Yeah, it does what it says and for some games it just feels better than a PC. The OLED screen is pretty nice. I haven't used an emulator, but I think that's a hot topic best avoided for a bunch of legal reasons.

I have an LCD Deck but can confirm it’s good for emulation (haven’t tried DS emulation so far, though). It’s also good for the vast majority of current (and older) titles if you’re willing to make some sacrifices when it comes to the image/FPS quality settings for the newer releases (any AAA post around 2019 I often mess with the settings of (even if only a bit) just to have a smoother gameplay experience-and to avoid my Deck running hot).

It’s become by far my favorite handheld, and I’ve had a lot (all from Nintendo). It’s definitely an upgrade from the Switch (and I didn’t bother buying the Switch 2) I think the OLED has better battery life than the LCD does, so if you travel a lot-that would make it more ideal for you than the LCD (mine usually stays plugged in while playing).

I can’t speak for the 3rd party handheld gaming consoles-I know some are more powerful than the Deck, but I’m not a graphics/FPS snob, so I’m not overly bothered by the Deck’s limitations.

Fair warning that setting up the Deck (especially if you want to do emulation or add any other plugins to more easily play games from other sites, customize the look of your Deck’s screen further, etc.) is a bit of a learning curve-particularly if you aren’t familiar with Linux at all (I wasn’t). Get ready to learn all about Proton and Proton GE compatibility-Proton db will be your best friend if you’re having trouble getting games to run.

I’ll also add that out of all the games I’ve played on my Deck (I’ve bought many “verified,” “playable” and “not supported” ones) only one “not supported” one that had previously worked for other Deck users when the game first came out straight up refused to run for me no matter what I did. Thankfully, I got it for free.

If you are curious whether any Steam game runs on the deck, go to ProtonDB and look up the game.

It has regular reviews from people in how well the game runs and if you need to fidget with it to make it work.

Also, if you are on the fence of buying a Steam Deck, you can log in with you Steam account there and see what extent of your library is supported on the Deck before buying one.

Thank you all! I have been reading about it for weeks, but still had some last minute doubts because it is a huge purchase for me. I think I will buy it.

I am not familiar with Linux, but I do work with two programming languages at work so I hope the learning curve is not too hard. I will definitely check Proton DB resources often :D

Again, thank you all for the time you took to answer to my post!

Theoretically, you could get windows 11 on an OLED, run Razer Cortex and just about do everything..

And a decent docking station, like Valve or Ugreen.

I use mine for my backlog mostly but it does struggle with newer games. I wouldn't play expedition 33 on it.

引用自 spectralmews：

I use mine for my backlog mostly but it does struggle with newer games. I wouldn't play expedition 33 on it.

Mine is also my backlog machine, and I have a backlog bigger than I probably have years to live. It doesn't help that I love RPGs that take tens to hundreds of hours to play through. I've beaten more of them since I got it than before.

I did try Expedition 33, just to give it a shot. It was surprisingly playable on the default settings, although I recommend switching the upscaling to XeSS. It looks nicer than the FSR implementation, and performance is still good with it. When I last checked, FSR on that game had a weird shimmer to the image, and hair especially looks noisy.

I was actually stuck on a particular fight, and I managed to get past it on my Deck the first try.

Generally speaking though, yes. The experience is better if the game is a bit older, and you'll get better battery life too.

I think it is a good choice. Maybe you can wait until the winter sale to see if it gets a little discount. But I paid the full price for it and I'm happy with it,

I've got the SteamDeck OLED 1TB and yes... it's a great device.

I like to play rogue, racing, and emulator games on it.

I grabbed the LE 1TB OLED SD on release back in 2023 (got me back into pc gaming).

For your use case (retro games, less demanding titles, a AA/AAA here and there) the OLED Deck is an excellent value. Screen quality is great (hard to go back to anything else after OLED), emulation is simple and easy to set up (I mainly use PCSX2). You can get better hardware if you want to spend more money, but you'll be happy with what you get for the price of the Deck.