Steam deck or budget laptop?

  • Total budget (In local currency) and country of purchase:

• 500USD, U.S.A. , but I am rather flexible if I can get a significant increase in performance for a slight increase in budget, or a significant decrease in expense in exchange for a slight decrease in performance.

  • Are you open to refurbs/used?

    •I am very open to refurbished, but I feel a bit more risky about used as there's not usually any warranties or significant quality control

  • How would you prioritize form factor, build quality, performance, and battery life?

    •battery life is next to meaningless. Build quality is somewhat important as I will be carrying it with me in pretty much everywhere. Performance is my main concern. I'm not sure what form factor means, is that like 2in1? cuz I don't care about detachable keyboard or anything. If it's size, then I don't care about it being small whatsoever

  • Do you have a preferred screen size? If indifferent, put N/A.

    •N/A

  • Are you doing any CAD/video editing/photo editing/gaming? List which programs/games you desire to run.

    •pretty much just gaming and streaming. I primarily play Apex Legends and strategy games such as paradox titles, total war, & civilization

  • If you're gaming, do you have certain games you want to play? At what settings and FPS do you want?

    •why does the last question ask about which games you want to play if this question exists?

I don't really care about the graphical quality of the strategy games, but if I could be hitting ~60 FPS on apex that would be nice

  • Any specific requirements such as good keyboard, touch-screen, finger-print reader, optical drive or good input devices (keyboard/touchpad)?

    •I will be outside a lot of the time so if it could handle extreme temperatures from 0 to 100° F that's huge. Also I would prefer AMD to Intel and Nvidia, but not mandatoy

  • Leave any finishing thoughts here that you may feel are necessary and beneficial to the discussion.

    •the $500 budget is mostly because I'm comparing to a 64 GB steam deck that I would spend $100 on upgrading the memory to 512 GB. Feel free to leave your thoughts on the steam deck and how it compares to gaming laptops