My personal solution to battery life problems is sort of impractical to some. I use my Steam Deck exclusively for game streaming from my home pc. I have a free VPN from Tailscale, which can connect to my home PC from any internet connection outside my home because of the custom IP address the VPN uses. Using the Sunshine and Moonlight streaming apps + the Tailscale VPN, I can stream my games in high quality with my home wifi, my phone's 5g mobile hotspot, or any random wifi anywhere I go. Since I only have 15gb a month of mobile hotspot, I have Moonlight set up to only pull .5mb, which is roughly 1.8gb per hour. Within the last 6 months or so, I've had a great experience with Steam Deck, and have been able to get a consistent 7 hours of battery using Moonlight when I'm away from home.
Note the 737 could likely have charged faster as it's allegedly capable of 140w charging if you had a 140w charger capable of the full 140w from a single port.
6:03 to be fair. It's much better for sum battery life to only game from the power bank and not charge the Deck at the same time. If you also charge, the battery pack needs to pump out more power which is less efficient, therefore losing more energy as heat. If you have for 15% left on your Deck's battery just turn off charging and play the game directly form the power bank, you'll get more playtime. (I know this was just a test case I'm writing this as general info)
@@raknikmik there's a Decky plugin, called Power tools. It has an option to set the charging stage to idle (stop charging) or you can set a battery percent where it'll stop charging.
It's an interesting value proposition, these banks seem to run anywhere from $150 to 250. That's definitely an added cost to come a couple that with something like ally or deck .. now you're looking at $ $800+ investment. Becomes an interesting debate if it's worth it over a aptop solution at that point.
PC handhelds in the coming years won't match the performance of a current $600+ gaming laptop and the screens on the handhelds are simply too small to be productive with. You could try to make the handhelds more productivity friendly by adding a portable monitor, keyboard and mouse but at that point it would be way out of the price range and simply too bulky to lug around, and that kind of setup would not be as compact as a laptop.
@@KashKatana Modularity will be great. A tablet that doubles as a portable screen or even better glasses like the nreal air will open up a lot of possibilities for using handhelds for productivity.
I’m someone who caps my deck tdp to 9 watts for every game, except emulators sine they don’t draw too much power. I make it work. Spider-Man at 30fps 95 percent of the time, and for almost 3 hours is enough for me. I don’t mind turning down some graphics options. That’s the fun of the steam deck though, you can play it how you want
the steam deck is the only device that is still the same, and will remain the same over 3-4 years to come ( valve already said so ) in which games are optimized for the platform more and more each day, always receiving updates, features, and feature sets. i feel like the others, Aya neo, ROG ally etc will all just be passing yearly releases and end up on the shelf with no support as each new model comes out not worth the money imo
I'm not strapping a battery to the back of my handheld device because its already heavy enough. I'm not buying some tiny battery bank that will tap out quickly either. I'll just use my 100AC Goal Zero Sherpa battery bank with a fast charging USB Type C cable.
I feel so happy to see this video cuz when I bout my deck I bout the 737 because it charges really fast and don’t look like a bomb since I fly a lot and the shark geeks don’t look like tsa will like them. Great video though
Question could my storm 2 be defective as when I push the button it does nothing just shows the display lighting up and information I also left the plastic on meaning the one already on it
You forgot the AokZoe 1A Pro also released this month. And how about the lack of docks with a USB4 connection on the bottom. I have to make my own. So annoying.
now I imagine my cringe self gaming on the go with a tac ammo carriers but instead of mags I have a bunch of storm2 slims~ do these handheld PCs have bypass charging by default??
me happily playing pc, switch, psp, ps2 and nintendo DS games on my phone either run locally or streamed from pc over wifi6 for like 8 hours straight XDDD without spending a single penny on a whole another device
Very good video, as for a follow up question have you heard of or tested the icemag portable mag safe power bank? It looks really cool but idont see many reviews and the few i do see say it isnt good but it is made by shargeek as well...would really look forward to a review or your two cents very least! Appreciate your videos man ✌🏽
I want High fps and i want 1080P OLED screen. If all you want is higher specs you should get a PC A handheld is not enough for you and you are wasting your money My own experience is that 40 fps is more than enough and that there is a limit to how good an experience is with a small 7 inch screen
AYA just released the S2 after releasing the Ayaneo 2. Whose to say they won't make a newer model after the S2 once a new cpu is released a few months down the road. They like to make their older models obsolete so fast.
I agree its not obsolete but they’re a Hardware Company and if theres a new GPU they will make a newer Model,just get what you think will Perform Good for Games
i dont think Valve or Asus will flood the market with a steam deck 2 or RoG ally 2 anytime within the same quarter, let alone charging high prices. We all know these chinese co are just cashing in with high margin when their products go on sale so quick after indiegogo campaign ends. With the Ally coming to storm the market, we know what these handhelds actually worth
@@ounaku not really. Asus and valve can afford to take a heavy loss and that's questionable for asus. All the other manufacturers are showing you the true cost. People just flock to the cheapest though.
they offered upgrade motherboards to those that ordered the Ayanoe 2. Their stuff is very easy to work on due to the fact they layout everything in the device so clean.
with those insane prices i'd rather buy another steam deck and use that when the first one runs out. come on, there's a price ceiling for everything, and these easily break that.
Not to shill, but there are cheaper options that still get the job done just fine like the INIU power banks which barely break $50 and regularly go on sale. The main advantage the power banks here have is their more informative IPS panels, and higher overall output allowing you to theoretically charge multiple demanding devices at once. However, IMO that utility is pretty pointless for handheld PC use, since you would want to funnel all of the bank's power to the PC and nothing else. It would be better to shoot for high capacity, "high enough" PD, and the smallest size possible if you were looking for a companion to a Deck (and, again, INIU has an option that's got the same capacity as the largest bank here that's physically smaller and a 1/3rd of the price).
I appreciate this video a lot. The battery of the Steam Deck really is just a piece of S. (Let's be honest) I will be picking one of those up for sure. Thank you for going so in depth with each one. 🙏
The battery is good, the power needs of x86 chips is the problem. Gotta get creative or go big. I get more battery life out of my Steam Deck playing games like Resident Evil 2 Remake(60FPS, medium settings, interlacing on) than I get out of Tears of the Kingdom on my Switch(which has constant framerate dips, often into the teens). Edit: forgot to mention, the "go big" part applies to the Win Max 2 7840U I ordered, its 67Wh battery is a lot bigger and should be better for games that demand more juice like 60FPS Elden Ring.
@@MrOdaddy2011 When I can literally sit and watch the battery percentage go down while sitting idle....I'd say that's an issue. Quit being ignorant. Valve was forced to design it this way and the external batteries help with it. If you're at home, just play with it either plugged in, or docked and you're fine.
@@nickstarlingch absolute lies and misleading, i have decky loader and mostly game at 40Hz on my SD but my oled switch still easily last much longer , everyone who really own an SD knows how terrible the battery life is despite the customization options
Okay, I'm gonna get fuckin' slammed for this, but playing less is always an option. Read a book. Listen to music. Listen to an audio book. Take a nap. Or just. . . talk to another human being in person. I love video games, but they aren't my entire life and identity. There's other shit that I can do. There's other things that I *should* be doing. Limiting screen time isn't a bad thing.
Yeah, when people complain about this I'm like... if you're on a handheld, it's because you're out and about or something. In which case why is 2-4 hours not enough for you?!?
Another TH-camr promoting an ad that got their product free anyone can know how a portable charger works without all this extra detail we care for the biggest battery life.
Tears of the Kingdom making my Oled battery feel like the original switch when BOTW came out.
can't you play switch while it's charging?
@@radysg4346yes,he can when it's docked
@@radysg4346 yeah you can plug it in
Easily getting 4-5 hours on my oled switch playing totk
@@AriCalifornia-yu7vq ah thanks I thought you can't
i'm looking at my steam deck. my gaming laptop is looking at me.
it's a delicious love triangle i've got myself in.
Ha! Love this comment.
Real gamer 👊🏾
Dude props to your testing, very comprehensive.
Shout it to my boi MrTek!! Great content, great edition/production. Perfect narration.
I demand a video talking about PSVR2!
Much love from México 🌮 💜
Wow I’m glad I bought the shargeek storm 2 for my steam deck. It really is a fantastic battery bank!
My personal solution to battery life problems is sort of impractical to some. I use my Steam Deck exclusively for game streaming from my home pc. I have a free VPN from Tailscale, which can connect to my home PC from any internet connection outside my home because of the custom IP address the VPN uses. Using the Sunshine and Moonlight streaming apps + the Tailscale VPN, I can stream my games in high quality with my home wifi, my phone's 5g mobile hotspot, or any random wifi anywhere I go. Since I only have 15gb a month of mobile hotspot, I have Moonlight set up to only pull .5mb, which is roughly 1.8gb per hour. Within the last 6 months or so, I've had a great experience with Steam Deck, and have been able to get a consistent 7 hours of battery using Moonlight when I'm away from home.
Heck yeah, Moonlight only sips like 7-8 watts from the Deck!
@@ElementalTJ I set the Moonlight app to the lowest custom TDP settings that the Deck can use, and it's still 100% playable. It's pretty awesome.
omg only 15gb and you stream games? i have 500gb monthy on my 5g and i don't do it.
Note the 737 could likely have charged faster as it's allegedly capable of 140w charging if you had a 140w charger capable of the full 140w from a single port.
It can only charge at that speed for a short amount of time. th-cam.com/video/WIrLw1fQ3GU/w-d-xo.html After that, it overheats
Wow, I was just looking at the Anker 737 for my Switch and laptop. This video couldn’t have come at a better time.
6:03 to be fair. It's much better for sum battery life to only game from the power bank and not charge the Deck at the same time. If you also charge, the battery pack needs to pump out more power which is less efficient, therefore losing more energy as heat. If you have for 15% left on your Deck's battery just turn off charging and play the game directly form the power bank, you'll get more playtime. (I know this was just a test case I'm writing this as general info)
How would you be able to stop charging?
@@raknikmik there's a Decky plugin, called Power tools. It has an option to set the charging stage to idle (stop charging) or you can set a battery percent where it'll stop charging.
I got a GPD Win 4 and ended up with an Omnicharge 20+. I picked it because of its smaller size to go along with the smaller handheld
The main thing is we need new battery technology in general.
not to get into details, but this is very true, the technology has been evolving for larger uses but not in ways that can help electronics.
The Key 🔑 in my opinion will be Solid State Batteries. They have long shelf lives, Safer, lighter , && can be made smaller.
It's an interesting value proposition, these banks seem to run anywhere from $150 to 250. That's definitely an added cost to come a couple that with something like ally or deck .. now you're looking at $ $800+ investment. Becomes an interesting debate if it's worth it over a aptop solution at that point.
Oh well baseaus is $98, or $85. That's obviously a much lower price than 150 but omits ome of the key features
PC handhelds in the coming years won't match the performance of a current $600+ gaming laptop and the screens on the handhelds are simply too small to be productive with. You could try to make the handhelds more productivity friendly by adding a portable monitor, keyboard and mouse but at that point it would be way out of the price range and simply too bulky to lug around, and that kind of setup would not be as compact as a laptop.
@@KashKatana Modularity will be great. A tablet that doubles as a portable screen or even better glasses like the nreal air will open up a lot of possibilities for using handhelds for productivity.
the form factor alone makes it worth it
I’m someone who caps my deck tdp to 9 watts for every game, except emulators sine they don’t draw too much power. I make it work. Spider-Man at 30fps 95 percent of the time, and for almost 3 hours is enough for me. I don’t mind turning down some graphics options. That’s the fun of the steam deck though, you can play it how you want
Thank you for this.
Yep, I make my own for only 15 dollars. The parts are in the micro center!
interesting
Make a TH-cam vid on it or it didn’t happen
the steam deck is the only device that is still the same, and will remain the same over 3-4 years to come ( valve already said so ) in which games are optimized for the platform more and more each day, always receiving updates, features, and feature sets.
i feel like the others, Aya neo, ROG ally etc will all just be passing yearly releases and end up on the shelf with no support as each new model comes out not worth the money imo
I'm not strapping a battery to the back of my handheld device because its already heavy enough. I'm not buying some tiny battery bank that will tap out quickly either.
I'll just use my 100AC Goal Zero Sherpa battery bank with a fast charging USB Type C cable.
Great video - would love to see a follow up with the ROG Ally if you end up purchasing.
Really excellent info. Thanks!
Am also interested in getting my hands on the Aces Rogue Alley
I have the Anker and I love it for my SD bruh. I just stumbled on your content and you def earned a sub.
I feel so happy to see this video cuz when I bout my deck I bout the 737 because it charges really fast and don’t look like a bomb since I fly a lot and the shark geeks don’t look like tsa will like them. Great video though
Ya true, the rogue alley is interesting.
Awesome quality content, keep it up.
Which powerbank and what is the clip called at 0:47?
Question could my storm 2 be defective as when I push the button it does nothing just shows the display lighting up and information I also left the plastic on meaning the one already on it
Never had to worry about battery life on my oled switch
Very well done
You forgot the AokZoe 1A Pro also released this month. And how about the lack of docks with a USB4 connection on the bottom. I have to make my own. So annoying.
now I imagine my cringe self gaming on the go with a tac ammo carriers but instead of mags I have a bunch of storm2 slims~ do these handheld PCs have bypass charging by default??
I wanted to buy the anker battery, but i read in reddit that some have defects and are frying phones
me happily playing pc, switch, psp, ps2 and nintendo DS games on my phone either run locally or streamed from pc over wifi6 for like 8 hours straight XDDD without spending a single penny on a whole another device
The main reason I got the onexplayer 2 is the huge internal battery
as a consumer i actually prefer camera style battery packs,
👍🏾
Very good video, as for a follow up question have you heard of or tested the icemag portable mag safe power bank? It looks really cool but idont see many reviews and the few i do see say it isnt good but it is made by shargeek as well...would really look forward to a review or your two cents very least! Appreciate your videos man ✌🏽
Hey man, I have not tested this yet! But I will keep an eye out
I want High fps and i want 1080P OLED screen.
If all you want is higher specs you should get a PC
A handheld is not enough for you and you are wasting your money
My own experience is that 40 fps is more than enough and that there is a limit to how good an experience is with a small 7 inch screen
This video came out the same day 2 steam decks came 8n stock I gt one luckily its coming soon!
AYA just released the S2 after releasing the Ayaneo 2. Whose to say they won't make a newer model after the S2 once a new cpu is released a few months down the road. They like to make their older models obsolete so fast.
That's just a dumb mindset. It's not obsolete. Buy what you can afford then stop looking.
I agree its not obsolete but they’re a Hardware Company and if theres a new GPU they will make a newer Model,just get what you think will Perform Good for Games
i dont think Valve or Asus will flood the market with a steam deck 2 or RoG ally 2 anytime within the same quarter, let alone charging high prices. We all know these chinese co are just cashing in with high margin when their products go on sale so quick after indiegogo campaign ends. With the Ally coming to storm the market, we know what these handhelds actually worth
@@ounaku not really. Asus and valve can afford to take a heavy loss and that's questionable for asus. All the other manufacturers are showing you the true cost. People just flock to the cheapest though.
they offered upgrade motherboards to those that ordered the Ayanoe 2. Their stuff is very easy to work on due to the fact they layout everything in the device so clean.
with those insane prices i'd rather buy another steam deck and use that when the first one runs out. come on, there's a price ceiling for everything, and these easily break that.
Not to shill, but there are cheaper options that still get the job done just fine like the INIU power banks which barely break $50 and regularly go on sale. The main advantage the power banks here have is their more informative IPS panels, and higher overall output allowing you to theoretically charge multiple demanding devices at once. However, IMO that utility is pretty pointless for handheld PC use, since you would want to funnel all of the bank's power to the PC and nothing else. It would be better to shoot for high capacity, "high enough" PD, and the smallest size possible if you were looking for a companion to a Deck (and, again, INIU has an option that's got the same capacity as the largest bank here that's physically smaller and a 1/3rd of the price).
@@ThePhilosogamer yeah, exactly.
That GOW steam deck is beautiful
Beautifully blurry and low
nice well done
Rogue Alley
What I wanna know is how are people finding the time to play two plus hours of anything on a goddamn handheld?
sorry but, "rogue ali"? ROG Ally?
No Ethernet port
What game at 1:23
Good video
Rogue Alley 😂
I need 6 of these for my ASUS ally
cant take shargeek on planes tho
I appreciate this video a lot. The battery of the Steam Deck really is just a piece of S. (Let's be honest) I will be picking one of those up for sure. Thank you for going so in depth with each one. 🙏
The battery is good, the power needs of x86 chips is the problem. Gotta get creative or go big. I get more battery life out of my Steam Deck playing games like Resident Evil 2 Remake(60FPS, medium settings, interlacing on) than I get out of Tears of the Kingdom on my Switch(which has constant framerate dips, often into the teens).
Edit: forgot to mention, the "go big" part applies to the Win Max 2 7840U I ordered, its 67Wh battery is a lot bigger and should be better for games that demand more juice like 60FPS Elden Ring.
@@nickstarlingch Either way, the battery ends up being an issue.
@@TsDwelling it's an issue if you have unrealistic expectations on reality
@@MrOdaddy2011 When I can literally sit and watch the battery percentage go down while sitting idle....I'd say that's an issue. Quit being ignorant. Valve was forced to design it this way and the external batteries help with it. If you're at home, just play with it either plugged in, or docked and you're fine.
@@nickstarlingch absolute lies and misleading, i have decky loader and mostly game at 40Hz on my SD but my oled switch still easily last much longer , everyone who really own an SD knows how terrible the battery life is despite the customization options
alley? LOL
Okay, I'm gonna get fuckin' slammed for this, but playing less is always an option. Read a book. Listen to music. Listen to an audio book. Take a nap. Or just. . . talk to another human being in person.
I love video games, but they aren't my entire life and identity. There's other shit that I can do. There's other things that I *should* be doing. Limiting screen time isn't a bad thing.
Yeah, when people complain about this I'm like... if you're on a handheld, it's because you're out and about or something. In which case why is 2-4 hours not enough for you?!?
Rouge alley
R.O.G. al·ly
It's not "Alley" it's "A-Lie"
Ha🫢😅 yes I absolutely butchered it there!
No none of these power banks are worth that money bro you aren’t looking good enough
Do you have any recommendations? Im using switch with gulikit powerbank, I wonder if I could find something better.
2 hours that’s it wtf you smoking bro there’s battery banks that last 5 hours not this joke
they probably cost way more and are way bigger
@@juhadexcelsiorno they don’t
@@pikantevim4684 which ones?
Another TH-camr promoting an ad that got their product free anyone can know how a portable charger works without all this extra detail we care for the biggest battery life.
Can you please fix your run-on sentence? I can’t even make sense of your criticism.
@@andrevaca6700 no
@@andrevaca6700 you already know what I was saying is why ur mad
@@pikantevim4684 I actually don’t 😅
@@andrevaca6700 ofc you don’t that’s why you needed me to fix my run on since you saw a run on sentence
Another paid dishonest review…