Gpd Win 3 Vs Stream Deck

The GPD (Gamepad Digital) Win 3 is a handheld PC manufactured in (you guessed it) Shenzhen, China. Impatient me didn't want to wait for the Steam Deck, so I got this in the meantime. Certain, the Deck starts shipping but a month from now, but I'm in the Q2 category, then for all I know I could be waiting until June.

The GPD Win 3 was launched early last twelvemonth and is the successor to the GPD Win 2 and GPD Win Max. Basically, information technology comes with upgraded hardware, going from an Intel Cadre M3-based processor to Tiger Lake, double the RAM, much larger storage capacity, etc. The third-generation hardware has also been redesigned, going for a Switch-like appearance rather than a super tiny laptop.

While I would have preferred to get with the Aya Neo or even the Onexplayer, prices are outrageous. I got a much better deal getting the GPD.

Specs and Price

I seemed to have been pretty lucky, scoring a used GPD Win 3 on eBay for $900, with a USB-C dock and controller grip (+ $56 taxation) with free shipping. Ordinarily these go for $i,000-one,200:

Even the case itself is selling for an boilerplate of $45, the dock ~$150, and the silicon grip for $16. Talk virtually ouch.

Got it in the postal service 1 calendar week later. Seemed like the seller kept it in pretty good condition; not that many scratches on the screen, no dirt to exist found anywhere. The device was factory reset with Windows x.

The GPD Win 3 comes in 3 different models, based on the CPU: Intel Cadre i5-1135G7, i7-1165G7, and i7-1195G7. I happen to fall in the mid-range category. The i7-1165G7 is a quad-cadre, eight-threaded processor with a base of operations speed of two.8 GHz and a max turbo speed of 4.7 GHz. Ability consumption can be as little as 15 watts or go upwardly to 28 watts. Tiger Lake processors brand utilize of the Xe graphics; far improve than the Intel HD graphics that we were stuck with for a long time.

xvi GB of LPDDR4x RAM is supplied, clocked at 4,266 MHz. LPDDR4x at this speed, peculiarly with integrated graphics, provides a heave when it comes to gaming performance over traditional DDR4. For instance, Counter Strike: Global Offensive renders about 24 FPS faster (1080p, everyman settings) when paired with LPDDR4x, according to Hardware Unboxed. Which is expert news here; we want to squeeze every inch that we can with integrated graphics, since we don't have a discrete GPU. If you lot wanted to upgrade the RAM, I really don't think it's possible; in that location'southward no slots for it on the motherboard and the xvi GB RAM included is soldered on.

one TB NVMe storage is provided, and believe it or non GPD was able to fit in a full-sized Thou.ii bulldoze (2280, rather than the Steam Deck's tiny 2230). Upgrading this hard drive requires taking the tiny Philips screws off the back casing, taking the fan out, unscrewing the spiral that holds the Yard.2 in place, taking it out, and putting the new one in. There'south besides a MicroSD card slot for additional storage. Wi-Fi vi and Bluetooth five are included.

The screen is impact-screen capable and measures 5.5″ across the board; it's the same screen size as the Switch Low-cal. The aspect ratio is sixteen:9, with a resolution of 1280×720 (actually practiced to encounter this, rather than the odd resolution the Deck and other PC handhelds come with). It'due south definitely not anti-glare though.

Sliding the screen upwardly reveals a small keyboard. The keyboard isn't using physical keys; kind of think of the keyboards the Blackberry had, where they are touch-sensitive, with no pressure when touched. Pressing any of the keys produces haptic feedback. After ten seconds or so of inactivity, the keyboard backlights close off. Pressing a key will bring the backlight up again. I definitely wouldn't recommend typing an essay with information technology; it's more then for brief usage, like if y'all wanted a game to go fullscreen with "Alt + Enter" or something along those lines.

For physical connections, in that location is a USB 3.i Type A port on the acme, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a volume rocker, a ability button, and a USB-C port on the bottom. The USB-C port is typically used for charging the device or connecting it to a dock, and information technology also supports Thunderbolt 4. The dock that is typically supplied with the device adds an Ethernet port, three USB 3 ports, a full-size HDMI port, and a USB-C port. Dual speakers for sound output are positioned to the bottom left and the bottom right.

Three batteries are duck-taped together inside the casing. Wikipedia mentions that these are rated at v,000 mAh each, but when I took the device apart I'm pretty certain information technology said three,950. The charger that comes with the device is 65W and can supposedly fully charge the unit in an hr-and-a-half.

Altogether the GPD Win 3 weighs 550 grams (most xx ounces; a piffling over a pound).

Buttons included are the typical ones you lot'd detect in any modern gamepad: twin clickable thumbsticks, a D-pad, 4 face buttons, Select, Start, shoulder buttons and analog triggers. The device comes with dual haptic motors, but at that place's no gyro. There's 2 boosted buttons on the back. There's as well a Guide push (which, for some reason, is labeled as "X") and a fingerprint sensor, simply apparently the fingerprint sensor doesn't work on Linux. There's a slider towards the left where you can seamlessly switch betwixt gamepad mode and a mouse. Gamepad mode works exactly every bit it says; mouse mode makes the correct analog stick act like a mouse. The left shoulder button acts like a left-mouse click, and correct shoulder, right. This is actually pretty useful when y'all're on the desktop and not using Steam BPM.

Experience

Now that the dry out laundry list of specs is over, permit's talk almost the general feel. I mentioned earlier the GPD Win 3 has Windows 10 Dwelling house pre-installed. Of course, I got rid of that and tried ChimeraOS to get every bit shut of a Steam Deck-like experience as possible. Installation went fine. The only thing I really had to practice was create an alsa-base.conf file in /etc/modprobe.d/, add a single line to information technology, so restart the device to get audio working. Give thanks goodness for the Arch Wiki.

Quite a few games I installed. I noticed Halo: MCC ran very well hither: the framerate generally hovered around 60 FPS on original settings. Framerate would dip to as low as xxx if in that location was a busy scene. Nonetheless, Dirt 5 crashed when launching the game. This is a trouble with Intel; not Linux, as even Windows users suffer from the same issue. Hot Wheels Unleashed got into the menus, but would be hitting or miss when going to the motorcar selection bill of fare. Even if I got there, starting a race would inevitably crash the game. I had to force DX11 with -dx11, and then the game was working fine. GRID (2019) would launch, but the screen was only blackness, fifty-fifty though I could hear audio.

Emulation was also hit and miss. Super Smash Bros. Melee suffered from terrible screen tearing. Oddly plenty, running Metroid Prime was a flawless experience. Fifty-fifty after enabling Vsync on Retroarch, the screen tearing was yet axiomatic on Smash Bros., although information technology wasn't equally bad as before.

While running Halo, battery lasted an hour-and-a-half from a full charge. Afterward disabling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, installing the tlp package, limiting the FPS to 30 via MangoHUD, and setting the resolution calibration to 67%, I got double the battery life at iii hours. Non terrible, merely not great either. According to our interview with an anonymous developer, the Deck lasts two-to-five hours on average, depending on the load. So mayhap the bombardment life on the GPD will exist the same as the Deck.

Suspend didn't work nether ChimeraOS. I either had to go along the device on or just shut it downward completely.

Sound can go quite loud on the highest volume. That beingness said, the quality isn't groovy; it sounds like it's coming from a 90s sitcom.

After borking my ChimeraOS install (by running sudo frzr-unlock to unlock the immutable file system, then sudo pacman -Syu to upgrade the packages. Pretty dumb of me to practise that), I went on to endeavour Arch. Installation was also pretty painless here, but I had to utilise the same tweaks as before to get sound working. I also had to correct the screen orientation, every bit it was in portrait mode, and install the touchscreen driver in order to get information technology to work. Then I just installed steamos-compositor-plus so I could get that panel-like experience.

At present there'southward no screen trigger-happy with Super Smash Bros. Melee (maybe Arch had already added an anti-trigger-happy parameter in xorg.conf, whereas ChimeraOS didn't). But the same games that I tried before that crashed produced the same event. F1 2020 but hangs on the main menu indefinitely, even when using DX11. The Curvation Wiki mentions installing the xf86-video-intel bundle to alleviate screen tearing, and for all I know that could probably get rid of the root crusade of and so many of these games crashing, but from what I've been told, the xf86-video-intel driver "destroys functioning on Xe graphics" and would simply exist useful for "older Iris or Intel Hard disk series."

I will say, though, deject gaming via Xbox Game Pass was a great feel. Using Microsoft Edge, the quality while streaming was spectacular. Combined with minimal latency, it felt like I was actually holding a portable Xbox.

Running Hades had the same battery life with the Vulkan backend as playing Halo; 3 hours. Suspend works on the desktop, but subsequently waking the device back up, the keyboard won't piece of work. I institute that hide works ameliorate.

Ergonomics. The thumbsticks are smaller than your typical set up of thumbsticks. They also "stick out" a little flake farther when pushing them. I wouldn't say it detracts from the experience though; for the virtually part they'll get the job done, and you'll become used to it after a while.

That being said, ane thing that I definitely had to adapt to was the right thumbstick existence positioned above the face buttons. Typically they would be located towards the lesser, whether it's a PlayStation, Xbox, or Switch Pro gamepad. It has made inputting smash attacks or air attacks in Smash Bros. a little more than difficult. I would normally have my thumb or my pointer finger on one of the face buttons, then slide my thumb across the correct joystick to get that forward air assault in, but the placement of this thumbstick has fabricated it a bit awkward to adjust to. It will take me some fourth dimension only my brain will probably make the connections after a few more hours.

The D-pad sort of resembles the pad from the DS4, but it's smaller and the private directions are connected rather than being spaced autonomously from each other. Non bad; it's clicky and somewhat mushy at the same fourth dimension, simply once again, gets the job done. Overall the buttons are minor; not groovy for someone like me who has larger easily, but fortunately the controller grip makes the experience a little more comfy.

The ii dorsum buttons are a flake awkwardly placed, and I couldn't figure out how to assign macros to them through Steam. I would probably have to configure third-party software in order to make employ of them.

Desktop experience. With a USB-C dock, you can use the GPD Win 3 like whatever other desktop. You can plug in a keyboard, mouse, and HDMI cable if you wanted to use an external monitor. But even without the dock, the slide-in keyboard and the mouse mode built into the device nevertheless allows navigation and use beyond the desktop. It's definitely not going to offering the same sort of convenience an external mouse and keyboard volition give, but at to the lowest degree it'south something when you lot're on the go or you don't have those peripherals bachelor.

Performance

If y'all've been a long time reader of Boiling Steam, you may have come across my Darter Pro laptop review from System76 last yr. That laptop had the aforementioned processor as this one: the i7-1165G7. As such, we can glean a lot of information going by the benchmarks there. The bones idea is you can run Shadow of the Tomb Raider at an average of 30 FPS at 720p, low settings. F1 2017 ran at an boilerplate of 68 FPS on the lowest settings at the same resolution. The point is, while we used to laugh at Intel for their iGPU performance, they seriously ramped up their efforts starting with Tiger Lake. Still not going to be anywhere near as skillful as AMD'south APUs, but even AAA gaming on the lowest settings is viable, provided the game has a DX11 backend available or information technology'due south natively available on Linux.

While I would accept liked to include a few more than benchmarks hither from other games, those games only didn't run: Horizon Nada Dawn, F1 2020, GRID (2019), etc…Xe graphics merely doesn't seem to fair well with DX12.

On this note, developers are aware of DX12 incompatibility with Intel and have been trying to work on it for over…7 months at present. So this will however probably take a lot more time earlier anything happens.

At that place's also a launch parameter that tin exist used on Intel to utilize a DX12 feature override:

VKD3D_FEATURE_LEVEL=12_0 %command%

Just on the games I tried (particularly Horizon Cipher Dawn), this didn't produce any dissimilar results.

As more and more games these days ship with DX12, work on this outcome is vital. In the meantime, y'all can reference this unofficial spreadsheet of game compatibility with Xe graphics, and use this Mesa pull request to fix the flickering nowadays in some games.

Should You Get It?

No. Hold off until y'all get the Deck. Information technology's cracking to take a portable x86-based organization, but Intel…man. Better iGPU performance over previous generations, yeah, but with a lot of games simply not running, either producing a black screen with audio in the background, hanging indefinitely, or crashing, information technology's not worth information technology. You take to be a fleck peculiar with your game choices. Strength DX11 if possible. Halo: MCC, yep, pretty much any modern AAA racing game with DX12, no.

Ergonomics aren't bad; the buttons and thumbsticks are a bit small, but y'all'll get used to it.

The only reason why I reached three hours of battery life playing Halo was because I had brightness at 10-20%, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth disabled, FPS limited to 30, tlp installed and running in the background, vibration disabled, and resolution scaling set to 0.67. Otherwise, the battery would only final an hour-and-a-half. I'yard hoping we're not going to have to apply the same sort of schematics to the Steam Deck to get the same amount of battery life. Merely I'k pretty sure I'm wrong.

That, and I got this at pretty much a steal at $900, used. That'south over double the cost of the base model Steam Deck, new. Double the price with a smaller screen, lack of gyro, i class lower for RAM, bad game compatibility…

If you really can't expect for the Deck, I'd recommend either getting the Aya Neo or the Onexplayer with the AMD Ryzen processor. Only trouble there is, prices for those wildly vary, but generally toll around $one,500 used on eBay. And then unless you got a lot of dough, concur off until the release of the Steam Deck. Or just get yourself a Switch; many of the aforementioned games available on Steam are available on Nintendo's handheld (particularly indies). You'd just have to buy the games again though.

Yous might desire to check out the post-obit articles besides!

Source: https://boilingsteam.com/gpd-win-3-the-tide-me-over-for-the-steam-deck/

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