Steam Deck owners can hook up an external GPU to their handheld PC to supercharge its graphics capabilities, via a clunky workaround, and now that feat has been achieved with AMD’s current flagship graphics card, giving the Deck the power to run games at 4K with high frame rates.
Now, first off, we should make it clear that this method – as demonstrated by ETA Prime on YouTube – involved connecting an ASRock RX 6900 XT OC graphics card directly to the Steam Deck using the M.2 slot.
We’ll come back to the practicalities of that later – in so much that it really isn’t practical, and involves running the OS off the SD Card (and that must be Windows, as SteamOS can’t be installed on an external drive).
Analysis: Messy and impractical, but fun – and a (sort of) glimpse of the future?
While this is an interesting – and let’s face it, fun – experiment, as we mentioned earlier it’s not something that anyone would actually want to do with their Steam Deck because of the army of caveats involved.
Those include needing to ditch the SSD from the Steam Deck – hence having to run the OS as Windows 11 on the SD card – in order to actually plug in the graphics card to the M.2 slot (using an M.2 to PCIe adapter). Oh and let’s not forget, the GPU needs its own separate power supply of course (a 750W Corsair PSU was drafted in on that score).
In short, this is a seriously messy setup, and as we said, more about experimenting with what’s possible with the Steam Deck, rather than what’s realistic. It’s worth noting that UFD Tech has previously done this using a lesser RX 6600 XT GPU on YouTube, as PC Gamer points out, and that ETA Prime did try Nvidia graphics cards, but didn’t have any joy getting them functioning in this fudged setup.
Who knows, maybe the Steam Deck 2 will run with a Thunderbolt port, and indeed folks have already dreamed about a future dock for the sequel handheld which allows for hooking up an external GPU and monitor plus peripherals on your desk, so you could use the Deck as your PC at home (perhaps with a considerably beefier APU inside Valve’s portable next time round).
That kind of flexibility might be pretty cool for those who would be willing to compromise and not have the fastest gaming PC going by any means, but something that could do the job while saving a pile of cash in the process (the only outlay would be the graphics card, of course, and its enclosure).