Valve is producing a hand held gaming machine called the Steam Deck, pre-orders start tomorrow July 16th

There were many rumors going around about Valve doing a hand held gaming system and finally, Valve has made that official. The Steam Deck is Valve's play into the PC handheld gaming space that seems to be gaining in popularity.

They aren't the first ones to come out with one as likes of Aya and GPD Win are some of the few companies that have produced them. But, Valve's a big name in the PC gaming world and while they didn't have much success with Steam Machines, this might work for them.

Behind the 7" touchscreen sits an AMD Zen 2 CPU with 4 cores and 8 threads with an RDNA 2 GPU with up to 1.6 TFlops of power. It's got 16GB of RAM and you'll have three storage options in a 64GB eMMC, 256GB NVMe, or a 512GB NVMe. All models will have microSD card slots for expansion.

There's a large array of control options and Valve continues to leverage their touchpad controls with two capacitive touch areas on either side of the screen. The placement of the analog sticks is interesting, so we'll have to see how well it works once we get hands on with it. There's also a six-axis gyro for motion control.

The screen has a resolution of 1280x800 and an aspect ratio of 16:10. It's an LCD screen, so not OLED like the upcoming Switch and runs at 60Hz refresh rate with touch.

Valve is stating 2 to 8 hours of gameplay with the 40Whr battery, but knowing handhelds, I'd expect the low range to be the norm. I'm happy to see there's a USB-C port for recharging and you can use it to output up to 8K 60Hz to a TV with it.

You'll be able to pre-order one tomorrow with a December delivery month starting at $399.

I'm kinda of excited about this one and I'll be for sure, ordering one to play around with. I've been thinking of getting a GPD Win, but I'm going to with Steam's offering now that it's official.