A few days ago, information appeared on the network that it was possible to install a longer SSD in the Steam Deck than planned. However, such interference may adversely affect the life of the console.

By default, the Steam Deck uses a 30mm SSD, however, players were able to install a 42mm long model with more memory. To do this, I had to move the fixing screw on the motherboard and remove the thermal pad.

According to Valve designer Lawrence Young, who participated in the development of the console, this should not be done. The fact is that larger drives consume more energy and heat up more. And ditching the thermal pad makes things even worse as the console starts to overheat.

“Please, do not do that. The charger chip becomes very hot, so do not move nearby thermal pads. In addition, most M.2 2242 drives use more power and run hotter than the ones the Steam Deck is designed to handle. It may seem that this modification works, but it will significantly reduce the life of your portable PC.‘, Young said.

Note that the console officially supports three SSD options – 64 GB, 256 GB and a faster 512 GB.

Previously, it was reported how you can significantly increase the autonomy of the Steam Deck console.

Rumors are actively attributing huge power consumption up to 600 W and even higher to GeForce RTX 40 video cards. Radeon RX 7000 cards will also consume more than the current generation.

AMD Senior Vice President Sam Naffziger revealed some details about the RDNA 3 architecture and products based on it. He also touched upon the topic of energy consumption.

The demand for gaming and computing performance is increasing, while at the same time the development of technical processes is slowing down quite sharply. Thus, the power level will only increase. We now have a multi-year roadmap with very significant energy efficiency improvements to offset this curve, but the trend is there.

Performance is critical, but even if our designs are more energy efficient, that doesn’t mean we won’t raise power levels if competitors are doing the same. They’ll just have to raise them much higher than us.

Thus, the Radeon RX 7000 line, despite the previously stated 50 percent advantage (over the RX 6000) in power efficiency, will stand out for its high power consumption simply because of the huge performance boost. At the same time, AMD is confident that Nvidia will have to increase power consumption even higher.

For now, the RX 6000 line is more power efficient than the GeForce RTX 30, although the difference isn’t huge. Previously, there were rumors that the top-end RX 7900 XT will consume 450 watts versus 600 watts in the case of the RTX 4090, but so far these are just rumors.

The GeForce GTX 1630 graphics card may hit the market on June 28th. This was announced by the manufacturer of 3D-maps Colorful.

However, the source says that the date may change, and this is quite likely, given that Nvidia has already postponed the launch of the adapter twice.

The GTX 1630 will be the weakest video card from the current Nvidia line if we are talking about new products. Recall that it is based on the TU117 GPU with 512 CUDA cores, has 4 GB of memory and a 64-bit bus.

The performance of such an adapter will be very modest. Previously, there was evidence that the new product will be slower than the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. This means that it will probably be weaker than the latest Intel Arc A380, which is 5-15% behind the GTX 1650.