Valve's product designer shuts down the prospect of upgrading your OG LCD Steam Deck with a custom OLED screen
Valve's product designer shuts down the prospect of upgrading your OG LCD Steam Deck with a custom OLED screen
Upgrades to Valve's portable PC gaming handheld are welcome, but can those who bought the first version manually install an OLED screen?
Yeah, speaking as an electronics engineer who's going through a new product release at work, swapping the screen to a different model, never mind a new display technology, means dealing with slightly different MIPI and TCP ribbon cable layouts. Unless you have a separate screen adapter PCB daughter board, that means redoing the track layout on the main board.
So yeah, it sucks a bit for the consumer but it's expected. I'd imagine Valve's engineers tried very hard to find an OLED screen that would work as a drop in replacement. At least they're not making promises they can't keep, which happens a lot: Companies often lie through omission on their spec sheets.
So all it would take is reordering the wires from the ribbon cable?
To me it sounds like it would take having a driver board that can run a different display (and is compatible with the rest of the Deck hardware). Some systems do this by having a ribbon cable from mainboard to the driver board then on to the display
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Following a relatively short wait for a mid-generation refresh, the recent Steam Deck OLED announcement details better battery life, lighter overall weight, and all the visual enhancements that come with this modern display tech.
Contrary to the company's original statements of being "harder than you think" to step away from its traditional 7-inch LCD screen, it seems that graduating the Steam Deck to an OLED alternative was a higher priority for Valve than initially implied.
Self-installed improvements began to surface shortly after the Steam Deck launched, primarily to expand the storage of the affordable entry-level 64GB with an M.2 2230 solid-state hard drive like the Sabrent Rocket, generally up to 1TB (1,000GB.)
With a bit of careful DIY, it is possible to increase the storage capacity and cooling performance of a day-one model, alongside replacing the Steam Deck's LCD screen without destroying it in the process.
However, current owners of a first-edition thinking about upgrading their screen to create a homemade Steam Deck OLED are so far out of luck, as Valve's Product Designer Lawrence Yang pointed out on X (previously Twitter.)
The concept of engineers painstakingly selecting each component inside the Steam Deck to maximize efficiency and prevent overheating is primarily why Valve advised against oversized SSD replacements in the first place.
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