Steam Deck Prototype sells on Ebay for $2,000

Steam Deck prototype reveals major design changes for Valve’s handheld

An early prototype for Valve’s Steam Deck handheld has reportedly sold for $2,000 on eBay. The handheld is listed as “Engineering Sample 34”, and it contains entirely different hardware from Valve’s finalised Steam Deck.

For starters, this early Steam Deck design contains fundamentally different hardware from the handheld Valve eventually released. This model features 8GB of total memory, a far cry from the Steam Deck’s 16 GB. The CPU also features an AMD Picasso CPU, which is older than the CPU Valve used on retail Steam Decks.

Instead of the Zen+ cores and Radeon Vega graphics on this prototype, Valve’s Steam Deck uses Zen 2 CPU cores and Radeon RDNA 2 graphics. If Valve’s Steam Deck launched with the CPU in this engineering sample, it wouldn’t be powerful enough to play most modern PC games.

This engineering sample was probably created before Valve’s custom AMD hardware was ready. With this design, Valve was likely testing its custom Steam Deck control system and software. Note that the design of Valve’s control system has changed a lot over time. Valve’s final Steam Deck has a much more refined control system, and nicer looking square control pads.

This engineering sample is an interesting part of Valve’s history. That’s likely why it (seemingly) sold for $2,000. While it features less powerful hardware than a retail Steam Deck, it highlights how far handheld hardware has to evolve to enable today’s PC handheld ecosystem.

You can join the discussion on Valve’s Steam Deck Engineering prototype on the OC3D Forums.