The screen swap was easy peasy, the hardest part was getting the old screen out. Mine was already broken, and I wasn’t keeping the front plastic, so I didn’t have to worry about being too careful, except around the top edge where the mics and ambient light sensor are.
The case swap was a bear, took forever. I’m fairly handy, but the whole process took almost 4 hours. My buddy was doing his in tandem with me and he was over 5 hours, and that’s with me lending a hand towards the end.
It looks great, in my opinion, and I’d do it again, I’d just start earlier in the day 😬
As far as the OLED goes, so far it looks good. The stock brightness slider isn’t working, it must be a software thing? I have had zero time to look into it. I haven’t even played a single game on it since doing the swap. I’ll report back when I have time to give it a fair shake.
Kudos and thanks for sharing! Looking forward to getting a steam deck myself.
Very cool! Any issues or drama when booting up or does it just run like steamdeck should?
Man id absolutely love to do this, full screen/shell/battery replacement and maybe even a 1tb nvme drive.
But goodness any time I see the clear shells all I can think of is how they look like a toy/switch afterwards haha
I mean, it kind of is a toy 😬
To each their own though 👍
See my comment below for advice on an SSD swap, it’s super easy
I swapped my 64gb LCD to a 2tb in about an hour, including reflashing the OS. Improved load times as well as storage space.
Yeah SSD swap is one of the easiest upgrades, with the most benefit. Plus if you get an external nvme enclosure and take some time to play with RescueZilla, you can clone your old drive to the new one and you won’t have to reinstall anything at all. Pretty slick!
Now that is seriously good to know! Espevially if you’ve got slow internet like me.
I splurged originally though haha, I have a 512gb Q3 deck, getting a 2tb or 1tb drive isn’t a huge incentive since I just have a bunch of 512gb sd cards, but if I open it up id rather just do it all at once ya know
Thank you sm forposting about this, I didn’t even know it existed.
I think I will wait a few months and see whether or not they make it to custom production and resolve issues like not being able to adjust the brightness properly in Gamescope and then think about whether I actually want to buy it since I don’t use my Deck much…
But when I do it’s mostly for relatively low-powered games and indie titles so the 1080p upgrade might be rly neat too
You’re very welcome.
The creator seems to be pretty on top of things, I bet we’ll get some fixes before too long.
I think it’d be really cool if, once there’s a bunch of Decks with broken screens and stuff, there’s a community around building new devices with them. There’s no reason it needs to be the same size screen, or even the same controller format. It’d be cool to have like GameBoy size versions (assuming the hardware can be compacted that small, which it probably can’t), or even larger versions. I’d love to see someone print out a Deck case that’s scaled for a laptop screen, for example. There’s no reason that can’t be made easy with parameterized models.
This one is a custom case with a custom screen, except they chose to make it a copy of the Deck. That’s great if you want it, but it’d be cool to have options.
What the hell that’s beautiful. How much did the whole setup cost?
Thanks!
The new case was like $35, and the OLED screen is like $140. I bought a deck with a broken screen for $150, so $325 from scratch? Plus taxes and odds and ends 🤷♂️ Not bad!
Is the OLED the same resolution as stock, or is it higher?
It’s 1080p, which is unfortunately just a little harder to drive. Apparently the hardware in the new screen technically supports hardware downscaling to 720p, but that isn’t implemented yet, and may never be.
Ah, dang - I was hoping for a 1:1 replacement.
I mostly just use mine to emulate PS1-2 games, so 1080p isn’t all that enticing - but OLED blacks definitely would be.
While not as enticing, it should be much easier for the deck to handle.
People’s concern with the increased resolution is that games that are already marginal, like horizon forbidden West, will slip further down in frame rate.
If hardware accelerated 720p becomes a thing with a software update, I’ll most likely bump it down for a net INCREASE in performance 😬
Yeash… 4 hours to swap the case? Absolutely striking that off my list. I’ll get as far as taking it apart and then I’d have solflocked myself lol. Looks great though!
Swapping the back is pretty easy, but my understanding is you have to do 100% disassembly to swap the front.
Can confirm 🫠
Well, I’m sure I could’ve gone faster, I did stop to help my buddy a number of times. But yeah it’s at least 2 or 3 hours, lots of little bits and bobs and they all have to go back in the right spots. It’s not hard per se, except for the screen removal, it’s just tedious.
Thanks I think it looks great too! 😄
What is the PWM frequency with DeckSight? I’m pretty sensitive to that and my regular OLED model sadly strains my eyes within an hour. Maybe something like this could be a better alternative for me.
You know I’m not sure, and I’m not sure how to check. That might be a good question for someone else? Or maybe it’s in the documentation? Or if you can tell me how to check I can check,
While the documentation does list quite a few useful details about the specs of the display, the PWM frequency is unfortunately not mentioned. A reliable measurement can only be done with a specialized device like an Opple Light Master. Here is some more research about the PWM flicker on the Steam Deck OLED: https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/1882kys/analysis_of_the_pwmflickervisual_fatigue_of_the/
I’ve sent a support message to the creator, hopefully he’ll have an answer 👍
It is a known issue https://www.shadetechnik.com/decksight-known-issues
Thanks! I thought I was keeping up with development but I guess I missed that somehow. I guess I’ll just have to be patient 😬
How about the BIOS flash? Is that easy to do?
Easy peasy, he created a tool that does it automatically, with prompts and everything. Literally just double clicking a file from his website, done and done 👍
I’ve considered doing this. Did you have to remove the old screen even though you were doing a chassis swap?
Yes unfortunately. I thought I wouldn’t have to, that’s half the reason I got the extra case. But the way the steam deck is designed, the internal frame is screwed to the front case with 6 screws that are under the screen 🫠
Edit: Swapping the screen without swapping the case would be significantly easier, you’ve only gotta go down as deep as the motherboard.
That’s interesting, I had a assumed screen swap/case swap would be equally difficult.
Nah, every little button and board are all individually screwed into the front case. So swapping it is literally removing those things one at a time, setting them aside, doing the rest of the work, then putting all those little pieces back in exactly where they go.
The instructions have over a 100 steps, then you do them an in reverse. So over 200 steps to do it all.
I bet you could get fast at it, but first time? Gonna be slow.
But the screen swap is just the motherboard in and out I’m pretty sure.
