A Redditor ‘didn’t know’ about the Steam Deck, so they built their own

By Jacob Roach Published April 23, 2024

The homemade Ryzen Deck sitting on a desk. — Raven0606 / Reddit

It’s hard to imagine that anyone interested in portable gaming hasn’t heard of the Steam Deck, but one Redditor says they “didn’t know” it existed. And because of that, they decided to build their own.

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The 3D-printed contraption comes from Raven0606, who shared images of the completed handheld on the r/SBCGaming subreddit, which is dedicated to handheld emulators. The build took nine months to complete, and Raven0606 dubbed it the Ryzen Deck in honor of the Steam Deck (they found out about Valve’s handheld halfway through the build process).

The Redditor compiled a gallery of images showcasing the build process, including various stages of prototyping that led to the final design. Inside is AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600G APU on a motherboard that Raven0606 says they “looted” from an ASRock DeskMini X300. The buttons and sticks were taken from an Xbox controller, which Raven0606 connected to an Arduino Micro board.

It doesn’t look too far off from the handhelds we have today like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally, at least from the front. Around the rear, however, are two large exhaust fans, as well as a cable connecting the handheld to an external battery. It also weighs 3.44 pounds, which is quite a bit heavier than what you’ll find with mass-produced handhelds.

Fans on the homemade Ryzen Deck. — Raven06060 / Reddit

Raven0606 estimates that the project took over 1,200 hours to complete, spread over nine months. “Felt like a 2nd job,” the Redditor wrote.

There are plenty of Steam Deck mods tp be found, and we’ve even seen some enthusiasts try their hand at building handheld gaming PCs. But it’s rare to see a completed project like the Ryzen Deck that actually works. It works well, too, according to Raven0606. The Redditor says that the APU can run light games at 30 frames per second (fps) in its 28-watt mode, and it can climb up to 65W for games like The Witcher 3. In that title, Raven0606 says they’re able to get between 45 fps and 55 fps.

Battery life isn’t the best, with the 108watthour battery draining in as little as 90 minutes according to Raven0606. Surprisingly, that’s still better than what we’ve seen with some devices, such as the Ayaneo 2s.

This is still a massively impressive piece of kit. Now we just need to wait for the Ryzen Deck 2 — maybe with a Ryzen Z1 Extreme looted from the Lenovo Legion Go?

Former Lead Reporter, PC Hardware

Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…

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