Steam Deck OLED will be faster than original thanks to key upgrades

The new Steam Deck OLED from Valve has pretty much the same specs inside, except for a few key upgrades to the new system.

Valve has surprised announced a new Steam Deck, upgrading it with an OLED panel and a plethora of small tweaks. One of them might be annoying to tinkerers, but there are a couple of key upgrades inside.

Thanks to the upgrade of 6400 MT/s from 5500 MT/s for the 16GB DDR5 RAM, the Steam Deck OLED should be able to outpace its LCD brethren. While it might seem like a small, negligible upgrade, in most games, the additional RAM speed should allow the OLED model to power through any performance struggles.

We recently saw the Lenovo Legion Go, which houses RAM with 7500 MT/s, but is also backed by the Z1 Extreme. The new upgrade to the Steam Deck’s RAM puts it on pace with the ROG Ally, but again, the RDNA 2 chip versus the RDNA 3 Z1 Extreme means the Windows handhelds will still run games better.

Steam Deck OLED will be faster thanks to RAM upgrade

For those planning to leap into an upgrade or get the device fresh for yourself, you’ll find the faster RAM helping in certain edge cases. The machine will also be taking work off the processor inside, as it includes a dedicated audio chip now. This means games won’t be fighting for resources from system functions.

While the APU inside has been shrunk by 1nm, the fabrication process is mostly the same, as is the chip. Don’t expect any improvements on this front. Meanwhile, you can expect to have a faster time downloading games.

According to Linus Tech Tips, at best they found an increase in speed to nearly 700Mb/s download on their fancy network. For home users, if you have a gigabit fiber connection, it should be able to flood the Steam Deck OLED with downloads.

The Steam Deck OLED is planned to be released November 16, alongside a special edition system available only in the US and Canada.