Ultra-Rare Steam Deck Prototype With Vega GPU Fetches $2K On Ebay
An engineering sample of Valve's Steam Deck handheld appears to have sold on eBay for $2,000 (it was listed for $2,999.99), plus another $5 shipping. So $2,005 total, if our math checks out. That's three times higher than Valve's most expensive Steam Deck model, the OLED variant with 1TB of storage ($649) and seven and around five times more than its cheapest SKU, the LCD model with 256GB of storage ($399). Why did it command so much?
The main reason is that it's a rare piece of history. Even though Valve went through dozens of designs before finalizing the Steam Deck for retail, you don't see a lot of prototypes in the wild. And at least in this case, there's a badge on the back that clearly indicates, "Engineering sample 34, not for resale."
Reddit user Gary_the_mememachine spotted the listing on eBay, and further on down the thread, user SavedMarth posted a graphic of the various different design iterations that Valve went through. The one that was listed for auction can be seen in the second row of the first column.
The final shout out goes to Reddit user Klin24, who discovered the Steam Deck prototype's actual selling price. Even though eBay shows it as having sold for $2999.99, a handy tool at 130point.com reveals that the seller accepted a 'best offer' price of $2,000 on the nose.
Beyond the high price, what's also interesting about the prototype is the hardware makeup of the handheld. Screenshots of the device's BIOS show it features 8GB of DDD4 memory, a 256GB SK hynix NVMe solid state drive (SSD), and an unspecified Picasso chip.
The presence of a Picasso part means it's running a Ryzen 3000 series mobile chip with Zen+ CPU cores (probably four of them) and Vega graphics based on AMD's fifth generation Graphics Core Next (GCN 5.0) architecture. To put those specs into perspective, the finalized Steam Deck design features a custom 7nm APU (6nm in the OLED model) comprised of a 4C/8T CPU based on Zen 2 and an RDNA 2 GPU with two compute units. Competing handhelds like ASUS ROG Ally X are even more powerful with AMD's Ryzen Z1 Extreme silicon feature Zen 4 and RDNA 3.
Adding a bit of additional intrigue here is that eBay's listing links are being wonky with this particular sale. You can find it by using eBay's search tool and looking up completed listings, but trying to share a direct link to the listing ends up loading a different Steam Deck page. Here are the search results, though, so you can check it out for yourself.
Even so, we are able to see it on our end (see screenshot above), and as far as the aforementioned sale price tool is concerned, it did in fact sell, without or without Valve's blessing.
