The Steam Deck's Component Overhaul: A Deep Dive

One of the most noticeable changes in the Steam Deck's OLED model is the squiggly metal retention spring on the touchpad mounting, which has been straightened. This modification not only improves efficiency but also reduces points of failure by improving tolerance. The trackpad module itself has fewer overall parts, making repairs more straightforward and reducing the likelihood of issues.

In terms of repairability, Valve has made significant improvements. According to the manufacturer, trackpad repairs are expected to decrease to near zero. This is largely due to better clearances within the chassis, allowing for easier removal and replacement of components. One notable change is that removing the trackpad module can be done with relative ease, thanks to improved clearance.

The screen is another area where changes have been made. The OLED display has allowed for significant reductions in package size compared to the LCD version. This reduction in size has enabled Valve to increase the battery's capacity from 40 watt-hours to 50 watt-hours, providing a noticeable boost in runtime. However, this change also presents challenges, such as navigating thicker batteries and being careful not to damage surrounding components.

Cable routing has been improved, with all screen cabling now routed underneath the subframe rather than above it. This not only makes repairs easier but also reduces the risk of damage to sensitive components. Valve claims that removing the OLED screen from the device is now possible without taking apart the entire back panel, a process that was previously more complicated.

The teardown reveals significant changes within the chassis. The subframe has been modified to accommodate the new screen and reduce cable routing issues. This change should make repairs and maintenance easier, as well as improve overall usability. Furthermore, Valve has redistributed heat loads across the board, creating a more even topology. The cooling solution is also vastly different from its predecessor.

The component changes are not limited to the screen itself; the motherboard has undergone significant reworks. The charging side of things has been improved, with a new topology and cooling solution that should provide better performance. Valve's approach to repairs seems to have paid off, with the company now marketing the device as being highly repairable.

The Steam Deck's OLED model is not just a screen refresh; it represents a significant overhaul of the device's components and design. By making targeted changes to the touchpad, trackpad module, screen, battery, and motherboard, Valve has created a more efficient and maintainable device. The company's efforts to promote repairability and maintenance are also noteworthy, as this is an area often overlooked by manufacturers.

Repairability and Maintenance: A Valid Marketing Point

Valve's approach to repairability and maintenance is a refreshing change in the industry. Companies like iFixit and other third-party sellers of Steam Deck parts will be interested in evaluating how these changes affect their products. As always, we'll provide an in-depth review, including testing and analysis, to help readers understand the impact of these changes.

In conclusion, the Steam Deck's OLED model is a significant improvement over its predecessor. Valve's efforts to optimize the device's components and design have resulted in a more efficient, maintainable, and repair-friendly device. As we continue our review process, we'll delve deeper into the thermal, acoustic, and power testing to validate Valve's claims and explore how these changes affect the overall user experience.

The Future of Steam Deck: A Review

Stay tuned for our upcoming review, where we'll provide in-depth analysis of the Steam Deck's OLED model. We'll put the device through rigorous testing, including thermal, acoustic, and power analysis, to validate Valve's claims and explore how these changes affect the overall user experience.

In the meantime, readers can look forward to a comprehensive breakdown of the Steam Deck's component differences, including our analysis of repairability, maintenance, and performance. As always, we appreciate your support, which allows us to bring you high-quality content like this article.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis crazy amount of components is all set up for side by-side comparisons because a ton has changed with valve's new steam deck OLED in fact so much changed that we got onto a call with three of valve's Engineers to talk about changes to the power topology of the motherboard we went over changes to consolidating these two sets of daughter boards for controls with one of their other engineers and we talked about changes to the heat sink and the thermal solution where they've actually flipped one of the fans upside down from its original orientation so the steam deck OLED is almost a completely new device and we're going to go into the depth that you probably won't find elsewhere today to talk about what's changed with the OLED versus the original steam deck let's get started with our Deep dive of the steam deck OLED changes before that this video is brought to you by Lexar Thor memory lexar's new Thor ddr5 and ddr4 RAM includes a heavyduty aluminum heat spreader while retaining a relatively low profile form factor for PCs with tighter air cooler clearance the Lexar Thor memory supports both Expo and Intel XMP timings and is available from ddr5 5600 to ddr5 6000 cl32 learn more at the link in the description below bam here it is we're going to start with the motherboard comparison we'll start with die differences the die is the most significant change despite being the same spec the node shrink to 6 nanometers from 7 nmet brought with it a die shrink we also noticed that valve rotated the die which you can see by looking at the tiny indicator Arrow at the corner of the Silicon substrate this rotation actually has a huge impact on board layout because it changes the side the memory and the vrm need to be on it actually should look more like this if we were to rotate the image to match the rotation they did on the die we'll come back to that part later though using a barbaric and hamfisted measurement method of calipers around the structural bulk silicon of the die but in at least a like for like way we we found that the new die is about 12.26 X 10.82 mm or 132.5 mm squared the old die with this same method was a much larger 16605 mm squ or about 13 1 12 x 12.3 for reference the official measurement on the older die was about 163 mm squar so we're only off by a little bit considering we're counting the bulk silicon and doing a hand measurement zooming out to the rest of the motherboard there are small differences everywhere some of these are from the refra the deck they did previously but we'll cover all the differences first off valve has significantly cut down on the density of components in general even just bare solder pads on the new board are gone the board is more Barren it's not necessarily a bad thing but it probably helps with cost too talking with valve this reduction of component clutter is an optimization the board was overbuilt previously as valve wasn't 100% sure where the steam deck would end up next but now that they've refined it they can reduce the components that a pick and place machine end up planting all over the board Val say cost wasn't a factor as the parts are extremely cheap but it was more about optimizing the layout and the efficiency of the design the next biggest change after the die is to the memory our old unit used four of micron's 32 gbit d8 bcw modules which are larger 12.4x 15x 1 mm tall modules these took a huge amount of board space on the old deck and forced other components into more complicated areas Elsewhere on the board the new deck OLED moved two significantly smaller 12.4x 7x 0.5 tall modules and only uses two of them because they're 64 GB density to achieve the same 16 GB capacity making this change saved the valve almost 570 mm squared of area which is huge and all that empty space it's not just unoccupied so although the memory traces aren't visible on the top layer of the motherboard valves using the layers within the board in between the Apu and the memory modules to do Trace routing a lot of memory traces need length matching where the traces have to be the exact same length for performance reasons or for memory to work at all in some cases valve used this space to run traces to get the correct length for each run and valve told us it took two months to do the memory Trace routing alone for the new PCB and that's not that crazy considering motherboard manufacturers have told us much the same where memory topology and a board could make or break the value of something like a desktop board a lot of times and the same goes for something like this where bad Trace routing can result in worse options for memory uh but then valve also had the new challenge to contend with which was reducing the count of memory modules where they had four of these lower density modules previously down to the superior but higher density two modules so now they have to run all those traces in a smaller area because each individual module has more traces than when valve was using the four larger dim packages the vrm is next the Apu vrm is mostly the same spec but valve has increased the rail count board wide and improved power delivery elsewhere the biggest change for the vrm and for the Apu phases is the location the original board had the power delivery centrally moving the power delivery components south of the Apu in that first design the new board shifted some of the power stages to the right of the Apu occupying space where the memory used to be but this is also because the die is physically rotated which as you can see shuffled the memory modules correspondingly the new inductors are also higher efficiency taller inductors in some cases that are easier to sink the heat to the cooling solution this is for thermal reasons so mosfets and particularly inductors are high heat components and everything around them will get heated up just by their proximity by their presence nearby and previously the old motherboard had a lot of the vrm the mosfets the inductors located centrally on the board in a way that caused hot spots to form on the board and now valve has moved some of those components closer to the fan on the edge of the PCB now moving them over here should help with cooling it gets it closer to that fan and there is a a sort of pass Hunter within the frame where some extra air can move through additionally getting the memory modules out of that region removes a 1 mm tall blockade where the air was would have struggled to get down into the center of the PCB where the vrm largely was oriented originally so the vrm has more access to Air and the heat should be spread more evenly across the board with fewer highly concentrated hot spots uh on the PCB based on the old layout so that's the main change here the memory is also a newer process nodee and as such it's a higher efficiency power efficiency memory solution so it's also Less in need of direct cooling from say the fan than the vrm would be which runs much hotter memory is normally a pretty low heat flux component one of the other things we asked about though was the absence of some of the filtering capacitors around the Apu where previously there was just a lot more density of surface mount devices here now in theory the engineering answer for this from vales engineering team was the reduction in impedance or cross talk between the vrm and the Apu drives down the need for quite as many filtering capacitors capacitors in general to stabilize the Apu there were also a number of cabling changes on the board these aren't sign ific but we'll just highlight some of the headers that have moved around this is to accommodate the new board layout networking has changed completely with the steam deck OLED the OLED moved to Wi-Fi 6E and it uses a qul fc 66 e-b module it has a max data rate of 3,000 megabits per second and a maximum temperature of 75° C this module is moved to the right of the SSD whereas the older LCD model positioned its networking Hardware underneath the SSD and with some shielding on top and finally flipping the motherboard over it's fully covered and popular at on the old unit and it uses a large piece of tape to cover this up the newer board is more Barren it matches the top side in this way and it's simplified so that's an efficiency change up next is the cooling solution this has also changed a lot and some of the changes jumped out at us right away I'm uh I wasn't able to hold on to that quite like I hoped first of all they flipped the fan over previously the blower fan was positioned to move more air across the shield can of the deck and that is this part valve has changed the shield can significantly and no longer sinks the heat directly into it so previously we had all these thermal pads and thermal interfaces and now nothing that's still usable surface area but depending on how some of the other improvements to air flow and efficiency have impacted the rest of the device it may be the case that valve found that it just wasn't worth doing didn't provide much benefit or could have been a downside in some way but we'll have to look at that that in our thermal testing and our full review of this now flipping the fan is pretty interesting because in theory flipping it over like this which is actually a pretty major design change would you think through a thermal solution the fan orientation is only pretty locked down but flipping it over allows for valve to push more air at a potentially higher flow rate through the fin stack or uh the heat exchange of this at the cost of reducing the flow underneath something like a shield can and to the motherboard so if the motherboard doesn't need the air flow as much anymore and rather they would use that power to blow through the fin stack to just have better dissipation and heat wicking potential then this change could be beneficial for especially the Apu temperature valves changes also included increasing blade and impeller thickness along with a thicker fin stack altogether the thicker fin stack was possible due to the reduced screen thickness caused by moving to the OLED display the fan changes should promote more flow at similar pressure while the larger fin stack just provides more surface area we also expect to see a large difference in the frequency response the frequency profile of the steam deck when we test it in this chamber the Hemi ano chamber we didn't have this when we reviewed the steam deck originally a year ago we had a really small version of it but one of the areas that the thicker blades and thicker fan should impact things will be in that type of noise that comes out of the device so specifically valves design goal with some of those changes other than thermal was to reduce the 2 to 4 khz tones which in speaking with third parties like Mike chin formally of Silent PC review and rs from Hardware Busters or cybernetics uh generally speaking 2 to 4 khz is a fairly annoying tone for the average person using a device so valve was trying to squash that frequency response to flatten it out a little bit and make it more uniform that's what we'll be testing here but as for the changes we're looking at today in the fan uh that's kind of where they're supposed to materialize a real difference we also noticed the soft bumper that's attached to the Magnesium subframe and is underneath the fan has gotten larger which should help with stability the next thing we noticed was the charging circuit and this is something we talked to valve about so this is significantly different it's something we tested in our original review and found to be the hottest component on the board sometimes entering the 90 to 100° Celsius range when charging and gaming like when docked was also the only component where we were specifically worried about some of the heat in that region of the board despite the IC itself being rated for relatively High maximum temperature the original charger IC was located just below the battery cable on the motherboard and from looking around online it does appear that in the past year some people have had these Scorch the new IC is labeled as an m276 2A unit which appears to map to the Monolithic Power Solutions MP 2762 a dual phase interl Buck charger the sheet is dense with functional schematics and charts explaining its operation as a dual phase charger IC so this IC is a pretty big difference we weren't familiar with how these specifically work before looking into it a little bit more uh but valve explained the solution as using duplicate mosfets and inductors to spread that power in the heat load again over a larger area so it comes back to the same principles of just Distributing uh the heat across the PCB more evenly a valve said it could be thought of as running two charger ic's in parall and the heat ends up being less concentrated which actually was one of our concerns with the original review where the temperature specifically of the charger IC was pretty high when it was in use and when you were gaming although ic's like this can be reconfigured in some cases the default absolute maximum ratings table indicates a 150° c Junction temperature max with an earlier section of the document indicating safeties at 120c it also has OTP for the battery there are number of other smaller changes across this some of them that are only small in the sense that you can't see them but there's more power rails across the whole platforms power topology has been reworked uh and additionally there have been some changes to miscellaneous Regulators but the core components like the Apu vrm are similar familiar to the previous generation our final section gets into the controls where valve had some pretty large changes the first thing we noticed was the change to the analog stick and the bumper button valve moved the switch for the bumper off of the large ger daughter board and instead onto the PCB containing the analog stick itself the switch has been changed with valve Now using a higher endurance switch instead this is in addition to reworking the stick PCB to jut out with a peninsula to meet the bumper button our only concern with this was it may create a weak point valve claims that some Flex here is part of the design and that they're using redundant traces which would provide better survivability in Falls even if there's a micro fracture somewhere the peninsula is part of the shock absorption per valves design according to them as far as validating this without drop testing a high sample size of devices we really can't prove or disprove it the concept makes sense though other than improving resistance to fall damage the change also makes things simpler to repair and maintain because fewer parts are needed to be removed to make a repair of this region of the device a valve also significantly changed the touch input module we noticed that it used to have a squiggly metal retention sprin as part of the touchpad mounting now this metal section is straightened and the trackpad module has fewer overall Parts which other than just another efficiency Improvement should also reduce points of failure by improving the tolerance part- toart the touchpad also feels different in use and as for repairs valve stated that it quote expects trackpad repairs to go down to near zero we mainly found that it's just easier to remove the trackpad module due to better clearances within the chassis now we get to the chassis so the screen is is in there it's in pretty deep and the screen itself is what allowed a lot of those changes for more physically constrained things so the battery as an example is clearly thicker now and I have to be careful moving this where all the buttons will fall out but uh that increase to 50 wat hours from 40 was made possible by the reduction in package size going from LCD to OLED we noticed some slight changes in the subframe but for the most part the changes are related to the screen itself so cable routing for example uh has now been made clean so that all the cabling for the screen is underneath that subframe rather than routed up and through it on the older device which should make it easier to replace the screen we haven't tried this part yet because we still need this device to go back together easily for further testing but valve says that it's now possible to remove the OLED screen from the device without taking apart the whole back of the device like you used to have to do for the LCD screen and part of that allowance would be possible because of routing the cable differently not having to go up under the motherboard between the frame so that's it for the tear down this is about as detailed as we could go within a a tight time frame for getting the device we received it just like 24 hours ago uh we took it all apart Jeremy laid this out beautifully on the table so thank you Jeremy for the patience to use tweezers and gloves because the glass to lay it all out uh and we have a pretty good look at what the differences are it is clear that valve has changed a ton of things in the steam deck OLED now we still have to do our thermal acoustic and power testing on other testing so that'll be in a separate review coming up that'll be where we start validating some of the claims and looking at how much these changes really affected things from a function level but it's clear to us that this is not just a screen refresh it's not like they swap the screen and the cable it plugs into uh valve actually did make use of the other benefits from that change which were largely space related and it also went through and changed the motherboard in significant ways that especially on the charging side of things should be beneficial they've redistributed the heat load across the board more evenly just based on looking at the new sort of topology of things and the cooling solution is also massively different and we suspect that there's going to be a big change in the frequency response graph that we make when we take it to the chamber later for uh testing in the Hemi anico chamber the control reworks were also somewhat unexpected for something that's just a screen refresh cuz it obviously wasn't just that but changing the uh the bumper interaction with the pcbs so that now most of the component Tre is contained on a single more easily replaceable board rather than spread across two boards one of which is larger that's a big usability change for people doing repairs definitely an interesting approach from valve they are actually doing some marketing on the back of repairability and maintenance of advice which is awesome to see because that's kind of rare uh it's a valid marketing point point and it's one that seems to be pretty well supported by the ecosystem so far if you look at companies like iFixit or some of the other third parties who are selling parts for steam decks whether or not any of that matters we'll have to look at it in our review so subscribe and check back for that where we'll have all the testing on all these changes and how it affected things but uh for now that's your relatively detailed uh Deep dive into the component differences we were able to speak with valves Engineers about it and uh they have been remarkably open about the changes in the decision in a way that's refreshing and there's a lot more here that's changed small subtle details also some of the larger ones but we'll stop here for now and hopefully that gets you a head start on understanding where the OLED deck has changed so thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store. Gamers access.net to support us directly like by grabbing one of our tear down toolkits or our mod mats that we used for the initial parts of this tear down and check back for the review we'll see you all next timethis crazy amount of components is all set up for side by-side comparisons because a ton has changed with valve's new steam deck OLED in fact so much changed that we got onto a call with three of valve's Engineers to talk about changes to the power topology of the motherboard we went over changes to consolidating these two sets of daughter boards for controls with one of their other engineers and we talked about changes to the heat sink and the thermal solution where they've actually flipped one of the fans upside down from its original orientation so the steam deck OLED is almost a completely new device and we're going to go into the depth that you probably won't find elsewhere today to talk about what's changed with the OLED versus the original steam deck let's get started with our Deep dive of the steam deck OLED changes before that this video is brought to you by Lexar Thor memory lexar's new Thor ddr5 and ddr4 RAM includes a heavyduty aluminum heat spreader while retaining a relatively low profile form factor for PCs with tighter air cooler clearance the Lexar Thor memory supports both Expo and Intel XMP timings and is available from ddr5 5600 to ddr5 6000 cl32 learn more at the link in the description below bam here it is we're going to start with the motherboard comparison we'll start with die differences the die is the most significant change despite being the same spec the node shrink to 6 nanometers from 7 nmet brought with it a die shrink we also noticed that valve rotated the die which you can see by looking at the tiny indicator Arrow at the corner of the Silicon substrate this rotation actually has a huge impact on board layout because it changes the side the memory and the vrm need to be on it actually should look more like this if we were to rotate the image to match the rotation they did on the die we'll come back to that part later though using a barbaric and hamfisted measurement method of calipers around the structural bulk silicon of the die but in at least a like for like way we we found that the new die is about 12.26 X 10.82 mm or 132.5 mm squared the old die with this same method was a much larger 16605 mm squ or about 13 1 12 x 12.3 for reference the official measurement on the older die was about 163 mm squar so we're only off by a little bit considering we're counting the bulk silicon and doing a hand measurement zooming out to the rest of the motherboard there are small differences everywhere some of these are from the refra the deck they did previously but we'll cover all the differences first off valve has significantly cut down on the density of components in general even just bare solder pads on the new board are gone the board is more Barren it's not necessarily a bad thing but it probably helps with cost too talking with valve this reduction of component clutter is an optimization the board was overbuilt previously as valve wasn't 100% sure where the steam deck would end up next but now that they've refined it they can reduce the components that a pick and place machine end up planting all over the board Val say cost wasn't a factor as the parts are extremely cheap but it was more about optimizing the layout and the efficiency of the design the next biggest change after the die is to the memory our old unit used four of micron's 32 gbit d8 bcw modules which are larger 12.4x 15x 1 mm tall modules these took a huge amount of board space on the old deck and forced other components into more complicated areas Elsewhere on the board the new deck OLED moved two significantly smaller 12.4x 7x 0.5 tall modules and only uses two of them because they're 64 GB density to achieve the same 16 GB capacity making this change saved the valve almost 570 mm squared of area which is huge and all that empty space it's not just unoccupied so although the memory traces aren't visible on the top layer of the motherboard valves using the layers within the board in between the Apu and the memory modules to do Trace routing a lot of memory traces need length matching where the traces have to be the exact same length for performance reasons or for memory to work at all in some cases valve used this space to run traces to get the correct length for each run and valve told us it took two months to do the memory Trace routing alone for the new PCB and that's not that crazy considering motherboard manufacturers have told us much the same where memory topology and a board could make or break the value of something like a desktop board a lot of times and the same goes for something like this where bad Trace routing can result in worse options for memory uh but then valve also had the new challenge to contend with which was reducing the count of memory modules where they had four of these lower density modules previously down to the superior but higher density two modules so now they have to run all those traces in a smaller area because each individual module has more traces than when valve was using the four larger dim packages the vrm is next the Apu vrm is mostly the same spec but valve has increased the rail count board wide and improved power delivery elsewhere the biggest change for the vrm and for the Apu phases is the location the original board had the power delivery centrally moving the power delivery components south of the Apu in that first design the new board shifted some of the power stages to the right of the Apu occupying space where the memory used to be but this is also because the die is physically rotated which as you can see shuffled the memory modules correspondingly the new inductors are also higher efficiency taller inductors in some cases that are easier to sink the heat to the cooling solution this is for thermal reasons so mosfets and particularly inductors are high heat components and everything around them will get heated up just by their proximity by their presence nearby and previously the old motherboard had a lot of the vrm the mosfets the inductors located centrally on the board in a way that caused hot spots to form on the board and now valve has moved some of those components closer to the fan on the edge of the PCB now moving them over here should help with cooling it gets it closer to that fan and there is a a sort of pass Hunter within the frame where some extra air can move through additionally getting the memory modules out of that region removes a 1 mm tall blockade where the air was would have struggled to get down into the center of the PCB where the vrm largely was oriented originally so the vrm has more access to Air and the heat should be spread more evenly across the board with fewer highly concentrated hot spots uh on the PCB based on the old layout so that's the main change here the memory is also a newer process nodee and as such it's a higher efficiency power efficiency memory solution so it's also Less in need of direct cooling from say the fan than the vrm would be which runs much hotter memory is normally a pretty low heat flux component one of the other things we asked about though was the absence of some of the filtering capacitors around the Apu where previously there was just a lot more density of surface mount devices here now in theory the engineering answer for this from vales engineering team was the reduction in impedance or cross talk between the vrm and the Apu drives down the need for quite as many filtering capacitors capacitors in general to stabilize the Apu there were also a number of cabling changes on the board these aren't sign ific but we'll just highlight some of the headers that have moved around this is to accommodate the new board layout networking has changed completely with the steam deck OLED the OLED moved to Wi-Fi 6E and it uses a qul fc 66 e-b module it has a max data rate of 3,000 megabits per second and a maximum temperature of 75° C this module is moved to the right of the SSD whereas the older LCD model positioned its networking Hardware underneath the SSD and with some shielding on top and finally flipping the motherboard over it's fully covered and popular at on the old unit and it uses a large piece of tape to cover this up the newer board is more Barren it matches the top side in this way and it's simplified so that's an efficiency change up next is the cooling solution this has also changed a lot and some of the changes jumped out at us right away I'm uh I wasn't able to hold on to that quite like I hoped first of all they flipped the fan over previously the blower fan was positioned to move more air across the shield can of the deck and that is this part valve has changed the shield can significantly and no longer sinks the heat directly into it so previously we had all these thermal pads and thermal interfaces and now nothing that's still usable surface area but depending on how some of the other improvements to air flow and efficiency have impacted the rest of the device it may be the case that valve found that it just wasn't worth doing didn't provide much benefit or could have been a downside in some way but we'll have to look at that that in our thermal testing and our full review of this now flipping the fan is pretty interesting because in theory flipping it over like this which is actually a pretty major design change would you think through a thermal solution the fan orientation is only pretty locked down but flipping it over allows for valve to push more air at a potentially higher flow rate through the fin stack or uh the heat exchange of this at the cost of reducing the flow underneath something like a shield can and to the motherboard so if the motherboard doesn't need the air flow as much anymore and rather they would use that power to blow through the fin stack to just have better dissipation and heat wicking potential then this change could be beneficial for especially the Apu temperature valves changes also included increasing blade and impeller thickness along with a thicker fin stack altogether the thicker fin stack was possible due to the reduced screen thickness caused by moving to the OLED display the fan changes should promote more flow at similar pressure while the larger fin stack just provides more surface area we also expect to see a large difference in the frequency response the frequency profile of the steam deck when we test it in this chamber the Hemi ano chamber we didn't have this when we reviewed the steam deck originally a year ago we had a really small version of it but one of the areas that the thicker blades and thicker fan should impact things will be in that type of noise that comes out of the device so specifically valves design goal with some of those changes other than thermal was to reduce the 2 to 4 khz tones which in speaking with third parties like Mike chin formally of Silent PC review and rs from Hardware Busters or cybernetics uh generally speaking 2 to 4 khz is a fairly annoying tone for the average person using a device so valve was trying to squash that frequency response to flatten it out a little bit and make it more uniform that's what we'll be testing here but as for the changes we're looking at today in the fan uh that's kind of where they're supposed to materialize a real difference we also noticed the soft bumper that's attached to the Magnesium subframe and is underneath the fan has gotten larger which should help with stability the next thing we noticed was the charging circuit and this is something we talked to valve about so this is significantly different it's something we tested in our original review and found to be the hottest component on the board sometimes entering the 90 to 100° Celsius range when charging and gaming like when docked was also the only component where we were specifically worried about some of the heat in that region of the board despite the IC itself being rated for relatively High maximum temperature the original charger IC was located just below the battery cable on the motherboard and from looking around online it does appear that in the past year some people have had these Scorch the new IC is labeled as an m276 2A unit which appears to map to the Monolithic Power Solutions MP 2762 a dual phase interl Buck charger the sheet is dense with functional schematics and charts explaining its operation as a dual phase charger IC so this IC is a pretty big difference we weren't familiar with how these specifically work before looking into it a little bit more uh but valve explained the solution as using duplicate mosfets and inductors to spread that power in the heat load again over a larger area so it comes back to the same principles of just Distributing uh the heat across the PCB more evenly a valve said it could be thought of as running two charger ic's in parall and the heat ends up being less concentrated which actually was one of our concerns with the original review where the temperature specifically of the charger IC was pretty high when it was in use and when you were gaming although ic's like this can be reconfigured in some cases the default absolute maximum ratings table indicates a 150° c Junction temperature max with an earlier section of the document indicating safeties at 120c it also has OTP for the battery there are number of other smaller changes across this some of them that are only small in the sense that you can't see them but there's more power rails across the whole platforms power topology has been reworked uh and additionally there have been some changes to miscellaneous Regulators but the core components like the Apu vrm are similar familiar to the previous generation our final section gets into the controls where valve had some pretty large changes the first thing we noticed was the change to the analog stick and the bumper button valve moved the switch for the bumper off of the large ger daughter board and instead onto the PCB containing the analog stick itself the switch has been changed with valve Now using a higher endurance switch instead this is in addition to reworking the stick PCB to jut out with a peninsula to meet the bumper button our only concern with this was it may create a weak point valve claims that some Flex here is part of the design and that they're using redundant traces which would provide better survivability in Falls even if there's a micro fracture somewhere the peninsula is part of the shock absorption per valves design according to them as far as validating this without drop testing a high sample size of devices we really can't prove or disprove it the concept makes sense though other than improving resistance to fall damage the change also makes things simpler to repair and maintain because fewer parts are needed to be removed to make a repair of this region of the device a valve also significantly changed the touch input module we noticed that it used to have a squiggly metal retention sprin as part of the touchpad mounting now this metal section is straightened and the trackpad module has fewer overall Parts which other than just another efficiency Improvement should also reduce points of failure by improving the tolerance part- toart the touchpad also feels different in use and as for repairs valve stated that it quote expects trackpad repairs to go down to near zero we mainly found that it's just easier to remove the trackpad module due to better clearances within the chassis now we get to the chassis so the screen is is in there it's in pretty deep and the screen itself is what allowed a lot of those changes for more physically constrained things so the battery as an example is clearly thicker now and I have to be careful moving this where all the buttons will fall out but uh that increase to 50 wat hours from 40 was made possible by the reduction in package size going from LCD to OLED we noticed some slight changes in the subframe but for the most part the changes are related to the screen itself so cable routing for example uh has now been made clean so that all the cabling for the screen is underneath that subframe rather than routed up and through it on the older device which should make it easier to replace the screen we haven't tried this part yet because we still need this device to go back together easily for further testing but valve says that it's now possible to remove the OLED screen from the device without taking apart the whole back of the device like you used to have to do for the LCD screen and part of that allowance would be possible because of routing the cable differently not having to go up under the motherboard between the frame so that's it for the tear down this is about as detailed as we could go within a a tight time frame for getting the device we received it just like 24 hours ago uh we took it all apart Jeremy laid this out beautifully on the table so thank you Jeremy for the patience to use tweezers and gloves because the glass to lay it all out uh and we have a pretty good look at what the differences are it is clear that valve has changed a ton of things in the steam deck OLED now we still have to do our thermal acoustic and power testing on other testing so that'll be in a separate review coming up that'll be where we start validating some of the claims and looking at how much these changes really affected things from a function level but it's clear to us that this is not just a screen refresh it's not like they swap the screen and the cable it plugs into uh valve actually did make use of the other benefits from that change which were largely space related and it also went through and changed the motherboard in significant ways that especially on the charging side of things should be beneficial they've redistributed the heat load across the board more evenly just based on looking at the new sort of topology of things and the cooling solution is also massively different and we suspect that there's going to be a big change in the frequency response graph that we make when we take it to the chamber later for uh testing in the Hemi anico chamber the control reworks were also somewhat unexpected for something that's just a screen refresh cuz it obviously wasn't just that but changing the uh the bumper interaction with the pcbs so that now most of the component Tre is contained on a single more easily replaceable board rather than spread across two boards one of which is larger that's a big usability change for people doing repairs definitely an interesting approach from valve they are actually doing some marketing on the back of repairability and maintenance of advice which is awesome to see because that's kind of rare uh it's a valid marketing point point and it's one that seems to be pretty well supported by the ecosystem so far if you look at companies like iFixit or some of the other third parties who are selling parts for steam decks whether or not any of that matters we'll have to look at it in our review so subscribe and check back for that where we'll have all the testing on all these changes and how it affected things but uh for now that's your relatively detailed uh Deep dive into the component differences we were able to speak with valves Engineers about it and uh they have been remarkably open about the changes in the decision in a way that's refreshing and there's a lot more here that's changed small subtle details also some of the larger ones but we'll stop here for now and hopefully that gets you a head start on understanding where the OLED deck has changed so thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store. Gamers access.net to support us directly like by grabbing one of our tear down toolkits or our mod mats that we used for the initial parts of this tear down and check back for the review we'll see you all next time\n"