing handheld, and while I want a deck, I doubt I'll buy one any time soon, as it is a bit pricey considering I have a switch and a "gaming laptop".

It's the best performing PC in that form factor and has actually good enough battery life. It's not GBA battery life but it's on par with the V1 Switch, the Vita and the PSP and considerably better than It's PC competition which are more like 1-2 hrs vs. 3-5. It's also the fastest and costs considerably less. Performance seems good for a PC half the price of even a cheap gaming laptop that's also considerably smaller. The only difference between tiers is storage with the base model having eMMC and the upper ones having NVME.

And we haven't even talked about software like resume feature yet. If that works it will fix my biggest pain point about PC gaming.

> The performance, poor as it is, requires the most expensive model at $630.

Why does it require the most expensive model?

Significantly faster storage.

How is the most expensive model ‘required’? The only difference in models is screen texture and storage.

Agreed. I’m sort of relieved after watching videos that there isn’t a big reason to drop more for some more storage and a matte screen (and better case). And I find it promising is that the micro SD slot loads nearly as fast as the SSD. My use case is to take with me on travel and really to not have to sit in front of the computer to play games. So I’ll load some games on it but likely stream heavier games from my PC.

I went for the matte screen. I saw in the LTT tear-down that that the SSD is upgradable by removing ~10 screws to get to it.

I would need storage to install recent game.

The storage is user upgradable technically.

The storage speed between the three models is wide. To achieve even the poor performance of the Gamers Nexus review required the top end model.

YouTube reviews are typically not actual reviews. They are usually hype videos containing “influencers” talking excitedly about the product they received for free under the condition that they sugarcoat everything.

A minimum of 60 jump cuts per minute is typically mandatory as well.

>YouTube reviews are typically not actual reviews

Disagree. "Youtube reviews" doesn't mean anything valuable because there are a million reviewers on youtube, some very good and some worse. Disregarding reviews because they're on youtube actually disregards some of the best reviews around.

Half the tech journals and websites turn out complete garbage that I rarely agree with, while many youtubers do a good job.

It's the specific reviewer, and I wouldn't call the big reviewers on youtube (LTT, GN, etc) worse than any magazine or trade journal.

near hour long discussions with game performance tests, thermal imaging, airflow testing, etc, don't seem to be the kind of stuff you're talking about

It's already sold at cost, especially the base model. You can replace the ssd by urself

Literally everything you pointed out is wrong. It has the best battery life out of its competitors, it's less than half their prices, and its cooling is not a problem whatsoever. This has to be bait.

Calling it a "relatively small subset of the Steam library" seems like a bit of a stretch. Proton is promising, and it doesn't seem like performance will be an issue for the vast majority of Steam games.

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