$3,000 Steam Deck Prototype Taken Apart — Early Models Featured Discrete GPU Support, Smaller Joysticks, and Circular Touchpads

Okay, so I stumbled upon this wild video where some YouTuber got their paws on a Steam Deck prototype. Imagine a secret gadget no one’s supposed to see yet, but there it was, all naked and exposed on camera. A guy named Jon Bringus from, well, Bringus Studios (because why not use your name twice?) got handed this tech treasure by an X user – who used to be a Twitter user, I think we’re all still figuring that out – called SadlyItsDadley. This Dadley person thought Jon was the ideal guy to uncover this bit of gaming lore. And honestly, seeing it pulled apart bit by bit was oddly satisfying, like peeling the wrapper off a fresh chocolate bar.

Anyway, Jon goes into total teardown mode on his channel – ripping into the Steam Deck piece by piece. Weird thing, though: it had this paper labeled “POC2-34 Control 163.” Proof-of-concept, he said. Number 34. The whole thing felt a bit like a spy movie, you know? Aside from just poking around at its guts, Jon booted up some games. Seeing them run on this early contraption was like watching a baby giraffe take its first wobbly steps.

The look of that thing, though! It was funky! Not like the shiny ones you see now. Huge circular touchpads instead of those neat rectangles, tiny joysticks, and the palm rests – totally different vibe. It was sporting an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U with 8GB RAM, plus some discrete GPU promise. Jon couldn’t get that to work, but hey, whatever. The thing also had a 256GB SSD and Intel Wi-Fi. What a combo, right?

Oh, the SSD was a story itself. Jon cloned it to save its secrets. When he popped the copy in, it booted up with this primitive version of SteamOS, date-stamped back to September 30, 2020. Talk about a blast from the past. But he couldn’t crack into this “official” account labeled ‘34’ – like the almighty door he couldn’t pass through. A mystery locked in time.

And while we’re on history books, Valve kinda kicked off this whole handheld gaming rebirth thing with the Steam Deck, right? Sure, Nintendo’s Switch laid down the road map in 2017, but the Steam Deck got the big players to notice. Asus, Lenovo, MSI – they started crafting their own portable wonders. Everyone wants to game on the go now, it seems. Funny how stuff just catches fire like that.

So yeah, check out Tom’s Hardware if you’re into this sort of tech rabbit hole. They keep up with the latest and greatest. Don’t forget to hit follow or something. Gotta stay in the loop!