With a number of repair-friendly companies entering the scene, we have gained motivation to dig deeper into devices they build, repurpose them in ways yet unseen, and uncover their secrets. One such secret was recently discovered by [Ayeitsyaboii] on Reddit – turns out, you can use the Steam Deck mainboard as a standalone CPU board for your device, no other parts required aside from cooling.
All you need is a USB-C dock with charging input and USB/video outputs, and you’re set – it doesn’t even need a battery plugged in. In essence, a Steam Deck motherboard is a small computer module with a Ryzen CPU and a hefty GPU! Add a battery if you want it to work in UPS mode, put an SSD or even an external GPU into the M.2 port, attach WiFi antennas for wireless connectivity – there’s a wide range of projects you can build.
Each such finding brings us closer to the future of purple neon lights, where hackers spend their evenings rearranging off-the-shelf devices into gadgets yet unseen. Of course, there’s companies that explicitly want us to hack their devices in such a manner – it’s a bet that Framework made to gain a strong foothold in the hacker community, for instance. This degree of openness is becoming a welcome trend, and it feels like we’re only starting to explore everything we can build – for now, if your Framework’s or SteamDeck’s screen breaks, you always have the option to build something cool with it.
[Via Dexerto]
Not a huge surprise that it works; but nice that Valve didn’t make the BIOS really touchy. You can typically just pull a laptop board and have it work; but the exceptions that have a battery alert that has to be dismissed interactively on every boot(extra credit if you need to press the dismissal key on the internal keyboard only) or other unnecessary fretting are deeply frustrating; and more likely to be too signed to patch out than they used to be.
It’s also not that uncommon for laptop/gadget boards to refuse to boot outright if, say, a battery is missing, or the internal LCD is not detected, or charger is wrong; can even be for EC reasons rather than BIOS reasons.
I have taken apart quite a few laptops, and never once have them refuse to boot because of a missing battery or internal LCD. Dont know how common that is … or I was juts lucky.
If only these were available to buy. Id love to make clamshell/tablet deck.
You can’t get Steamdecks where you live? Pretty sure you can in Poland.
You’d be surprised at how limited the distribution of Steamdeck is directly from Valve. For instance the only way to get one in Australia or New Zealand is from a reseller with an insane markup.
I’d guess the original comment was about getting motherboards standalone
I almost always play on the Deck using Rokid Max AR glasses. At times I also connect a keyboard and mouse via bluetooth. I can definitely see a mini deck in the future with no controllers or screen built in as AR glasses improve.