How to pre-order a Steam Deck — pick one up today

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The Steam Deck is up for pre-order today at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST.

Steam deck
(Image credit: Valve)

Surprise! Valve’s Steam Deck is set to take on the Nintendo Switch and you can pre-order one today.

Announced on the same day as the Nintendo Switch OLED model became available for pre-order (the timing is far too convenient), the Steam Deck is an AMD-powered portable gaming PC and you can secure your pre-order at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST today.

Darragh Murphy put a good case forward for why the Nintendo Switch Pro may still happen, but none of us expected it to come from Valve! This brand new handheld comes packed with a custom AMD CPU with eight RDNA 2 compute units, 16GB LPDDR5 RAM and either 64GB, 256GB and 512GB of storage.

All of this power equates to 1.6 teraflops of performance — just 0.2 shy of the 1.8 found in the PS4. Targeted at the lower resolution of the 7-inch 1280 x 800 pixel display, this means the latest AAA titles are able to run at the full 60Hz or really close to it.

Pre-order the Steam Deck

The pre-ordering system for Steam Deck is running solely through Steam, starting today at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST.

To avoid unauthorized reselling, Valve has put three measures in place. Firstly, a Steam account is required. Secondly, there is a reservation fee of $5 USD or £4 GBP. And third, for the first 48 hours of pre-orders going live, only accounts with a Steam purchase prior to June 2021 will be able to reserve one.

If you fit the criteria, go ahead and add it to your wishlist and setup notifications to pre-order one!

Pre-order the Steam Deck: reservation fee $5 / £4

Pre-order the Steam Deck: reservation fee $5 / £4
The Steam Deck starts at $399 (£399) with 64GB eMMC storage, $529 (£459) for a 256GB NVMe SSD, or $649 (£569) for the 512GB model that comes with “premium anti-glare etched glass.”

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Pro tip: make sure your account details are up to date!

Here's a little advice from someone who knows a thing or two about making sure you're in and out of a pre-order queue as quickly as possible.

Check your account details, specifically the card and make sure it's up to date. That way, you're not fumbling for the long card number and losing out to the many other thousands of people who are going through the process of pre-ordering.

Jason England
Jason England
Content Editor

Jason brought a decade of tech and gaming journalism experience to his role as a writer at Laptop Mag, and he is now the Managing Editor of Computing at Tom's Guide. He takes a particular interest in writing articles and creating videos about laptops, headphones and games. He has previously written for Kotaku, Stuff and BBC Science Focus. In his spare time, you'll find Jason looking for good dogs to pet or thinking about eating pizza if he isn't already.