Valve Releases Steam Deck CAD Files

Valve has released the CAD files for the Steam Deck handheld. Users thus have a 3d model of the outside of the Steam Deck in their hands. They can use it, for example, to inspect the housing, print it in 3D or design accessories for it.

Another option is to design skins using these files. Valve says it will make both .stp, .stl and .dwg files available for broad compatibility. The data is made available under a creative commons license. In that license, Valve states that one may do anything with the files, so long as Valve is referenced as the author of the original files and the material created is not used for commercial purposes. If someone wants to do that, they should contact Valve.

Valve is relatively open with its Steam Deck. For example, it has itself shared a teardown of the handheld and will sell spare parts such as thumbsticks itself. Valve leader Gabe Newell was also relatively open about the upgrade options, including the potential replacement of the SSD. Finally, the first Steam Decks came into the hands of a few YouTubers, who ran benchmarks on them.

The Steam Deck will be a handheld game console that will run SteamOS 3. That’s basically Arch Linux with KDE Plasma 5 as the desktop. By default, however, Steam is shown as an interface. That will be a new interface that should also replace the Big Picture Mode on the desktop application.

The Deck’s apu features a Zen 2 CPU with four cores and eight threads, running at a speed between 2.4 and 3.5GHz. The GPU is based on the RDNA 2 architecture, has eight compute units and runs between 1 and 1.6GHz. According to Valve, the graphics processing power is a maximum of 1.6 Teraflops. On paper, that’s comparable to the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.