Someone Put 32gb RAM and New WiFi Card in a Steam Deck

Since Valve has been supportive of opening up and manually repairing your Steam Deck, there have been countless modifications to it. We have seen the usual shell swaps and even button swaps, but we have seen some creative people add a 4tb NVMe, liquid cooling, and even put on Nintendo Switch joycons! None of these creative improvements are easy and require a ton of work including soldering and modifying the original parts of the Deck. Now, we have a new upgrade that has surfaced and it looks like one that will improve the Deck significantly.

A Twitter (X) user, @TreezusRepairs/Alex Swanson, who has 4 years of soldering and tech repairing experience, made a couple of posts showing off some upgrades they have made to their Steam Deck, including upgrading the 16gb of RAM on the Deck to 32gb and the WiFi card to support 6E, which has a slew of improvements along with it. I DMed Alex about these changes and I got a little more information about what was done and how they did it.

32gb RAM and WiFi Card

The biggest upgrades that Alex added to the Deck are the RAM and new WiFi card. For the RAM, Alex used 2 Samsung K3LKCKC0BM-MGCP cards to double the amount of RAM inside the Deck. This can be especially helpful in games that require more RAM and multitasking in Desktop mode. If there's a game that is massively improved by CryoUtilities, this should help too. Installing these required not only soldering, but a BIOS edit to make sure the new RAM was recognized and the speeds could reach 6400MT/s (the Deck has 5500 MT/s in the stock RAM).

Then we have the WiFi card. Alex put in an Intel AX210 card, which supports WiFi 6E and has almost double the bluetooth range, increase WiFi range, and higher speeds. If you are constantly downloading and installing new games, I know I am, this will help make it go a bit faster. This also required soldering, so it isn't recommended for those without experience to try doing.

Other Upgrades

The RAM and WiFi card are not the end of Alex's upgrades though, they plan to do a lot more. So far, Alex has also swapped out the joysticks for Elecgear hall effect ones and is putting on a Atomic Purple shell. The Atomic Purple shell looks awesome and you can get your own from eXtremeRate or JSAUX, but a heads up, it will require swapping out buttons and possibly re-applying thermal paste if you are replacing the back as well. It is work, but it looks incredible.

After these are done, Alex plans on adding in a Monoblock V2 for better heat dissipation, a 2TB SSD, and the DeckHD screen for better colors and 1200p. It will be interesting to see once all of these upgrades are done and see how insane a fully customized Deck can be. I am looking forward to following up once all of these upgrades are done.

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