Thirty years in the past, transportable players have been “enhancing” the Recreation Boy with huge amalgamations of lights, audio system, magnifiers, and management extensions to make the barely-pocketable system approximately the size of a toaster. It’s in that spirit of joyous anti-practicality that YouTube channel ETA PRIME connected a full-sized desktop graphics card to the Steam Deck. Sure, it’s precisely as ridiculous and great because it sounds.

Whereas the Steam Deck’s USB-C port can output video to its dock accent, it isn’t a full Thunderbolt port, so it doesn’t work with the semi-standardized exterior GPU units available on the market. To get round this limitation, ETA PRIME (noticed by Video Game Chronicle) cracked open the Steam Deck’s case and connected a PCI extension adapter on to the system’s M.2 storage growth port.

To make this much more ridiculous, the 80mm adapter is greater than double the size of the Steam Deck’s 30mm bay, so it needed to be held in place with double sticky tape. The adapter itself requires exterior energy, right here offered by a regular ATX energy provide working rails to each the adapter and the graphics card plugged into it.

Unsurprisingly, the AMD Ryzen APU-based Steam Deck doesn’t appear to wish to play good with Nvidia desktop playing cards. ETA PRIME examined with a Radeon RX 6900 XT — which is about twice the dimensions of the Steam Deck even with out the additional connection {hardware}. With out the inner M.2 storage, Home windows needed to be loaded onto a MicroSD card with a USB-C flash drive appearing as supplementary storage. A USB-C hub was used for mouse and keyboard enter, since really taking part in with the Steam Deck’s rear open could be lower than sensible.

In brief, it really works. The RX 6900 XT setup is bottlenecked by the Steam Deck’s APU and the restricted knowledge bandwidth of the M.2 slot. Besides, benchmarks present roughly 4-5 occasions the graphical efficiency, permitting the tiny gadget to play The Witcher 3 in 4K at greater than 100 frames per second. Newer video games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring confirmed poorer efficiency, however have been nonetheless significantly higher than the Steam Deck alone.

Must you create a Frankenstein monster of {hardware} to attach a desktop GPU to the Steam Deck? After all not! Is it enjoyable to observe somebody obtain it? You guess! If nothing else, it reveals that Valve may wish to contemplate enabling customary exterior GPU assist on future iterations of the Steam Deck {hardware}.