Marcin Plaza's Ultra-Wide Steam Deck-Like Portable Gains a Magnetically-Attached GPU — Sort Of

Maker Marcin Plaza has been working on making his own portable gaming handheld, inspired by Valve's Steam Deck — and in its latest upgrade has added a full-size desktop graphics card to the gadget, in an effort to better drive demanding triple-A games.

"I built an ultra-wide DS Steam Deck thing," Plaza explains of the project. "It's very cool, but it sucks. With just the sad [Intel Core] i5 [processor] big games equals big lag, and many crash. So, obviously, I'm putting a full desktop graphics card in it, because here's the vision: imagine yourself sitting there playing your relaxed game, but all of a sudden you really want to play Cyberpunk — but no fear, you pull out the graphics pack, slap it on the back like those magnetic batteries, and boom: buttery smooth. At least, that's how I imagine it."

Valve's Steam Deck is one of a number of handheld gaming devices built around high-performance mobile-centric processors, designed to run a desktop operating system and provide on-the-go access to any game a desktop can play — with a big caveat being the performance difference between even the best mobile processor and the top-end CPU and GPU devices you'll find in a high-power desktop gaming PC. Plaza's custom setup, which uses an ultra-wide display designed to hinge down over a keyboard, trackpad, and D-pad control system, is even weaker than most, relying on the integrated graphics of a mid-range Intel Core-i5 chip.

The solution, then, is to add a dedicated graphics processor — on an add-in board designed for a desktop. Products already exist to do exactly that, putting the GPU in a mains-powered case that connects to a laptop or other portable device over a high-speed connection like Thunderbolt, but Plaza's goal was to have something you could use on-the-go. Thus the idea: an external GPU dock that could connect to the back of the handheld magnetically, providing a performance boost when required but being easy to detach while playing less power-hungry games.

Plaza built the GPU dock from a modified enclosure designed for a solid-state drive (SSD), adding a dedicated battery pack and a custom CNC-milled heatsink to keep things cool. A 3D-printed housing holds all the components together, and — as envisioned — attaches to the main handheld via embedded magnets, providing an easy way to separate the two when more portability is required. At the same time, Plaza added a second touchscreen and an analogue joystick taken from a Nintendo 3DS to expand the gadget's control system.

Sadly, the project has not been an unalloyed success. "I've spent, probably, 200 hours trying to make it work," Plaza admits of the GPU dock. "I even installed Arch [Linux], by the way, and in that time it's worked two, two and a half times. The half is because my backup plan failed too, and I don't think I would call this playable."

The project is detailed in full in the video embedded above and on Plaza's YouTube channel.