A prototype of the Ryzen 7 3700U-powered Steam Deck has been sold on eBay and tested
An early Steam Deck prototype, based on a Ryzen 7 3700U processor (Zen+ with Vega GPU), has been tested after being sold through eBay. Manufactured in 2019, three years before the official release of the final model, this prototype initially didn’t work, before a repair to the boot partition made it operational again.
The system was running an early version of SteamOS from 2020. To get it back up and running, testers replaced the SSD. The installation of official SteamOS failed, but that of Bazzite succeeded, despite a portrait mode display making the operation complex.
The prototype incorporates a Ryzen 7 3700U (4 cores / 8 threads, 15W, etched in 12 nm), clearly less powerful and less efficient than the Zen 2 + RDNA 2 APU in the final version of Steam Deck. Performance is limited, notably due to the Vega 10 GPU and 2GB of shared VRAM, compared with 8GB on the commercial version. Some games, such as Counter-Strike, barely run at 3 frames per second.
This prototype shows that Valve was already working with AMD on this project well before its official announcement, and with a different choice of processor at first.
