Valve Confirms Steam Deck Shipments Will Begin February 25, What You Need To Know
Valve has finally given a launch date for its long-awaited Steam Deck. The company has confirmed the handheld gaming PC will officially launch on Feb. 25. Don’t expect to see it in stores or on your doorstep on that date, though.
According to its press release today, Valve will begin emailing invites to reservation holders at 10:00 a.m. PST on February 25, 2022. If you receive an invite, the countdown begins: you have 72 hours to make your purchase or lose your spot to the next person in the queue.
The first units ship out on Feb. 28, and new invite emails will go out on a weekly basis to try to keep up with the expected demand.
Valve will be sending order emails in the same order reservations were received, and you can only order the Steam Deck model you originally reserved. Your reservation deposit will be applied towards the final price, and shipping costs are already included.
The Steam Deck, beneath the surface, is a handheld gaming console built around a tiny PC running SteamOS. It uses a custom AMD chip with a 4-core/8-thread Zen 2 CPU. It’s clocked at 2.4GHz to 3.5GHz, and offers an RDNA 2 GPU. The GPU has 8 compute units running at 1GHz to 1.6GHz with 16GB of shared LPDDR5-5500 RAM.
Available Steam Deck models come with up to 64GB of eMMC ($399), 256GB of NVMe storage ($529), or 512GB of NVMe storage ($649). All three models have a 7-inch LCD touchscreen with a 1280x800 resolution and 60Hz refresh rate.
Quite a few big-name games are listed as compatible with the new Steam Deck, including Death Stranding, Portal 2, and Final Fantasy, among others.
