The Steam Deck is pretty dang rad as it is, but one owner dared to dream bigger by connecting it up to a full-size desktop GPU for some really powerful gaming. And look, as awesome as that sounds, this obviously isn’t something that carries any level of practicality. The Steam Deck was and always will be meant for portable PC gaming. In a way that, as Valve CEO Gabe Newell has described it, is how we wished it was possible ten or twenty years ago.
Hooking up the little handheld gaming PC to a desktop GPU not only defeats this purpose, but completely takes away its ability to really go anywhere. All that being said, it’s still quite incredible to see someone digging into the Deck in ways like this. Not to mention when you think about it, this isn’t all that different from gaming laptops that can hook up to external GPU docks. Which is probably at its most basic, the best way to describe what YouTube channel ETA Prime has done for the Deck.
A Steam Deck with a desktop GPU connection does work, but it’s not optimal
You might be seeing this kind of project and scratching your head wondering, “why?” The obvious answer there is, because you can. But ETA Prime’s efforts serve more of a purpose than that. What the Steam Deck might be like if it did have support for eGPU hookups. Which would turn it into a much more versatile machine. Allowing it to be portable in its normal state and a more powerful rig when connected at home.
The really surprising thing is that ETA Prime was not only able to get the GPU connected, but it worked an allowed them to play games via the Steam Deck with better graphics. For the GPU ETA Prime use an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT.
Some games booted and worked perfectly fine. Even allow for 4K graphics and higher frame rates than what the Steam Deck normally allows. But, a whole host of games ended up slowing way down. And this apparently wouldn’t work NVIDIA cards either.
Still, it’s a neat experiment. One that hopefully gets Valve to think about adding this type of feature to a future unit.