Broken Steam Deck becomes dirt cheap mini PC in creative DIY project

Valve partnered with iFixit to supply parts and repair guides for the Steam Deck handheld console, making most repairs and parts replacements pretty trivial. However, if you do somehow end up with a Steam Deck with broken parts and feel like an easy weekend project, ETA Prime's Steam Deck mini PC is an interesting alternative to restoring the device to its original glory. It's also a handy idea to get a fairly inexpensive desktop mini PC if you can find a parts-bin Steam Deck — on eBay, for instance.

ETA Prime, known for his YouTube reviews of handheld gaming PCs and his recent budget Linux gaming desktop build, bought a disassembled Steam Deck with a broken display from a friend for $100 and an Anbernic handheld gaming console, totalling $142, according to the YouTuber. The YouTuber starts the build with the Steam Deck fortunately already in pieces, meaning he would only need to supply a case and connect it to a power supply. However, ETA Prime goes one step further, adding additional cooling via stick-on aluminium heat sinks — a move that should improve thermals, performance, and acoustics.

Instead of complicating things with a 3D-printed case, ETA Prime simply cut up a piece of thin PVC plastic sheet and mounted the Deck's motherboard and cooling solution to that, ensuring that everything was stable and the port and microSD card slot are easy to reach. ETA Prime did have to add his own SSD storage to the Steam Deck mini PC. He also used what looks like a Cyberize 65 W GaN USB type-C travel charger with an HDMI port and two additional USB type-A ports (curr. $55.90 on Amazon) for power and extra ports, since there was no longer a built-in display.

Booting the Steam Deck mini PC seemed fairly simple, with a press of the power button kicking the fan up to full speed for a moment before things calmed down again and the system launched SteamOS flawlessly. As for performance, the Steam Deck mini PC managed to run Cyberpunk in 900p at as much as 50 FPS. Hades 2 ran at 1080p with frame rates hovering around the 120 FPS mark, while Forza Horizon 5 ran at around 65–90 FPS in 900p with medium settings and FSR set to balanced.

While ETA Prime doesn't mention fan noise in his video, during the game performance testing, there was very little audible fan noise, with the fans seemingly running at a steady state rather than ramping up and down as can be typical in gaming scenarios.

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