Valve has shipped 'hundreds' of Steam Deck dev kits in the last month, remains on track for February launch

Isn't the Steam Deck an incredible piece of hardware? Just look at it, hanging around Steam's front page in all its matte black glory, promising those with copious patience and money modern PC gaming absolutely anywhere they dare take it. Valve's machine is a bold and beautiful thing: the present pinnacle of portable PC play, and the beginning of another generation in a long and haphazard family tree. Its roots are the chunky Game Boys and laptops of the '90s, but the Steam Deck's closest (or at least quirkiest) ancestor is Sony's now sixteen-year-old, but still astonishingly chic, Vaio UX.

This all-AMD gaming PC covers all the basics for your average gamer, while still leaving a little wiggle room for later upgrades. Its current gen GPU and still very relevant CPU combo makes it a great contender for playing triple-A games today. Right now it's only $1,100 at Amazon. That's...

AMD's Zen 4 CPUs aren't expected until the second half of the year, but the leaks are already rolling in earnest, with the latest spotted by Petykemano (via Tom's Hardware) on the OpenBenchmarking site. The entry for the Phoronix benchmark sees an AMD engineering sample divulging some interesting tidbits about AMD's follow-up to Zen 3, including the fact that it is running at 5.21GHz, is an 8-core, 16-thread chip, and that it boasts integrated graphics in the form of the AMD GFX1036.

Starfield isn't the only big videogame delay to happen today. Techland has announced that the first major story DLC for Dying Light 2, which was expected to roll out in June, won't actually be out until sometime in September. "Over the last few months, we have focused on adding some...

Linux gaming, once thought of as a niche option for the passionate few, is now steadily moving out of the shadows. This has only been accelerated by its use in Valve's Steam Deck which is still working towards improvements for things like battery life with Linux drivers. Even just the...

Having one of the best external SSDs in your toolkit, this data-dominated world will surely cower before you. With it you can better transport your important files around with you—a necessity for gamers, students and professionals alike. That way you can keep your massive games library to hand without it taking up your entire PC storage. Or if your HDD stops working all of a sudden, having everything backed up on a fast and decent size external SSD can be a life-saver.

The best RGB lighting kit will make your boring, stale gaming PC burst into a rainbow of color. It's not as simple as slapping any old RGB lighting strip onto your PC though, you need one that lines up with your existing color scheme and tastes. Here are the best RGB lighting strips and controllers that will fit your look.

I've been playing with a lot of new (or new to me) small form factor chassis recently, and if there's one thing that really helps when building into an ickle PC case it's good cable management. Thankfully the best mini-ITX PC cases have cable routing as part of the design, sadly some do not.

The best gaming keyboard is not only responsive but reliable too. It's undoubtedly going to be plastered with RGB lighting as well, which may not be to everyone's tastes, but what's a modern gaming keyboard without a pulsating light show? Aside from your gaming mouse, your gaming keyboard is one of the main peripherals to get right.

When Computex kicks off this month it may well be the place where we find out all the details of the next generation of gaming hardware. Those new slices of silicon nirvana which promise to deliver frame rates beyond our wildest dreams. Or, alternatively, it could be a huge anti-climax where both AMD and Nvidia nod to their new technologies without giving us anything more tangible than some chips shown off on stage, or an anonymous benchmark.

Discord is the current go-to chat app for many PC gamers, and plenty of other online hobbyists. For the uninitiated, Discord allows people to form individual servers with forum-like categories for text based chat, and includes voice chat functionality for group calls during games. People make Discord servers for all...

Using the best audiophile headphones for gaming alone might seem like overkill, but if you want to hear things the way it was meant to be heard, these headphones are it. Someone might ask, "Why would you waste those perfectly tuned drivers on video games?" To this stick in the mud, I'd say, "Why not?"

Several months after Mass Effect Legendary Edition came out, modders released a community patch to fix a host of minor bugs and irritations in the remastered version of the first game. A similar community patch for the Legendary Edition's update of Mass Effect 3 followed. But the remastered Mass Effect 2 lacked a similar community patch—until now.

The corner of the galaxy where my species nests is nice and quiet—peaceful, even though it's busy. All the species that call this slice of Stellaris' galactic pizza home are buds, working together for the glory of the Holy Fafossan Empire, which dominates the region. Sure, there were probably some nasty bouts of subjugation in the past, but we're all friends now. We don't have much of a choice, to be fair.

Mark Zuckerburg, the Zuck himself, has been spotted flaunting Meta's upcoming VR headset in a demo video on his Facebook page, but for reasons we can't quite place, the company has decided to blur out the VR headset. Either by way of generating more hype, or just being vague for the fun of it, we're still none the wiser about Project Cambria.

Overwatch 2 is in its beta stages, and the theme so far is Blizzard's determination to make support heroes a bit less lacklustre. The developer recently made a bunch of changes, including giving Zenyatta a badass super kick, and now it's looking at perennial favourite Mercy. Rather than addition, though,...

As a sub £800 4K gaming monitor, you'd expect the Philips Momentum 279M1RV to cut a couple of corners with its design. And while there are some minor features that Phillips has dulled down to keep the cost from skyrocketing, this gaming monitor has a few tricks tucked behind its nifty Nano IPS panel.

Starfield is delayed to 2023, and whether you really thought that it would launch on time or are not surprised at all, the end of this year is now a big black hole. Starfield's delay has shaken our confidence in the other big games that we've been expecting to arrive by the end of this year. Will other big launches fall into the gravity well of such a major delay, taking the opportunity to announce their own?

Steam has looked the same for a long time. It may not be green anymore, but gray gets tiring, too. Why not make it snazzier? Refresh your game library with new colors, fonts, and roomier layouts using the best Steam skins. Skins are very easy to install, so you can switch between them whenever you like using a dropdown menu and quickly reset to default if it all gets a bit much.

Welcome to This Week in PC Gaming, a show where we take a look at the new games, updates, and more coming at you over the next week, every week, until the end of time. Or until I go on holiday, whatever. This week we're studying witchcraft in the forest...