This $300 “Steam Deck” is AWFUL

Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This $300 “Steam Deck” is AWFUL”.
Inside this box is a cheaper and better version of the Steam Deck, or at least that’s the pitch.. Now it is a good pitch. $ 300 running SteamOS AMD processor. I mean what’s not to like Well ( needle scratching ), maybe a couple of things.. This is the Ayaneo Next Lite.. Now this got announced a couple months ago and as soon as I saw it, I was like “.

Oh my God, I got ta get my hands on one of these things, ,”, because it is a really really cool device.. Now it’s not running SteamOS exactly.. Instead, it is running the open source version, which is Holo OS ( bell dinging ), which is largely the same, but this is one of the first non-Steam Deck devices to actually ship with a version of SteamOS.. Now, since this is shipped they’ve changed their story just a little bit., It no longer ships with Holo OS pre-installed.. Instead, it runs Windows 11, which is nice to have. But if you want to install SteamOS, you can download it from their site and supposedly it is fully supported drivers all that kind of stuff which I will definitely be doing.. The other thing that’s changed since they announced this is the price.. So you remember that $ 300 very, very compelling value proposition. Well, they sold them at $ 300, 100 of them, and then they upped the price to 350 for everyone else, but considering that they have not been able to keep this in stock over the last couple of weeks as it’s actually gone on sale. I’M very curious to try this because even at $ 350 that is still cheaper than all, but the absolute most basic version of the Steam Deck, which only comes with 64 gigs of storage.. With 512 of this, this is actually like a usable kit right out of the box., I’m very excited, but is this even worth considering compared to a Steam Deck or something like an ROG Ally which is now being discounted as low as 400 bucks? Well, it’s only one way to find out.

( knife clicking ) ( screen whooshing ), (, Austin, chuckling, ), “, Real gamers, know gamers.” Yeah., (, quirky, music, ), Oh ( duck quacking ) son., That is pastel blue. Ooh. Okay, I was highly unsure about the color.. So this comes in white, which actually has the neat like orange sort of highlights black as well as this pastel blue..

Oh, my god that is mm. ( lips, smacking, ), (, soft music ). That looks so good. Now I’ll say that, while the Steam Deck is a very nice piece of hardware, I’ve always thought it’s too wide.

Like it’s just too physically big., Not only in your hands. I just think it’s okay, but just the fact that this thing will take up like half a backpack, at least with the Ayaneo. It is a little bit more compact.. It doesn’t have quite the same sort of sculpted grips, but the weight feels okay enough.

That I think this would be okay for a while. ( screen, whooshing ). So when it comes to running Windows on the Ayaneo, I have some thoughts. Um. Let’S talk about specs first, because when you’re talking about 300 $ 350, you expect some sacrifices in the spec department.. That is absolutely what we see here. So, first and foremost, is the display.. It’S fine! It’S a 1280 by 800 7 inch panel, pretty much the exact same as what you would get with the original Steam Deck, which means that it is acceptable.

The resolution’s fine.. It doesn’t look great in Windows just because, even though you’ve scaled a little bit everything’s a little bit blurry but for games totally fine.. I think the spot. That’S a little bit more of a compromise.

( chuckles ) are with the specs.. So, on the surface, this is very similar to a Steam Deck.. They both got an AMD Ryzen-based CPU. So this is using the Ryzen 5 4500U, which is technically slightly better than the Steam Deck, because it’s a six-core processor instead of four and they’re, both based on the same Zen 2 architecture.

But then it starts to get a little bit tricky.. Now they did do a good job of outfitting this with 16 gigs of ram I’ll, give Ayaneo that. They could skimped out, they did not there, so it does match the Steam Deck.. However, when you go to the graphics well, these are significantly older graphics..

So because this is the 4500U, this is before the RDNA. 2 graphics showed up., So these are still the Vega graphics, which were fine for a integrated laptop GPU from 2019. But when it comes to playing games on this, I suspect we will have some issues, especially when it comes to AAA titles., But before we go too deep, let’s actually go and do some gaming on Windows right, outta the box and see how well this holds up And then we can decide is SteamOS the answer that we need, Or should we have just bought a Steam Deck or an ROG Ally or Legion, Go or an MSI Claw ( text, whooshing, ), (, soft, music, ) or Nintendo Switch OLED Or Game Boy Advance, SP, ( screen whooshing ), So we’re gon na try a couple of games. Here.

We’re gon na start out with “ Cyberpunk.” “ Cyberpunk” is a game that runs acceptably. Well, I would say, on a Steam Deck., It’s not a great experience, but it’s fine., Something else I’ll say about this running Windows, specifically it’s kind of slow. Now part of it is because it is running that Ryzen processor, which is significantly behind which you would get In something like the ROG Ally.

And because it’s running Windows, it’s not as smooth an experience as it is on SteamOS, which feels very well-optimized.. What’S going on right now, I couldn’t tell you, but look, I’m gon na be real.. This is not gon na, be a good experience.. There’S zero shot. It’S gon na be a good experience..

I’M gon na give it the best possible shot., I’m gon na run it at potato quality.. Oh snap, wait is that actually 39 FPS ( soft dance, music, ) ( table thumping ) Huh Wait. That’S not awful. 46 average FPS with a minimum of 36..

That’S actually not terrible.. Let’S try “ Forza ,”, because we actually, we might be onto something here.. I was expected this to like gim me, like 15 FPS. Now, “ Forza” is a game that is pretty well-optimized.. I think we will be able to get a pretty solid, lock 30 FPS in the game..

I don’t actually think it’ll be that difficult.. That being said, we’re definitely burning through this battery. Right now, we’re already down to 79 %.

We were at 95 15 minutes ago, ( soft dance, music ). If, even like we’re almost doing like a percent of the battery per minute, which I guess is not way worse than Steam Deck but Steam Deck usually gives you even like the original like base Steam Deck, it will still usually give you close to like two two And a half hours in most games., This is looking like, maybe an hour and a half. If I had to take a guess, Damn dude, this thing is cranking.

CPU GPU RAM, all 100 %, I’m changing my settings, but okay, sure why not Okay, so everything’s set to low. So let’s do a quick, benchmark. ( table, thumping ) Did it crash. I was trying to say something nice., I regret my decisions. And it’s actually gon na run the benchmark. Now..

That’S weird. I had to restart the game for the benchmark to load.. Okay, whatever. Yeah we’re at 40 FPS. So it’s not brilliant.. I would like to see a little bit higher and the image quality is poor., We’re throwing everything we can at this to get the best experience possible and it is topping out in the 40 to 45 FPS range, but where this becomes far more interesting, I hope Is when you load up a copy of SteamOS, AKA HoloISO and get that sweet, sweet Steam Deck on a budget experience? Or so I hope.? Let’S actually do that now and ( chuckles ) get rid of Windows ,’cause. This is not great.

( screen, whooshing ). So there’s been a couple of weeks since we unboxed the Ayaneo Next Lite and boy. Oh boy, do I have some lovely updates for you., So while Windows is fine, you know the main reason why I really wanted to try. This is not only the price, but also the fact that you can run Steam OS asterisk..

Well. So when you go to the Ayaneo site and you go to their support, page you’ll see that there’s like BIOS and drivers and stuff and then you’ll see the HoloISO image and tutorial. Lovely.. What happens when we hit download? Well, it takes you to a Google Drive link which wait it works now.

Oh, it works now. Oh.. They opened up.

(, bright music, ) ( table thumping ). So, for the last two and a half weeks, we’ve been waiting for them to give us access to download this.. Now you can actually grab it from the site..

Now I’m going to try to follow these expert tutorials and install this on my Ayaneo. I wan na see if this is officially supported by HoloISO/SteamOS-ish.. What can I actually get out of it? “ No ISO or supported files.

Found.” ( soft music, ) ( Austin sighing ). I will be back after trying to remake my flash drive and see if somehow that will work ,’cause. This is a whole bunch of not working right.

Now. ( screen whooshing ), One more time, one more time. Boot in normal mode, so I’m gon na go through the process again.. We now have two flash drives installed: ( button clicking ), one of which has our Clonezilla, which is what we’re going to use to copy HoloISO to the internal drive..

Did they tell us to do this? No, they didn’t, but I’m not sure how else would do it so we’re gon na give it a shot. There’s no way to mount the subdirectory. ( buttons clicking ). Well I’ll, do it anyway.? No, I can’t it cannot do it.. I can just tell it. I don’t care how it’s not mountable. Just do it anyway.. I will say I am not on the tutorial at all..

None of this is it’s like “, Hey hit the button and go for it. My dude.” ( soft music ) Things are happening now., So we are currently cloning. Theoretically HoloISO from our flash drive onto our SSD.. I think I’m copying the right thing. Maybe possibly. The instructions are about 50 % of what you actually need to do here.

So there’s a lot of filling in the blanks where … (, chuckles nervously, ), Almost there., That is 69 % completion.. Hmm, it sees 500 gigabyte SSD and it has 258 gigs in use.. That’S not right.. It says it is gon na take two and a half hours to confirm that the disk has been written to correctly. Three minutes to install two and a half hours to verify.

Okay.. Whatever just happened, I’m pretty sure. It’S not right. I’ll, see you tomorrow when we inevitably fall deeper into the rabbit hole of this lovely, lovely, device., ( screen whooshing ).

It is 4:58, my friends and I think, we’ve done it. So after some fiddling rebuilding the USB ,’cause. At one point, we accidentally overwrote an image onto our flash drive instead of the SSD. I think we’ve installed something..

So, let’s find out, shall we Ooh booting SteamOS? Oh snap, Yo, let’s go ( Austin cackling ) (, dramatic, music, ), Um …. You saw that right. You saw when the logo was there and it said: “ SteamOS ?” See you tomorrow. ( Austin wailing ) ( screen whooshing ), So I’ve been informed that it is time to try again..

Do you wan na gim me any context at all No.? Did you do anything to it? ( soft music, ) [ Alex ] You’ll find out.. Oh hey, Something’s happening., It’s in Chinese, but something’s, happening., Guess I’ll. Let it verify for a little while and we’ll see if I’ve finally hit the jackpot or whether I’m gon na drop. This thing on the floor put it back where it belongs., As you can see, SteamOS is up and running.. However, that’s about it., So there are immediately some problems. I see here., First and foremost, these buttons on the side.

Don’T do anything, so I can’t actually open my little like Steam menu.. I can open up the left menu like open settings and that kind of stuff. It does say that there’s a software update., I don’t trust that.. Otherwise, though this does largely seem to work. The brightness works.

Audio. Everything like at first glance seems to be fine, but well there’s a little problem and that it is stuck. I think, at like 100 % max speed., Listen to the fan. ( fan blowing ). It’S just doing that and also blowing out very hot air.

All the time., It’s as if it’s gaming except it’s not., So I have some thoughts as I’m sure you could tell by the hours and hours we’ve spent to try to get to this point. But let’s give this a fair, try and play a game is what I would say if I had enough space to install anything besides “ CS2 ,”, because somehow, during the very lengthy install process, we have only formatted this as 97 gigabytes.. Why is it 97 gigabytes? ( duck quacking ). If I know but honestly at this point I just wan na see it do a thing.

Now, as you might have imagined, “ CS2 ,”, not exactly a great game to play on a Steam Deck or a portable device. So I’m gon na be using a mouse and keyboard. ( Matt chuckling ), Look …, (, Austin, babbling ), So for context for only $ 50 more than this Ayaneo I can get an actual Steam Deck.. This is the LCD model, a 256 gig model. So just keep mind. This is $ 400.. This is what I’m, comparing it to.

All right, let’s hop in here and okay, that’s some of the frames.. Now. Can I pull up? Oh boy, I’m getting 42 FPS.. It looks okay, actually. Ooh, the stutters are real.. Now would I get more performance if I had spent an hour processing, shaders Probably., [, Matt, ], Hey, you know what you should do is turn up the TDP on that. ( gun popping ), Oh yeah. I can’t do that.. I’M sniping with my pistol.

[ Matt. ] Okay. About the only nice thing I can say is that we have an actual game running in HoloISO on our Ayaneo.. That’S literally the only nice thing I can say. Okay. But can I ask a big philosophical question about this? Please do.: If you can’t get into the Steam Deck settings Yeah., Then what is the point of the OS? Because otherwise this is just Big Picture.

Mode. Yeah you’re not wrong, except is a lot more work and I’ve somehow lost 4/5 of my SSD space and several weeks off my life expectancy.. The idea of a $ 300 Steam Deck competitor running actual SteamOS sounds great.. I don’t mind the hardware..

I don’t even mind a lot of the cutbacks and the fact that it’s got 16 gigs of RAM and a big SSD.. That’S all great! That’S really really good stuff, but the Steam Deck exists, and while it’s yes slightly more expensive, not really, especially if you’re really looking for something on a budget, you can find yourself a used Steam Deck and maybe even upgrade yourself for around the same price as we Bought this new and this one surprise, surprise works.! Thank you very much for watching., Don’t buy this Ayaneo. Ayaneo. If you’re watching this video fix HoloISO the end. ( voice, echoing ) ( rhythmic, music, ), Alex hasn’t slept in weeks. [ Alex ]. It was the worst handheld experience. I’Ve ever had .