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

A YouTuber, kind of a creator, somehow got this early Steam Deck prototype—one of those engineering samples—and ripped it apart on camera. It’s an internal layout or whatever, probably really neat and organized. Somebody named SadlyItsDadley on X (what used to be Twitter) is behind letting this guy, Jon Bringus of Bringus Studios, have a crack at the unit. Apparently, Jon’s the guy for this sort of geeky historic stuff.

So, Jon gets this thing and just starts pulling it apart like you do when curiosity gets the best of you. The device had this paper stuck to it, some sort of official-sounding “POC2-34 Control 163” scribble. Means it was proof-of-concept number 34, if that matters. Anyway, he didn’t just tear it open; he actually tried some games on the contraption, you know, to see what Valve was up to with these portable gaming setups.

Oh, there’s this YouTube video where he talks about the whole $3,000 prototype deal. He says it’s a bit different from the Steam Deck people are fawning over now. Like, these strange massive round touchpads instead of those nice modern rectangle ones. And the joysticks, tiny little things. Different palm rests too, for whatever that’s worth. The BIOS—or some tech thing—showed it had an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U with 8GB RAM. Oh, and a 256GB SSD plus an Intel Wi-Fi chip. Supposedly, it supports discrete GPUs, though Jon didn’t actually get that far in testing.

It gets even more mysterious. Jon copied the original SSD to keep it safe or something. Then, surprise! The imaged drive revealed an early version of SteamOS with three weird pre-installed accounts. Couldn’t get into this ‘34’ account, kinda locked like a treasure chest or whatever. And apparently, this SteamOS was kicking around since September 30, 2020—like a whole year and a bit before Valve decided to put the Steam Deck out there for everyone.

And can we just appreciate what Valve did with this Steam Deck thing? Before them, we only had Nintendo’s Switch making waves since 2017, then suddenly—bam!—handheld PC gaming becomes a thing. Now everyone’s on board. Big names like Asus, Lenovo, MSI, and more have spinoffs like the ROG Ally, Legion Go, Claw—name it, they’ve probably got it.

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