Valve Steam Deck Dock
Update August 2023⌗
It seems that many of the issues below have been fixed. My Steam Deck now reliably connects to the Dock and outputs a 4K 60Hz picture on my LG OLED65B9, without any messing around with rebooting or toggling power to the Dock. Whatever has changed, I am grateful! The info below will remain as it was correct at the time.
What is it?⌗
It’s a docking station for the Valve Steam Deck. It lets you Dock your Deck.
Through the power and might of USB-C, it claims to provide 4K 60Hz outputs through HDMI or DisplayPort, can pass through power from a wall adapter, and gives you ethernet plus a couple of extra USB ports.
Sounds great, what’s the catch?⌗
It’s buggy. The Steam Deck doesn’t always recognise the correct resolution for the attached monitor, and when it does it’s often at a much lower refresh rate than expected.
Using my Samsung ultrawide in picture-by-picture at 1440p, the Dock will not output video to the monitor. Similarly, it will not play nicely with my LG TV unless I use the manual resolution settings in the latest Preview firmware.
In theory you should also be able to use it as a generic laptop docking station, but with my work machine I can only get a reliable image when the dock is unpowered and at low refresh rate & 6-bit(!) colour depth. As soon as I plug it in to a wall adapter, the image disappears completely.
My hopes of using this as a 4K Steam Link replacement are slowly evaporating. It’s a real shame as I love the Steam Link concept for living room gaming using ’the big PC’, but it’s currently limited to 1080p. The Steam Deck itself has been otherwise flawless (more on that in another post).
Is yours faulty?⌗
It doesn’t really do what it says it will… but neither do dozens of others according to the Steam community forums.
What’s the alternative?⌗
Just get something from JSAUX. It’ll save you time, frustration, and possibly money.
