In my case the Deck (OLED) has one major advantage over my PC besides the portability - its screen. My PC screen is a perfectly competent 1440p panel with decent colours, but it’s also a 60Hz IPS. Some games the power of the PC (5900X, 3070) is going to make games look better on there, others the Deck’s OLED is going to give it the win. Or there’s always streaming to get both!

I’d do a 40 or 45 FPS target for most games. Still looks good, more likely to get a steady framerate instead of jumping up and down, and easier on the battery than trying to push as many frames as possible all the time.

So are we calling the OLED Steam Deck 1 Episode 1? Or Steam Deck Opposing Force?

I have a PC but I love my Deck. I do travel a decent amount, visiting my wife’s family is reasonably common, so I love it for that, but it’s also great at home. I play in bed quite a bit, and even more demanding games that don’t run as well as I’d like on the Deck, I can stream from the PC. As others have mentioned, the (mostly) non-game-breaking sleep feature is brilliant for enabling short sessions, there’s definitely times when I play something on my Deck where, if I didn’t have it, I’d never have gone up to my desk and fired up the PC, I’d have just doomscrolled on my phone for a bit.

Have you checked ParcelForce tracking? Mine was picked up by GLS on the 22nd, got to Parcelforce early in the morning of the 25th, delievered 27th. GLS did update after ParcelForce got it, but it took a while.

I wouldn’t trust it at the moment, no. It may improve as they get away from the launch rush and Black Friday, but on the other hand we’ve got Christmas coming up so it could even get worse.

I ordered mine on launch day while it still said 3-5 business days, and it took 7 (11 days total). And some people still seemed to be stuck waiting for theirs to dispatch when I got mine. So expect it to take at least a few days longer than estimated.

Run through Aperture Desk Job or just the controls test in settings to make sure all the inputs are working correctly.

I always pause the game, then sleep. Occasional audio issues, but mostly those have been when I forgot to pause, and once or twice I’ve had bigger issues where I had to restart the Deck. But those are very infrequent and haven’t happened at all for ages so might have been resolved with a software update at some point.

I think it’s also because of the smaller bezels. I know, obvious, but what I mean is, proportionally the decrease in bezels is more substantial than the increase in active area.

Delivered! Assuming somebody hasn’t opened it up and stolen it and carefully resealed it… Now I have to make it through the next few hours stuck at work while it sits at home!