$3,000 Steam Deck Prototype Teardown Reveals Discrete GPU Support, Smaller Joysticks, and Circular Touchpads

I stumbled on this crazy YouTube video where a dude got his hands on an early Steam Deck prototype. You know, one of those wild pieces of tech history. Apparently, it’s sample 34—no clue why that number matters, but it sounds legit, right? Some guy on X, used to be Twitter, named SadlyItsDadley (really!) lent it to Jon Bringus. Bringus Studios’ own archivist or something. Whatever, he’s into documenting old tech stuff.

So Bringus cracks this thing open on his channel. You ever see a Steam Deck? This one’s not quite like the ones you buy now. The touchpads are these massive circles—like, who thought of that? Way bigger than what you’d see now. Joysticks? Tiny. Palm rests? Different. But hey, back then they were just figuring this stuff out. I think that’s cool. Oh, and inside, it’s running an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and some Intel Wi-Fi thingy. Curious bit—mentions discrete GPU stuff, but Bringus didn’t or couldn’t check that out.

The SSD had some quirks. Bringus cloned it—to keep it intact, maybe? Popped in the clone, and boom, old SteamOS loads up. Three accounts pop up. Very mysterious. Especially this ‘34’ account—like, what’s even in there? No access though. Bummer. This OS version dropped September 2020, way before the Steam Deck hit stores. Gives you a peek into the timeline, I guess?

And who’d have thought, right? Valve with this Steam Deck kicked off this wave of handheld gaming madness. Nintendo got there first with the Switch, sure, but this little gadget got the bigger folks in PC gaming all excited. Suddenly, Asus, Lenovo, even MSI jumped in, rolling out their portable game machines. It’s like they realized, “Oh, people wanna game outside or something?”

Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, yeah, follow Tom’s Hardware on Google News or something for updates. They’ve got you covered with all the juicy tech tidbits. But yeah, this whole prototype thing? Blows your mind a bit, doesn’t it?