While Valve claims to have not seen any impact on gaming performance, they may be choosing their words carefully. Sure, the experience may not change much during actual gameplay, but what about load times? They’ll almost certainly be slower on machines with an x2 SSD. 512 GB high-speed NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4 or PCIe Gen 3 x2*)
Some 256GB and 512GB models ship with a PCIe Gen 3 x2 SSD. In our testing, we did not see any impact to gaming performance between x2 and x4.
Valve quietly swapping in cheaper SSDs is particularly noteworthy given the fact that storage capacity is really the only difference between Steam Deck models and the company is charging a fairly hefty premium for the larger SSDs. This revelation also comes amidst Valve going out of their way to warn players not to mod new SSDs into their Decks. Want to know which SSD is in your Steam Deck? Enter Desktop Mode then search for “Device Viewer” in the Applications Menu search bar. Go to Storage Drives, tap the Hard Disk Drive, and in the right panel you’ll see a code for your SSD model. If the code doesn’t have “E13T” somewhere near the end, it’s likely a lower-bandwidth model (thanks to PC Gamer for explaining how to do this). Steam Deck Q3 reservation emails start going out tomorrow (June 30).
