A Steam Deck with a Radeon RX 6900 XT

Although Valve's Steam Deck portable console has been one of the most intriguing novelties on the market in the last year, it is important to remember that we are talking about a portable video console, designed to be used anywhere, and thus the balance with both flexibility, calculated in size and weight, and the components with which it is built, and on which, of course, its performance depends to move the games from the Steam catalog.

In other words, the Steam Deck's hardware is compliant, it's extremely good for what it is, and, as we've seen in several tests over the previous few months, it's capable of moving some fairly demanding titles with sufficient respect, such is the spectacular Portal. But, of course, we highlight "what it is for," which is that we cannot expect a portable console to have components and performance equivalent to that of a gaming PC, right?

After all, it's possible that it's not entirely true, that modders occasionally surprise us with assemblies worthy of admiration, and that while in practice they are not entirely useful (if at all), they do show us that many things are not impossible, even if we thought so, and that with ingenuity, free time, and a good budget, it is possible to put a Saturn IV rocket engine in a Fiat Panda.

We urge you to view a video that YouTuber ETA PRIME recently posted to his channel. A video in which, as the title suggests, you can see how to connect an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card to a Steam Deck step by step. A technique that is also not overly sophisticated and does not necessitate any manipulation that could harm either the graphics card or the Steam Deck.

And how has he done it? Remember how the Steam Deck includes a PCI-Express M.2 x4 connector? With that as a starting point, we simply need an external eGPU module that allows us to connect the card to the Steam Deck interface. From there, and with a few tweaks, it is possible to play multiple titles in Ultra mode with 4K resolution and graphic settings, something that a standard Steam Deck could never dream of.

Now, it's important to note that, while it works and is entertaining to see, it's not a particularly practical alternative. First and foremost, we sacrifice the console's portability, but more importantly, the performance is not, not even remotely, what we would like. And it is that, given the massive disparity between the GPU and the CPU, the bottleneck is a constant, as we can assume, and we can also confirm it by observing, in the video, that many games do not operate properly, which we can attribute to this performance mismatch.