So I am starting a new job next year which involves a fair amount of travel. Hotel stays, hanging out on job sites, living out of a backpack, etc. I was planning on building a new gaming desktop next year but with this career change I don’t think it is wise to spend a bunch of money on a system that I will only boot up maybe once or twice a week.
Enter handheld gaming.
I am very interested in a handheld gaming device like the steam deck or the ROG ally paired with Xreal glasses. I think that this would be about the best gaming on the go setup while keeping costs reasonable. The biggest conundrum I have is do I go Steam Deck or Ally? I know the Ally is more powerful hardware but the repair ability and SteamOS on the steam deck are sellers for me. Thoughts on this and any suggestions welcome.
The Ally (or lenovo legion) may be capable of higher plugged in performance but on battery they seem to work out similarly. Is that significant - for you to decide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na1y7DyDe2w
i’d suggest to consider
do you plan to do any work on the device; are you going to require windows for that
do the games you want to run, run on Steam OS
For what it’s worth, the steam year in review says my own, this year was 80% steam deck, so you can get a lot of and maybe even most games, (but the other 20% being linux also in my case, selection pressure already evolved out the ones that don’t).
With the steam deck, and nreal/xreal glasses*, - there’s one power port which is the display connector. That might mean you’re only getting 2 hours if you’re playing heavy games, but e.g. movies you’ll be fine with (though, probably not any two of the three lotr movies one after the other).
If you go deck, I’d strongly suggest the oled version if you can (even if you never look at the screen, power use is improved).
if you think to ever want a keyboard, you can use a bluetooth k/m with the glasses but maybe you really want a laptop with a similar-ish igpu at that point (gpd win max 2 say, though that’s more costly).
* if you do this, and can, maybe wait and see reviews for the air 2 glasses - them seem to be just about to be entering the market.