The Steam Deck: A Versatile Gaming Solution with Some Caveats

If you're considering purchasing the Steam Deck as your primary gaming solution, there are some important notes to keep in mind. First and foremost, if you're running the Steam Deck in its default gaming mode, you'll be limited to resolutions of 1280x720. However, this limitation can be bypassed by switching to Linux desktop mode, which allows for resolutions up to 1080p. To do so, simply switch to desktop mode, and you'll find that your options expand accordingly.

For those who want to play demanding games at higher resolutions, the Steam Deck may not be the best solution. I recently tested The Long Dark at 1080p, and while it was playable at around 35-45 frames per second, it's unlikely to meet the demands of competitive first-person shooters. This highlights a key limitation of the device: its ability to handle demanding games is currently capped at 60 FPS.

Another important consideration is the performance pass-through issue, which can cause power issues with certain devices. In my testing, I found that this caused me to need to charge the deck before playing, rather than being able to play while charging. This is a major drawback for those who want to use their deck on-the-go or in situations where access to power is limited.

One potential solution for these limitations is using a docking station, such as the Lapdock XPR. As I mentioned earlier, this device can be used in conjunction with the Steam Deck to provide a larger display and other benefits. However, it's worth noting that the keyboard and trackpad provided with the dock are not ideal – they may require some compromise for those who prefer more premium input devices.

The Lapdock XPR itself is an all-in-one docking solution that folds up neatly when not in use. It's a versatile device that can connect to any USB-C or HDMI source, making it suitable for use with other devices as well as the Steam Deck. This flexibility makes it an attractive option for those who want a portable and compact docking solution.

Despite some limitations and drawbacks, I believe the Lapdock XPR is a good product that offers value for certain users. While the keyboard and trackpad may not be ideal, they're certainly not the worst in the business – and there are plenty of other laptops out there with similar input devices. The display itself is well-made and nicely constructed, although it could benefit from greater brightness and reduced reflectivity.

In terms of overall value, I think the Lapdock XPR is worth considering for those who want a versatile gaming solution that can be used on-the-go or in more stationary settings. While the Steam Deck itself may not be perfect – particularly when it comes to keyboard and trackpad performance – the docking station provides some key benefits that make it a worthwhile investment for certain users.

Ultimately, I'm excited to explore the possibilities offered by this device further and see how it integrates with the Steam Deck in practice. As always, I'll be sharing my findings with you all, so be sure to subscribe and leave me a like or dislike in the comments section.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI've got an interesting product to show you guys today it's the U perfect XPR lap dock it's a 15.6 in portable battery powered monitor with an integrated kickstand uh it looks a little bit like a Surface Pro I guess with its uh detachable keyboard and trackpad here and it's designed to connect via USBC to any device which supports USBC output and of course the steam deck is one of those devices so could you use this device to turn your steam deck into a gaming laptop let's find out this lapt is primarily designed for use with things like Samsung's Dex mode where you can connect your phone and then use it like a laptop but I'll be testing that out in another video so if you want to see that don't forget to subscribe um but up perfect specifically sent this over to me because they wanted me to test it with the steam deck and uh by way of full disclosure uh they sent it to me without charge I'm not required to return it but you perfect don't at any site of the video before it goes Live on YouTube and we retain full editorial control so we can give you our honest opinion of this device I'm sure you know what a steam deck is but if you're unfamiliar with this this is the mighty gaming portable from valve that gives you access to the vast majority of the Steam games library on the go uh the slight downside of course is that not all PC games are suited to playing on a 7in screen and sometimes you just need keyboard and mouse input so perhaps up perect laptop could be the answer here valve are expecting Gamers to dock their deck and they bought out their own steam deck specific dock which I've got here uh and I'll be reviewing that very soon on the channel but of course this do requires you to bring your own monitor keyboard and mouse so let's have a rundown of the laptop first and then we'll see how it does with gaming there are lots of different models available but for this specific model you can have it as 4K or 1080p the 4K model costs £440 or $500 and a 1080p model is £ 343 or $390 uh and this is the 1080p model that we've got here now there wouldn't be much point in having the 4K model for steam deck use because the steam deck doesn't have enough Graphics power to render games at that kind of resolution let's just remove the keyboard and trackpad for a moment and just look at the display itself it's a 16.7 million color depth which supports 100% of the srgb color gamma the display is itself is a w LED backlit IPS touch panel made by LG and it runs at 60 HZ the viewing angle is nice and wide at 178° and I have to say it looks really good uh but it is quite reflective now that wouldn't be a problem apart from the fact that the peak brightness is only 260 nits now 260 nits would be fine so long as you're not in a brightly lit room um I do think that lack of brightness is a bit of a shame though as it does let down an otherwise brilliant display the display is touch enabled it's got 10o capacitive multi-touch and it supports things like two finger dragging to zoom in and that kind of thing provided the OS supports it and you'll be pleased to hear that Steam OS does support it the onscreen menu for the display itself also supports touch which makes life much easier though there is also a push wheel interface control over here on the left hand side the build quality of the display itself is really good uh the cas is all made out of aluminium as is the kickstand and the whole thing feels sturdy the kickstand has got this nice resistance to it that allows you to choose any kind of viewing angle you can rotate it through 180° if you want to it's really impressive it looks stylish it feels premium the display itself is really Slim I like the design I like the fact that we've got rubber feet on the bottom so when you've got it positioned like this it's pretty stable on the desk surface it's not going to slide around too much uh honestly I'm initial thoughts are that it's worth the price just for the monitor but I'll come back to that um on the right hand side here we've got two USB ports um one is for power input and one is to connect to your device now it does support USB PD and it will pass through power to the steam deck in fact you can actually charge your steam deck from the internal battery of the lapt although that will drain this battery very quickly charging speed though when you've got power plugged in through to the deck isn't particularly fast it says it's going to take something like 6 hours to fully charge the deck and if you're playing a game and the deck is working hard and drawing power then there's insufficient power being sent through to charge it so it'll actually discharge as you're playing it so if you want to charge and play you're going to need to buy another USB hub to connect to your steam deck the battery inside is apparently 10,000 milliamp hours I'm not sure about this because it doesn't feel heavy enough for that or look large enough uh you perfect are claiming 8 hours of video playback and 4 to 6 hours in desktop use and I I just don't understand those claims uh it's a display it's not got a processor in it so what you're displaying shouldn't really make that much difference uh it's all about the the back light how bright you have it and how long it's on for that's what's going to determine your battery life so I would take those figures with a healthy pinch of salt we certainly haven't got close to 4 to 6 hours in our testing um just cleaning the display there is picking up fingerprints I can't bear fingerprints on my display touch screens are probably not for me a nice touch that we have here is that there's a mini HDMI port on the side which means that you can also use this display then with devices that don't have USBC display out support and and I like the fact that this port is on the right hand side of the display so that means that all of the main cables your power input and your display cables are all on one side of the monitor there is another USBC port on the left hand side which you can use to plug in a hub or other USB devices like a a wired keyboard or Mouse and there's also a headphone jack on this side and that's a useful addition but there are stereo speakers on board as you'd expect on a device like this they don't have much in the way of bass response but they do actually sound pretty good and they're loud enough for playing at home uh when you plug in the steam deck it will automatically select those speakers and you can turn the volume up and down using the controls on the deck if you want to so a very promising start I think uh let's attach the keyboard and trackpad now if you're used to a Surface Pro you're going to find this process pretty frustrating because the magnet placement is just I think I've done it it's just not quite in the right space I find that a little bit frustrating I think that needs work and and maybe that's something you perect could improve with the next iteration something you might notice is that by attaching the keyboard and trackpad we've just lifted the front of the monitor up so the rubber feet are no longer touching the desk which affects stability slightly but it's still pretty good and the typing experience on the keys uh I found them to be nicely weighted there's a decent response to them although the spacing is a little bit wider than I'm used to we have got some shortcut keys which you use with the FM button for things like volume and brightness although what I found in Steam Osos is changing the brightness using these Keys doesn't actually seem to do anything so you probably need to use the onscreen menu but again with that brightness you're probably never going to have it on anything other than maximum I think the biggest downside to the keyboard is the amount of board Flex that you've got now unlike a Surface Pro where the keyboard kind of folds up and attaches magnetically to the front edge of the surface for extra support we don't have anything like this on the laptop so the keyboard is able to move and flex as you type and that's not a particularly great feeling all when it comes to the trackpad it's okay uh if you're used to a Mac or a Windows Precision trackpad then you're going to find this one a little bit me it's got left and right click regions at the front of the trackpad uh but you can't click at the back I find that slightly awkward but it does support tap to click so overall then initial impressions are that the display is lovely as long as you're not in a brightly lit room and the keyboard and trackpad feels like it needs a bit more work but let's get to the important thing how does it game initially we found that it was a little bit buggy when connecting directly to the steam deck when the steam deck is in gaming mode in a couple of the games that we tried we found that the trackpad didn't work properly and it just seemed to bug out the game now that may have been something specific to our deck or it may be something that is fixed in a software update but something to remember of course is that the steam deck is a PC and with a device like this perhaps you're going to want to switch into desktop mode once we did that everything worked as intended and of course you can launch games from the Steam app within desktop mode just like you can on any PC so I've spent a little bit of time using my steam deck as a Linux PC in desktop mode with this lapt and the exper experience really surprised me I'm actually thinking it might be interesting to try and use it for a day as my main work machine let me know if you'd like to see that in the comments section now incidentally I do try to read all of your comments uh even if I don't have time to respond to all of them and it does help with the YouTube algorithm and supports the channel so thank you in advance for all of your comments now Ben spent a few hours uh play testing this setup and he found that he had to quickly give up with the trackpad and he used a USB mouse instead and actually I expect this would be the case with most Gamers even if the trackpad was better on the device Ben spent some time with the long dark Jurassic world Evolution and timberborn and his conclusion was that it felt just like playing on his PC now it's important to say that he left the games running at the default steam deck resolution of 720p and he was perfectly happy with the way it looked I think it looks fine as well but there is nothing stopping you changing the resolution to 1080p if you want to but there is an important note here if you're running the steam deck in its default gaming mode then you can't select a resolution higher than 128 by 720 the native resolution of the deck so you do need to go into Linux desktop mode if you want to change resolution once you do that you'll find that you have options for resolutions up to the 1080p resolution of this display but obviously it depends on how demanding the game is as to whether the steam deck can render it at 60 frames per second I just quickly tried the long dark at 10 80P and I found I was getting 35 to 45 frames per second and that's completely playable for a casual game but it's not going to please anyone who likes to play competitive firstperson Shooters and something else to note is that the Steam and menu buttons on the steam deck don't seem to work in desktop mode so instead you need to use shift tab to get access to the standard steam overlay which is a shame because I would have liked to have used the performance data overlay that comes with the steam deck um but that's just not available it seems when you're running Des toop mode it's nothing stopping you just picking up the deck and using it as a controller whilst you're connected to the laptop all of the normal controller inputs work fine in desktop mode uh but you could also connect a Bluetooth controller if you prefer that now just to clarify why we're using desktop mode it was specifically because it resolved bugs with this specific keyboard and trackpad for us in our situation if you're just planning to dock your deck onto a display perhaps using the new steam deck dock you don't need to use desktop mode so overall this is a pretty interesting experience and I think we need to draw some conclusions and I I believe there are two separate questions to answer here first of all is the lap do a good partner for your steam deck yes and no it really depends on how much time you spend playing games that need keyboard and mouse input or just need a bigger display if you spend a lot of time playing those sorts of games then is the steam deck the right solution and by the time you you bought your deck and something like the lap dock you're getting quite close to the price of a reasonable gaming laptop on the other hand if you primarily play controller based games but you want to have an occasional solution for other games then I can see the benefit of something like this it is an all-in-one docking solution which is completely portable and it does fold up nice and neat makes it ideal for travel and there's no reason why you couldn't use it to get some work done too now since the lap do is versatile and it can connect to any USBC or HDMI Source it's perhaps a nice thing to have around if you have other devices that could make use of it and then perhaps the purchase price makes more sense when it comes to the steam deck though I think there are some pretty big downsides you won't be able to make full use of the 1080p resolution with top tier titles and that power pass through issue is really a problem uh it seems that you're going to need to charge first and then play rather than play whilst charging the second question I think we need to answer is whether this perfect XPR lapt is a good product and is it worth the asking price overall I think so for some people now short the keyboard and trackpad we haven't been very complimentary about and they're not the best but it doesn't mean that they're useless there are plenty of laptops out there with worse key action and worse trackpads and at the end of the day you can always take it off and use your preferred keyboard and mouse anyway the display itself is really nice it's well made nice build quality but it's let down by the lack of brightness and the overall reflectivity of the glass and I think that brightness situation does actually impact the portability of the device imagine if you're taking it traveling well it'll be fine once you're sat in your hotel room of an evening but uh sat in a bright airport lounge possibly not so much and now perhaps you perfect could improve that with the next generation of these devices and something like 400 nits I think is where they need to be getting to it's probably true that some people won't be bothered by that and they'll see the usefulness of having such a versatile setup it does open up new possibilities for your steam deck and I'm really excited to explore those possibilities um both with this product and also with the official Doc and naturally I'll be sharing what I find with you all so be sure to subscribe leave me a like or a dislike and please let me know what you think in the comments section and I'll see you next time for some more keerI've got an interesting product to show you guys today it's the U perfect XPR lap dock it's a 15.6 in portable battery powered monitor with an integrated kickstand uh it looks a little bit like a Surface Pro I guess with its uh detachable keyboard and trackpad here and it's designed to connect via USBC to any device which supports USBC output and of course the steam deck is one of those devices so could you use this device to turn your steam deck into a gaming laptop let's find out this lapt is primarily designed for use with things like Samsung's Dex mode where you can connect your phone and then use it like a laptop but I'll be testing that out in another video so if you want to see that don't forget to subscribe um but up perfect specifically sent this over to me because they wanted me to test it with the steam deck and uh by way of full disclosure uh they sent it to me without charge I'm not required to return it but you perfect don't at any site of the video before it goes Live on YouTube and we retain full editorial control so we can give you our honest opinion of this device I'm sure you know what a steam deck is but if you're unfamiliar with this this is the mighty gaming portable from valve that gives you access to the vast majority of the Steam games library on the go uh the slight downside of course is that not all PC games are suited to playing on a 7in screen and sometimes you just need keyboard and mouse input so perhaps up perect laptop could be the answer here valve are expecting Gamers to dock their deck and they bought out their own steam deck specific dock which I've got here uh and I'll be reviewing that very soon on the channel but of course this do requires you to bring your own monitor keyboard and mouse so let's have a rundown of the laptop first and then we'll see how it does with gaming there are lots of different models available but for this specific model you can have it as 4K or 1080p the 4K model costs £440 or $500 and a 1080p model is £ 343 or $390 uh and this is the 1080p model that we've got here now there wouldn't be much point in having the 4K model for steam deck use because the steam deck doesn't have enough Graphics power to render games at that kind of resolution let's just remove the keyboard and trackpad for a moment and just look at the display itself it's a 16.7 million color depth which supports 100% of the srgb color gamma the display is itself is a w LED backlit IPS touch panel made by LG and it runs at 60 HZ the viewing angle is nice and wide at 178° and I have to say it looks really good uh but it is quite reflective now that wouldn't be a problem apart from the fact that the peak brightness is only 260 nits now 260 nits would be fine so long as you're not in a brightly lit room um I do think that lack of brightness is a bit of a shame though as it does let down an otherwise brilliant display the display is touch enabled it's got 10o capacitive multi-touch and it supports things like two finger dragging to zoom in and that kind of thing provided the OS supports it and you'll be pleased to hear that Steam OS does support it the onscreen menu for the display itself also supports touch which makes life much easier though there is also a push wheel interface control over here on the left hand side the build quality of the display itself is really good uh the cas is all made out of aluminium as is the kickstand and the whole thing feels sturdy the kickstand has got this nice resistance to it that allows you to choose any kind of viewing angle you can rotate it through 180° if you want to it's really impressive it looks stylish it feels premium the display itself is really Slim I like the design I like the fact that we've got rubber feet on the bottom so when you've got it positioned like this it's pretty stable on the desk surface it's not going to slide around too much uh honestly I'm initial thoughts are that it's worth the price just for the monitor but I'll come back to that um on the right hand side here we've got two USB ports um one is for power input and one is to connect to your device now it does support USB PD and it will pass through power to the steam deck in fact you can actually charge your steam deck from the internal battery of the lapt although that will drain this battery very quickly charging speed though when you've got power plugged in through to the deck isn't particularly fast it says it's going to take something like 6 hours to fully charge the deck and if you're playing a game and the deck is working hard and drawing power then there's insufficient power being sent through to charge it so it'll actually discharge as you're playing it so if you want to charge and play you're going to need to buy another USB hub to connect to your steam deck the battery inside is apparently 10,000 milliamp hours I'm not sure about this because it doesn't feel heavy enough for that or look large enough uh you perfect are claiming 8 hours of video playback and 4 to 6 hours in desktop use and I I just don't understand those claims uh it's a display it's not got a processor in it so what you're displaying shouldn't really make that much difference uh it's all about the the back light how bright you have it and how long it's on for that's what's going to determine your battery life so I would take those figures with a healthy pinch of salt we certainly haven't got close to 4 to 6 hours in our testing um just cleaning the display there is picking up fingerprints I can't bear fingerprints on my display touch screens are probably not for me a nice touch that we have here is that there's a mini HDMI port on the side which means that you can also use this display then with devices that don't have USBC display out support and and I like the fact that this port is on the right hand side of the display so that means that all of the main cables your power input and your display cables are all on one side of the monitor there is another USBC port on the left hand side which you can use to plug in a hub or other USB devices like a a wired keyboard or Mouse and there's also a headphone jack on this side and that's a useful addition but there are stereo speakers on board as you'd expect on a device like this they don't have much in the way of bass response but they do actually sound pretty good and they're loud enough for playing at home uh when you plug in the steam deck it will automatically select those speakers and you can turn the volume up and down using the controls on the deck if you want to so a very promising start I think uh let's attach the keyboard and trackpad now if you're used to a Surface Pro you're going to find this process pretty frustrating because the magnet placement is just I think I've done it it's just not quite in the right space I find that a little bit frustrating I think that needs work and and maybe that's something you perect could improve with the next iteration something you might notice is that by attaching the keyboard and trackpad we've just lifted the front of the monitor up so the rubber feet are no longer touching the desk which affects stability slightly but it's still pretty good and the typing experience on the keys uh I found them to be nicely weighted there's a decent response to them although the spacing is a little bit wider than I'm used to we have got some shortcut keys which you use with the FM button for things like volume and brightness although what I found in Steam Osos is changing the brightness using these Keys doesn't actually seem to do anything so you probably need to use the onscreen menu but again with that brightness you're probably never going to have it on anything other than maximum I think the biggest downside to the keyboard is the amount of board Flex that you've got now unlike a Surface Pro where the keyboard kind of folds up and attaches magnetically to the front edge of the surface for extra support we don't have anything like this on the laptop so the keyboard is able to move and flex as you type and that's not a particularly great feeling all when it comes to the trackpad it's okay uh if you're used to a Mac or a Windows Precision trackpad then you're going to find this one a little bit me it's got left and right click regions at the front of the trackpad uh but you can't click at the back I find that slightly awkward but it does support tap to click so overall then initial impressions are that the display is lovely as long as you're not in a brightly lit room and the keyboard and trackpad feels like it needs a bit more work but let's get to the important thing how does it game initially we found that it was a little bit buggy when connecting directly to the steam deck when the steam deck is in gaming mode in a couple of the games that we tried we found that the trackpad didn't work properly and it just seemed to bug out the game now that may have been something specific to our deck or it may be something that is fixed in a software update but something to remember of course is that the steam deck is a PC and with a device like this perhaps you're going to want to switch into desktop mode once we did that everything worked as intended and of course you can launch games from the Steam app within desktop mode just like you can on any PC so I've spent a little bit of time using my steam deck as a Linux PC in desktop mode with this lapt and the exper experience really surprised me I'm actually thinking it might be interesting to try and use it for a day as my main work machine let me know if you'd like to see that in the comments section now incidentally I do try to read all of your comments uh even if I don't have time to respond to all of them and it does help with the YouTube algorithm and supports the channel so thank you in advance for all of your comments now Ben spent a few hours uh play testing this setup and he found that he had to quickly give up with the trackpad and he used a USB mouse instead and actually I expect this would be the case with most Gamers even if the trackpad was better on the device Ben spent some time with the long dark Jurassic world Evolution and timberborn and his conclusion was that it felt just like playing on his PC now it's important to say that he left the games running at the default steam deck resolution of 720p and he was perfectly happy with the way it looked I think it looks fine as well but there is nothing stopping you changing the resolution to 1080p if you want to but there is an important note here if you're running the steam deck in its default gaming mode then you can't select a resolution higher than 128 by 720 the native resolution of the deck so you do need to go into Linux desktop mode if you want to change resolution once you do that you'll find that you have options for resolutions up to the 1080p resolution of this display but obviously it depends on how demanding the game is as to whether the steam deck can render it at 60 frames per second I just quickly tried the long dark at 10 80P and I found I was getting 35 to 45 frames per second and that's completely playable for a casual game but it's not going to please anyone who likes to play competitive firstperson Shooters and something else to note is that the Steam and menu buttons on the steam deck don't seem to work in desktop mode so instead you need to use shift tab to get access to the standard steam overlay which is a shame because I would have liked to have used the performance data overlay that comes with the steam deck um but that's just not available it seems when you're running Des toop mode it's nothing stopping you just picking up the deck and using it as a controller whilst you're connected to the laptop all of the normal controller inputs work fine in desktop mode uh but you could also connect a Bluetooth controller if you prefer that now just to clarify why we're using desktop mode it was specifically because it resolved bugs with this specific keyboard and trackpad for us in our situation if you're just planning to dock your deck onto a display perhaps using the new steam deck dock you don't need to use desktop mode so overall this is a pretty interesting experience and I think we need to draw some conclusions and I I believe there are two separate questions to answer here first of all is the lap do a good partner for your steam deck yes and no it really depends on how much time you spend playing games that need keyboard and mouse input or just need a bigger display if you spend a lot of time playing those sorts of games then is the steam deck the right solution and by the time you you bought your deck and something like the lap dock you're getting quite close to the price of a reasonable gaming laptop on the other hand if you primarily play controller based games but you want to have an occasional solution for other games then I can see the benefit of something like this it is an all-in-one docking solution which is completely portable and it does fold up nice and neat makes it ideal for travel and there's no reason why you couldn't use it to get some work done too now since the lap do is versatile and it can connect to any USBC or HDMI Source it's perhaps a nice thing to have around if you have other devices that could make use of it and then perhaps the purchase price makes more sense when it comes to the steam deck though I think there are some pretty big downsides you won't be able to make full use of the 1080p resolution with top tier titles and that power pass through issue is really a problem uh it seems that you're going to need to charge first and then play rather than play whilst charging the second question I think we need to answer is whether this perfect XPR lapt is a good product and is it worth the asking price overall I think so for some people now short the keyboard and trackpad we haven't been very complimentary about and they're not the best but it doesn't mean that they're useless there are plenty of laptops out there with worse key action and worse trackpads and at the end of the day you can always take it off and use your preferred keyboard and mouse anyway the display itself is really nice it's well made nice build quality but it's let down by the lack of brightness and the overall reflectivity of the glass and I think that brightness situation does actually impact the portability of the device imagine if you're taking it traveling well it'll be fine once you're sat in your hotel room of an evening but uh sat in a bright airport lounge possibly not so much and now perhaps you perfect could improve that with the next generation of these devices and something like 400 nits I think is where they need to be getting to it's probably true that some people won't be bothered by that and they'll see the usefulness of having such a versatile setup it does open up new possibilities for your steam deck and I'm really excited to explore those possibilities um both with this product and also with the official Doc and naturally I'll be sharing what I find with you all so be sure to subscribe leave me a like or a dislike and please let me know what you think in the comments section and I'll see you next time for some more keer\n"