Modder Boosts Steam Deck to a Bountiful 32GB RAM
Open link in next tab
Modder Boosts Steam Deck to a Bountiful 32GB RAM
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/modder-boosts-steam-deck-to-a-bountiful-32gb-ram
Some assembly is required
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Intrepid Steam Deck modder Balázs Triszka has shared news of an impressive feat of handheld device enhancement.
In a recent Tweet/X by Triszka (h/t Overclock3D), we see that they managed to boost the Valve-made x86 PC gaming portable to 32 GB of RAM.
Unlike your desktop, and many laptops, the RAM in these devices is soldered directly to the system PCB, like on a graphics card.
Very often hardware needs a firmware modification to enable this kind of upgrade, and this is true of the Steam Deck memory doubling mod.
The Steam Deck is one of the most popular of the new wave of PC gaming handhelds, which is understandable given that it invigorated the segment with a uniquely compelling software / hardware combo in 2022.
But be warned, RAM upgrades like Triszka are far from trivial, with soldering equipment and skills required in abundance.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I believe I had to manually change it. I’ve added a lot of mods as well - this can cause some instabilities but I’ve found a happy balance. I average 25-30 frames on medium settings but as the game isn’t anything fast paced this works well for me.
Is the performance there? I really want to play it on deck but I always just thought it would run at like 10 fps
My max pop city so far is just shy of 100,000. I’d say the average is closer to 25. Frames drop when you scale across the map when you’re quite zoomed out, but not for more than a half second. It’s not the kind of game where I move the camera much - I tend to obsess over certain districts and niche building strategies lmao.
32... that's a sweet split of 16 for the vram and 16 for the ram. Supposing it works well it can completely fix any memory issues with any current games!
I think a lot of people would have wet dreams about opening this hardware further by not soldering the memory to the mainboard, etc.
Already looks pretty easy to upgrade the ssd, which is great. Now create a PC-like standard for this handheld size.
Wont be perfect, but you cpuld theoretically design a case for the framework 13 mainboard and convert it into a handheld. It wont be cheap though.