Regarding firmware though, that beta branch is, right now, essential. Even if just for the fan curve. The latest one on the stable branch is absolutely shocking in terms of noise, and the one it ships with isn’t fit for purpose at all. My temps were going over 105 on that before the GPU throttled itself to stop it frying while the fan eventually kicked in for a 1 second blast. Playing Desk Job it would go in a cycle from 60fps to 8fps when it got hot for about 30 seconds while it cooled off a bit. All this while the back of the unit (where I rest my fingers) got scalding hot to the point that I had to move my fingers to stop them burning.
Been pretty tempted by this lately; I'm assuming the controllers aren't detachable, but can you pair bluetooth controllers? And is there some kind of dock in the works?
Jezo wrote:Been pretty tempted by this lately; I'm assuming the controllers aren't detachable, but can you pair bluetooth controllers? And is there some kind of dock in the works?
Jezo wrote:Oh hype. All in all looking pretty pricy tho, but I guess you can do a lot of gooseberry fool with it
The base model is £350, so it's not exactly steep, especially when you see what a lot of component prices have been doing over the last 2 years. By all accounts, loading from SD cards is pretty swift, so going for a base unit and either upgrading the SSD yourself or using expandable storage is totally workable as an alternative to the more expensive models.
When I tried running Steam Link on a Samsung tablet, the tablet didn't register the video stream as activity, and so would lock itself due to inactivity.
Knoyleo wrote:When I tried running Steam Link on a Samsung tablet, the tablet didn't register the video stream as activity, and so would lock itself due to inactivity.
Anyway, the radio silence from Steam since I confirmed that, yes, RMA plz, has now entered its fourth day. I’m so fed up I unboxed it and set it up all over again.
Forgot to mention that the WiFi is strawberry floated and all. The power management of the wireless chip can’t handle 5GHz connections properly. It will just constantly be dropping and reconnecting, so you’ll just see failed downloads and sync issues all over the place with “cannot find steam servers” messages. And you can’t boot any games when it drops connection, because you have to be online to enable the offline mode.
You can fix it by enabling developer mode and turning off the WiFi power management, but then you can kiss your battery life goodbye.
All this is terribly fun when you have, say, factory reset it to send it back and are trying to set it up again, where it demands to download an update before you can sign in (and therefore access the menu to fix the WiFi), and if the download disconnects the install fails. Just a constant loop of update failed. I wasn’t for messing with my mesh so I had to get around it by tethering to my phone, forcing that hotspot to operate in 2.4GHz, and downloading it over 4G.
I’ve got the packing label printed and I’m sending it back for a replacement today at last, but I just thought I’d counter balance my earlier negativity with my experience these last few days when I had it on good firmware and all set up.
It’s been wonderful. The thing is an emulation dream machine, and in less demanding titles I’m squeezing almost 7 hours out of the battery. I played through the entirety of Doki Doki Literature club and a little bit of West of Loathing on it and the instant sleep/resume you’d expect is perfect. I started playing Deus Ex Human Revolution but I’m not sure that lends itself as well to the pick up/put down way I mainly engage with handhelds. It ran great though and the battery was… ok with it, I guess? Definitely takes a hit when rendering 3D, but it’s workable. I think it’d be killed if you were pushing the machine itself to its limit so of the few other things I tried out there wasn’t anything really from the last 5 years, but I’ll look at that stuff when I get it back.
The emulators were a breeze to set up and the emudeck UI itself puts official stuff to shame. It’s just a huge weight off having it all work first time. I even managed to do the whole lot wirelessly, using my NAS as the mass storage for all my ROMs. It’s the setup I’ve always dreamed of.
UK 512GB queue moved ahead by more than a minute today, so fingers crossed this pace keeps up. I'm now less than 2 minutes down the queue, so could be getting my email this time next week if all goes well.