I think it's right around how much they were selling brand new Decks for during the summer sale, so it would make me want to wait for a future sale probably. Or rather I think it was 10, 15, and 20 percent reduction for the low, mid, and high end options respectively. I wonder if they'll reduce the costs of the refurbs during future sales.
edit: based on what I could find, I think it's disabling "updated fan controls" under system settings. Must have missed the patch where they added the option.
Probably fixed RMA units. I had to RMA my original June 2022 Deck because it got stuck in some permanent low TDP mode. Otherwise the hardware was still in great condition. If they were able to somehow reflash the firmware to fix this issue it would be like new. I'm sure there were others RMA'd for this issue or minor internal hardware issues that could be fixed. If there were fan issues hopefully they put new fans in as part of the refurbishing process.
It’s also worth trying to limit power draw and seeing how far you can go before it impacts performance. This game I’ve been playing went from about 18 watts to 7 watts with very little performance change and the fans run way quieter.
It would be better to replace the SSD, read write speeds and all that y'know. I'm not saying you shouldn't get a big ol sd card, I mean, dankpods got doom eternal running off an iPod's hard drive, but it's not something you'd wanna deal with every day
I'd say it depends on the types of games you probably play? Maybe?
Have the 64Gb one with a 256Gb SDcard, and been perfect for the games I play (hades, stardew valley, emudeck also quite good), I know it'd probably be faster with an SSD but not looking to invest the time or money to upgrade just yet. Really happy with it
The only game so far I've definitely noticed slow load times was star wars jedi fallen order, that was the most resource demanding game I've played on the deck. Sometimes took like 30secs to load the game or respawn, but after that the whole game was quite normal.
I look forward to tronicsfix tearing one down and seeing just how “refurbished” they really are. I expect great things from Valve but I still remain skeptical