The Steam Deck can have its storage expanded with MicroSD cards, which are also used with the Nintendo Switch. It's not clear that the speed of the memory used in the Steam Deck is the same, but given its limits based on its PCIe support alone the picture doesn't look great.

These were notoriously slow for even simple computing tasks, which lead some reviewers, such as WindowsCentral, to suggest spending more for the faster memory.

Microsoft's Surface Go, its cheaper alternative to the Surface Pro, also features eMMC storage for its cheapest models. This isn't a new problem to portable devices, either. For modern games that are being developed with the assumption of faster memory will become common soon (spurred on by the move to new consoles, with both the Xbox Series X|S and PS5 having extremely fast SSDs) the cheapest Steam Deck might be quickly hindered by its storage if you're playing any games that are either large sandboxes or graphically demanding. By comparison, the other two models have a theoretical throughput of 4GB/s, or around eight times faster. That has a dramatically different effect on the speed at which the Steam Deck's CPU can access assets on your drive, which can hinder the performance of games where those matters.įor context, the maximum theoretical throughput of the eMMC 64GB model is 500MB/s, according to the official PCIe specifications. The NVMe versions run across PCIe Gen3, with four lanes associated for storage alone. Worse yet, this storage is only PCIe Gen2 compatible, with only a single lane dedicated to the storage. What isn't is the cheapest model, which uses eMMC storage. Now Playing: Valve's Steam Deck: Are We Excited For It? By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's

Steam deck 64 gb