Valve has just dropped a new flavor of its acclaimed handheld, with the new white Steam Deck OLED transforming the previously all-black gaming device into a classy white and gray model. Despite being ostensibly the same device, but with a different colored shell, the result looks strikingly different from the original device, with the white heavily contrasting against the black screen.
This isn't the first white handheld, of course. The Asus ROG Ally is already available in white as standard, as are some other devices, but Valve doesn't often venture outside the Model T Ford color scheme for the Steam Deck, and we love to see it. As we found in our Steam Deck OLED review, this device's amazing screen, and use of SteamOS rather than Windows, makes it the best handheld gaming PC right now, even if other devices have more processing power available.
The white Steam Deck OLED release date is Monday, November 18, 2024, when it will be released worldwide in limited quantities.
The white Steam Deck OLED price is $679, which is $30 more than the standard black model with the same spec. The white model also comes with some accessories included in the bundle, such as a matching white carry case and white cleaning cloth.
These are the white Steam Deck OLED specifications:
There's a warning here, though, which is that Valve says the white Steam Deck OLED is a limited edition device, and it doesn't look like more are coming after the first run. "This is a Limited Edition!" says the company, "once we're out, we're out." Accordingly, Valve says it's only allowing each customer to buy one unit, and only to people who've made at least one Steam purchase before November 2024.
Each region will be allocated a certain amount of separate stock, rather than it just being one big pool, meaning the US, Canada, UK, EU, and Australia will all get a batch of the new white Steam Decks.
In terms of performance, the white Steam Deck OLED specs are identical to those of the 1TB black model. This gives you a 1TB NVMe SSD, so you get a decent amount of storage space for games, and you also get the acclaimed 7.4-inch OLED screen, which has a 1,280 x 800 resolution.
Meanwhile, the CPU and GPU are the same as the base Steam Deck model, with a quad-core AMD Ryzen Zen 2 CPU and an AMD Radeon RDNA 2 GPU containing eight compute units. The OLED models come with faster RAM than the base models, though, with 16GB of 6,400MT/s LPDDR5 memory, which helps performance, as this RAM is also used as VRAM by the GPU.
Valve has dipped its toe into the different color waters before, releasing a smoky translucent Steam Deck OLED earlier, which it describes as "an experiment to find out if there was interest in alternative colorways (there was!)." This new white Steam Deck OLED model is also a bit of an experiment along those lines, with Valve saying that it's "curious to see what the response is," adding that it "will use what we learn to inform future decisions about any potential new color variants down the line."
Basically, if this white Steam Deck OLED sells out quickly, it's likely that Valve will produce the Steam Deck 2 in both black and white variants, with possibly other color variations as well.
If you're looking for more power than the Steam Deck, check out our Asus ROG Ally X review, as well as our Lenovo Legion Go review, where we test these high-powered Windows handhelds. If you already own a Deck, make sure you also read our guide to the best microSD for Steam Deck, where we take you through our favorite options for expanding your storage.