Define affordable, and also what you want out of it, 4K? High framerates? 1080p?
In general I'd say, unless you're willing and able to spend 7-800+, the steam deck is giving you the best value to performance for "out of the box"/prebuilt.
If you want something better with any hope of approaching the price point of a steam deck you'll have to build your own PC
Yeah, you have to define affordable. For some, that's $300, others $3000.
Quick answer is just go to pcpartpicker.com and look at other people's builds for your budget.
Bang for your buck... Just go midrange AMD cpu, don't worry about core count. Most games aren't cpu bottlenecked like they used to be.
Motherboard, just grab a reliable brand, don't overspend.
16gb ram, speed won't matter much and it's not that much more than 8gb.
1tb m.2 ssd drive. You can always get more storage later
Cheap case, good quality power supply probably 600 watt would get 90% use cases.
Don't forget to budget for windows or use Linux if you go that path, your monitor, mouse/keyboard, speakers or headphones.
After all that, than buy the highest end graphics card left in your budget.
While this is certainly in self-build territory, Logical Increments does a real good job giving balanced builds for various price points. People new to building often don't know how much to spend on a CPU vs GPU to get the best value out of a given build cost.
I’m mildly suspicious of how rarely it recommends AMD cpus.
Yeah, with the Intel 13th and 14th gen issues, it really shouldn't be recommending them as much. I think part of the issue is they only have one CPU vendor per tier. If they improved that, it would probably fix the issue. That said, if we are going purely off price/power, I'm not convinced their choices are bad.
For a beginner though, I really don't like just shoving them at PC Part Picker. It's too easy to get overwhelmed with choices.
At least it recommends almost exclusively AMD GPUs
Also don't go Asus. So much drama with their poor quality and customer service as of late. Gamers nexus and others have videos that go into detail.
And the advice here is perfect, exactly what I do when I build a budget machine for someone.
If you're looking for the best bang for your buck nothing beats assembling it yourself. A pre-built is always much more expensive to pay for assembly.
That's not "out of the box" though
You'll need to define a budget for "really affordable", but it's going to be hard regardless to match the price performance of the deck. Is $700-$1000 affordable? That's probably the ball park for a mid-tier prebuilt. You maybe be able to get lower with an Intel Arc option (HP has some of these at $600)
If you're looking for "maybe slightly higher specs than the Steam Deck", a good APU solution will get you there on the cheap. In particular, the 5000 series APUs are pushing 50% off in most places, because they're the last entry in a socket type which has already been replaced.
The challenge will be finding a pre-built that takes advantage of these facts, so you may do best either using a website that lets you define the parts you want and then builds the PC for you, or walking into a local PC shop and asking them the same question followed with "I've heard that Ryzen APUs are surprisingly good for gaming and affordable right now".
With budget pre builts, you’re usually sacrificing performance to an extent of cheap power supplys (that can blow up) and a tier or two lesser graphics unit for the same price as you would building it yourself.
Honestly, if you’re happy with the performance the steam deck provides then you should stick with that long enough to either realize your need for a purpose built desktop, or put it in a gen 2 steam deck down the road.
Everybody in a PC community is going to go to "build your own" by default, but it really isn't the only option.
It is true you won't match the price-to-performance on the Deck, but if you're willing to go a bit higher you can try a few things. For one, you can try to buy used. I would like to see a PC in person before I do that, but there may be options, depending on where you live. The good news is that upgrading from a Steam Deck anything with a dedicated GPU should be a nice boost in performance, so you can go for entry level or older desktop parts. If you don't mind a bit of bulk or have a convenient place to stash it you can also skip the whole mini-PC space, which is typically sold at a premium, and just buy a big old tower.
And then there's laptops. Used laptops devaluate a lot, which means you can find decent entry-level laptops with 30 series GPUs that will still outperform the Deck by a lot for a few hunderd bucks. Again, I'd like to look at one of those before I buy, but if you don't care about the screen quality or the cosmetics there are some affordable used options out there. Just... check the noise when gaming, because some of those sound like a hair dryer on high power mode.
As others have said, it depends on your budget and specific use case, but if you're using a handheld as a console attached to a screen you should be able to cobble something more functional together. Just maybe not as hassle-free or reliable.
Definitely agree on the used idea. Ebay is full of used previous gen parts at great prices (stick with sellers with a deep history of 99% and higher feedback, avoid those with accounts less than a year old and/or single digit feedback. Avoid single digit sellers with suspiciously cheap prices for recent hardware like the plague - these are likely scammers.)
Personally, I'd avoid laptops if gaming is your primary interest. Performance does lag behind similar spec desktops, but more importantly, if something that isn't ram or a storage drive breaks on a laptop, the whole machine is probably done. Not necessarily because the whole machine is unusable, but many if not most repair parts are model specific and can cost more than the laptop did.
Desktops can be repaired and upgraded per assembly, which makes them pretty kind to your wallet if gaming on a budget. I just scored an excellent condition 1080ti for around $150, and I know with absolute certainty that very robust off lease workstations from a few generations back can be had for $200-ish or less if you know what you're looking for. Pair them with that 1080ti and you've got some decently capable hardware to play with!
I've got several gaming machines that I use to run everything from old stuff to heavily modded Skyrim VR and many new titles, and I pretty much only buy storage amd cables new. Everything else is purchased used on Ebay.
As cm0002 said, you need to define your budget first. With that you can start looking around. You can find a more capable system than the SteamDeck second hand.
For a new system, look for a System Integrator that offers warranty. Usually local PC stores offer this kind of service.
You could go for the 8600G/8700G APUs without a graphics card. This should give you better performance than the Steam Deck and the option to later add a graphics card.
I've added a screenshot of a german shop that sells these for 649€ without operating system:
I did not find any pre-built PCs with this CPU, that's why I'm referring to this shop that does the assembly for the customer.
Imo your best bet is to see if you can find someone else's used gaming computer.
Roughly ~400$ gets you pretty far for hardware 3-5 years old
The energy efficiency will be much worse, so depending on how much you use it you may want to account for that and get slightly newer.
In my personal experience look start in amd's Am4 platform, as it's quite upgradable up to a 5800x3d.
But to start something like a 2700x or 3700x are solid cpus.
Equivalent Intel cpus are an option too.
As for gpus look for 1000s series nvidia 1070-1080 and onwards. Less than might be too weak.
Similar for amd. Vega 56/64, 5700xt etc.
Huh the 1080ti came out 7 years ago, so I was a bit off.
The short answer is no.
The long answer is, you might, just might be able to approach slightly higher specs than a Deck for the same cost if you do a custom build, assemble it yourself and get some wild deals or get lucky with a used but still good component.
Old Dell workstation. You probably won't be able to play anything from the last 10 years, but other than that you can probably play it. Those old workstations are like $150 USD usually, sometimes $200.
EDIT: Didnt see you mention you already have a Steam Deck. For something comparable, you will probably end up paying the same or only slightly less, not worth it IMO. Just stay on Steam Deck for now.
Regardless of budget, I have found the following setup has afforded me all the comfort upsides of mobility and console gaming, with none of the performance downsides.
Build a standard desktop gaming pc to your budget, setting aside ~$150, give or take.
Make sure it's wired into your network and not using wifi. Setup Steam on it as usual.
3a. (Console experience) Buy a Google TV with Chromecast, or whatever it's called now. Install Steam Link app on it and connect it to your gaming pc. Get a Bluetooth compatible Xbox controller, connect it to the chromecast. Enjoy a console experience with your gaming pc. If you have the chromecast on a wired ethernet lime you'll have maybe 1ms of input lag, very playable.
3b. (Laptop experience), buy a dirt cheap laptop, install steam on it, use Steam Streaming fu ctionaloty to stream from gaming pc to laptop. If you plug the laptop into ethernet you should have sub 1ms input lag.
This let's you get all the horsepower of a gaming pc, at gaming pc hardware prices, but the portability of a laptop and/or couch gaming comfort of a console.
And since it's all centralized to your 1 "server" machine, of you make changes in setup A (ie change am in game setting or etc), it'll persist even if you swap over.
IE if I change my settings or preferences on the console, I'll persist that over on my laptop and won't have to change it again.
Furthermore no network save game synching needed, no waiting for a game to download a second time, no need to update the fane multiple times, etc.
It's all centralized to your own core machine and everything else is just a thin client.
PS: this works with the Steam Deck too, you can stream from gaming pc to steam deck and use it as a thin client 👍
Dock + big ass fan directed at steam deck vents + overclock the steam deck?
Its possible to find pre-built that are decent value. Browsing through newegg just now, there are some for ~$800 with a 4060, which is not a terrible value. Just do some research, see what CPU and GPU are good values and available already built. Also you'll want to determine whether you want ray-tracing, and to focus on getting an Nvidia GPU if you do. Just try to read the descriptions to make sure you get all the features you want, some motherboards on prebuilds are the bare minimum, so no wifi or bt like my example, which apparently comes with a wifi usb adapter lmaoo.
I've always built my own PCs. And from my experience, it's worth not to be cheap on the parts. There is always a sweet spot or a special offer and the biggest task is to find it for each part.
If you're going to be cheap, you'll build a PC that lasts ~2 years.
The long answer is there are steam deck alternatives that can dual boot something like Bazzite (Steam OS), and windows, and they will work for desktop use if you don't want to buy a nuc or build a regular desktop. You'll have all the usefulness of the steam deck with the option to use windows.
But dual boot is still clunky, and the devices you would buy for this purpose are still generally more expensive than a steam deck (Legion Go or ROG Ally etc). When you add in the price of a dock, and other accessories (mouse and keyboard etc) I don't know if it's worth it except in niche use cases like my own. I use the Bazzite OS on my Legion Go 90% of the time. But for the 6-7 games I own that aren't compatible or optimized for steam os, I use windows. I had to debloat and change a lot of privacy settings and upgrade the windows 11 OS to Pro to get policy editor etc. That's a lot of time investment. I also bought a 2 TB drive and cloned it. All told I probably spent around the same amount as you would for a regular desktop (even with buying the Legion Go and other parts for my setup on Labor Day sale).
Losing the windows 11 secure boot and encryption means you won't be able to play certain games that require anti-cheat that relies on secure boot.
I think ROG may be coming out with the next iteration of the Ally soon and that might drop the price of the current models but nobody can make any promises on that.
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