Thirty years within the past, portable avid gamers were “enhancing” the Sport Boy with massive amalgamations of lights, audio system, magnifiers, and adjust extensions to keep the no longer continuously-pocketable instrument roughly the size of a toaster. It’s in that spirit of joyous anti-practicality that YouTube channel ETA PRIME hooked up a corpulent-sized desktop graphics card to the Steam Deck. Yes, it’s precisely as ridiculous and elegant because it sounds.
Whereas the Steam Deck’s USB-C port can output video to its dock accessory, it isn’t a corpulent Thunderbolt port, so it doesn’t work with the semi-standardized external GPU gadgets available on the market. To in discovering around this limitation, ETA PRIME (spotted by Video Sport Tale) cracked originate the Steam Deck’s case and hooked up a PCI extension adapter on to the instrument’s M.2 storage growth port.
To keep that scheme more ridiculous, the 80mm adapter is bigger than double the size of the Steam Deck’s 30mm bay, so it had to be held in subject with double sticky tape. The adapter itself requires external vitality, here equipped by a customary ATX vitality present working rails to both the adapter and the graphics card plugged into it.
Unsurprisingly, the AMD Ryzen APU-basically basically based mostly Steam Deck doesn’t seem to have to play nice with Nvidia desktop playing cards. ETA PRIME examined with a Radeon RX 6900 XT — which is ready twice the size of the Steam Deck even with out the extra connection hardware. Without the internal M.2 storage, Dwelling windows had to be loaded onto a MicroSD card with a USB-C flash power acting as supplementary storage. A USB-C hub was once outdated for mouse and keyboard enter, since in truth fidgeting with the Steam Deck’s rear originate will most likely be much less than wise.
In brief, it works. The RX 6900 XT setup is bottlenecked by the Steam Deck’s APU and the diminutive info bandwidth of the M.2 slot. But even so, benchmarks show conceal roughly 4-5 cases the graphical performance, allowing the exiguous scheme to play The Witcher 3 in 4K at better than 100 frames per second. More recent games admire Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring showed poorer performance, but were soundless severely better than the Steam Deck alone.
Might perhaps well also just soundless you operate a Frankenstein monster of hardware to join a desktop GPU to the Steam Deck? Certainly no longer! Is it fun to glance somebody stop it? You wager! If nothing else, it presentations that Valve would perhaps well well own to favor into consideration enabling customary external GPU toughen on future iterations of the Steam Deck hardware.
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Creator: Michael Crider, Workers Creator
