In a nutshell: Steam Deck manufacturing is on the rise however efficiency could also be trending in the wrong way. It was not too long ago found that Valve in some unspecified time in the future quietly up to date the tech specs on its Steam Deck product web page to replicate a change with regard to the solid-state drive used within the handheld. A be aware below the storage class signifies that some 256GB and 512GB fashions ship with a PCIe Gen 3 x2 SSD.
Previously, all of those fashions got here with a PCIe Gen 3 x4 SSD.
A Valve spokesperson instructed IGN that many Steam Deck elements come from a number of suppliers for improved redundancy and manufacturing capability. Specifically, one in all their SSD suppliers gives PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe SSDs whereas one other gives an x2 (two lane) variant.
The rep mentioned they’ve examined each elements extensively and decided there is no such thing as a affect on efficiency between the 2.
“SSD efficiency is at the moment gated by components not associated to PCIe bandwidth,” the rep famous. “In extraordinarily unusual circumstances, variations in learn / write velocity caps could minimally affect file switch speeds, however OS efficiency, loading instances, recreation efficiency, and recreation responsiveness are similar between the x2 and x4 drives.”
Valve introduced earlier this week that it was greater than doubling Steam Deck shipments shifting ahead.
There would not seem like a method to request which sort of drive your Steam Deck will ship with. Those sad with an x2 mannequin may improve the drive at their expense however Valve would not suggest doing so. What’s extra, a high quality microSD card may get you extra storage with a lot much less problem and solely a minor efficiency hit.
