Steam Deck OLED vs Switch OLED: Is the 2023 Model Worth the Change?
Steam Deck OLED or Switch OLED? We compare price, measured performance and real-world trade-offs to work out which is the better buy.
Tom Halvorsen
The short answer
Steam Deck OLED 3h 40m in demanding titles, Switch OLED 5h 30m in demanding titles — the same test, run the same way. Where they part company is who they suit: the Steam Deck OLED is the one to get if you are anyone with a large Steam library who wants it to just work, the Switch OLED if you are families, and anyone who wants Nintendo games.
Price difference: The Switch OLED undercuts the Steam Deck OLED by £170. That gap only matters if the extras below are ones you will actually use.
Specifications side by side
| Specification | Steam Deck OLED | Switch OLED |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £479 | £309 |
| Our score | 5 / 5 | 4 / 5 |
| Display | 7.4in OLED, 90Hz, 1000 nits HDR | 7in OLED, 60Hz, 400 nits |
| Chip | Custom AMD Zen 2 / RDNA 2 | Nvidia Tegra X1+ |
| RAM | 16GB LPDDR5 | 4GB |
| Storage | 512GB NVMe | 64GB + microSD |
| Weight | 640g | 420g |
| Battery | 50Wh | 4310mAh |
| Play time | 3h 40m in demanding titles | 5h 30m in demanding titles |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent two weeks as the reviewer’s only games machine, across a fixed set of twelve titles. The same twelve games on every device, handhelds at a metered 200 nits, consoles on a calibrated 4K 120Hz OLED.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Play time | Battery life in three demanding titles at default settings, averaged, from full to shutdown. |
| Sustained frame rate | Thirty minutes of continuous play, reporting the 1% low rather than the average. |
| Load time | Cold boot to playable across ten titles, timed to the tenth of a second. |
| Thermals and noise | Surface temperature at the grip and fan noise at 30cm after the sustained run. |
| Power draw | At the wall under load, because it is the running cost nobody quotes. |
We deliberately do not report peak frame rates in menus, and any performance figure from a launch trailer.
The honest caveat: Handheld battery figures assume default power profiles; capping frame rate changes them substantially.
Where the Steam Deck OLED wins
- SteamOS is the only handheld software that does not feel like a desktop in disguise
- The OLED panel and 50Wh battery fixed both complaints about the original
- Fully user-repairable with parts sold openly
It also has the edge on the intangibles: suspend and resume worked on every one of the 40 titles we tried.
Where the Switch OLED wins
- The lightest console here by a clear margin
- An exclusive library nothing else can offer
- The dock makes TV play genuinely effortless
And in day-to-day use, it is the only handheld here a child can comfortably hold for an hour.
The trade-offs
Neither is flawless. The Steam Deck OLED has one clear weak point — raw performance now trails the Windows handhelds — and the Switch OLED has its own: the 2015 silicon shows badly in any third-party port. Weigh those against how you actually work rather than against the spec sheet.
The value case
The Steam Deck OLED costs £170 more and scores 1 point higher — roughly £170 per point of difference. Whether that is good value depends on whether the extra buys you steamOS is the only handheld software that does not feel like a desktop in disguise, or only a number. In our testing it is the former, but only just.
If neither quite fits
Look at the ROG Ally X at £799 — it scored 4 out of 5 and suits players who need Game Pass or a launcher Steam does not cover. If the budget will not stretch, the Xbox Series S at £249 is the cheapest option in this category we would still put our name to.
Living with each of them
On paper the gap looks like a specification difference; in use it is a habits difference. With the Steam Deck OLED the thing you adjust to is raw performance now trails the Windows handhelds, and you do adjust — within a week it stops registering. Its display (7.4in OLED, 90Hz, 1000 nits HDR) is the part you stop thinking about. The Switch OLED asks for a different accommodation: the 2015 silicon shows badly in any third-party port, against a display of 7in OLED, 60Hz, 400 nits that holds up better than the number suggests. Neither compromise is severe. They are simply different, and which one you would rather not think about is a more useful question than which is objectively smaller.
Which one ages better
The Steam Deck OLED is 2 years newer, which usually means 2 more years of security updates at the far end of ownership — the part of the decision nobody weighs at the till and everybody feels at year four. The other half of ageing is the weak point you already know about: raw performance now trails the Windows handhelds on one side, the 2015 silicon shows badly in any third-party port on the other. Weaknesses of that kind do not improve with firmware, so assume you are buying them for the life of the device and price the decision accordingly.
Our recommendation
For most people we would take the Steam Deck OLED, which scored 5 out of 5 in our testing against 4 for the other. That said, a score is a summary, not a substitute for knowing what you need.
Buy the Steam Deck OLED for steamOS is the only handheld software that does not feel like a desktop in disguise. Buy the Switch OLED for the lightest console here by a clear margin.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the gaming we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are Steam Deck OLED vs Xbox Series S: Is the 2023 Model Worth the Change? and Steam Deck OLED vs Xbox Series X: Same Money, Different Priorities.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
