This $300 "Steam Deck" is AWFUL - Ayaneo Next Lite 

The fact that this is the same price as the base steam deck 256gb makes this DOA. Just buy the steam deck, there is no reason to buy this.

I really think it's a swing and a miss to not have SteamOS/HoloISO pre-installed. Most average users aren't going to go through the hassle you went through to get that running, meaning they're stuck with a subpar experience under Windows, or have to manually expand the filesystem after the HoloISO install. Either way, seems like a nice bit of kit!

Austin should know cheapest Steam Deck is 256GB since OLED one came out.

Pretty sure he lost all his space because the cloning process also clones the size of the source drive onto the target. If you take a 256gb SSD and clone the files onto a 500gb SSD you will only have 256gb useable on the 500gb and a partition will be created but inactive with the remaining space, you're missing. I had to use NIUBI Editor to move the 2 storage partitions together then extend my active partition to allocate the unused space.

The thing about AYA and Holo ISO is that: 1) AYA does not own Holo ISO, so there's very little they can do on their end to fix it. 2) Holo ISO is 1000% for enthusiasts. If you're not an enthusiast DO NOT USE HOLO ISO! There was a LOT more Austin and company needed to do to get the Next Lite to work properly with Holo ISO. This is not me dunking on Austin, but more dunking on AYA for saying that Holo ISO works with the Next Lite. That's pretty scummy of AYA to say that. Here's my theory: AYA couldn't get permission to use the official SteamOS directly from Valve nor could they get permission from the makers of Holo ISO. But they still really wanted to say they had SteamOS on the Next Lite... So they just said you could install Holo ISO onto the Next Lite, implying support without actually offering any.

i absolutely love my Legion GO. I purchased it because I was going on a trip to Oklahoma and was going to be spending some time in an airport and plane and wanted something to do. The battery life isn't the best ever but being able to hook it to a dock and do some actual work with a keyboard and mouse was amazing. I'm glad I spent the money on it

the steam deck takes up half a backpack? You rocking a tiny hello kitty backpack or something?

Interesting product, although by this time next week they will already have several newer versions making this version out of date.The almost weekly rate at which Aya Neo cranks out new devices makes me wonder about long term support. This already looks to be a bit of a waste of money, I would just save up a bit more money and get a Steam Deck because the ecosystem and the product have synergy and I just don’t think Non SD can compete, even when some devices have way more capability.

I am just curious. Where did you get that awesome Laguna Seca Shirt?

You can tap the battery icon to bring up quick setting menu.

They need to add tweaker settings so that people can tinker with the voltage etc on a bios level. Some crazy nutjob is gonna be able to undervolt the crap out of it and still have it run perfectly fine at max performance....

I think they just jumped the gun on this one. BUT, they should definitely tell people the true progress on SteamOS/Holo. Windows worked pretty well for the specs.

Bringus said go ahead Austin, that's not jank enough for me

Oof, I hear Chimera OS has support for aya neo devices. It's basically the same thing as holo, I think holo even uses some stuff from chimera

As soon as I heard "Ryzen 5 4500U", I knew it was DOA. The Deck is $400 for the 256GB model - its iGPU is running circles around 4500U's iGPU. The only thing the 4500U is good for is with CPU performance - but they had only one job, and that was to make a game console, not a laptop (I wish they had done it).

When you video starts up, the first thing I see is your shirt representing Laguna Seca race track. Nice touch there lol 😆

So im guessing the age old remove rhe SSD from the portable and write the OS file directly to it doesnt work with this one.

I absolutely love my Steam Deck. Just save for the real thing. You will be much happier in the long run.

Doesn’t Ayaneo release soo many handhelds that they don’t support them all much after launch?

Meanwhile I STILL can't afford it

2:13 Thought that was a dead pixel on my expensive OLED monitor. Thanks for the scare Austin.

The price is so close to the ROG ally and steam deck, I feel like there is 0 reason to get this device over the others. The steam deck has way better controls and OS support, while the Ally has a better screen and performance.

Matt was right, keep it on windows and run Big picture mode.

That box alone gives me huge "market stall knockoff console" vibes.

Why didn't you try Chimeraos? Seems like that could work better.

Did they say to use Clonezilla? Normally you wouldn't flash a full image for an OS on a PC.

I'll be honest, whatever you switched to to film with a @ 9:43 the picture/color/contrast is much better than the main camera. Audio not so much but the image personally looks better and more true

Why was the original decks screen not shown next to the lite if it's same" the only thing similar is the resolution🙂should follow up showing the actual screens running the same image side by side. Color gamuts exist.

Bro I thought it was a switch oled 😭

The pastel blue one is actually in stock RN

check the thermals under linux like bringus did with the 2s, also check how hot the screen is

It's clearly not a recommended purchase. Since you already have it, though, it's worth checking to see if ChimeraOS works better on the hardware than the HoloISO image they provide. It would be funny if it did. There are alternate ways to get to all the settings. However, what's the point of the HoloISO image if it's not actually customized for the device.

Wait... so basically this is the Aya Neo 2021 Pro??? I wonder if the device would be much better on Linux Steam Deck Edition distro like ChimeraOS, BazziteOS, or NobaraOS versus HoloISO

I know the struggles of installing Steam OS on a Chinese laptop ( I'd post of link but don't want to be that guy - video on the channel ) I got holo ISO installed but it locked up on startup screen a few times and when I tried to upgrade it, it completely broken the OS so I went with Chimera OS. Chimera OS works fairly well but it came with its own issues I had to iron out with tons of online research. The process is somewhat stressful and was never as simple as it seemed for ETA Prime. Steam needs to release a working version of the OS for different hardware!

some of the ssd size issues youbhad were prolly the fact there isnstill a windows partition there and you only had 100gb free so the ssd wasnt fully formatted

Austin needs to buy a pack of space raiders to find his brothers

@austinevans What T-Shirt are you wearing? White/Blue with penguin.

I was expecting Austin to find out how awful the iGPU was on the Z1 non-Extreme, which even though has 6 cores like Zen 4 Ryzen 5s, has only 1/3 of the GPU compute units (4) instead of 2/3s that the other Ryzen 5s get (8, for reference, the Z1 Extreme/Ryzen 7 or 9s has 12 GPU compute units)

I believe the fan is blasting due to the fan settings in developer mode try to toggle them and see what happens

Meanwhile waiting for steam deck discount

Austin you need to lv extend the partition to 100%. I had this issue with Ubuntu server only taking 100GB.

Next time, try to use balena etcher to create a boot stick from the holoISO image.

You should have inboxed a guy like eta prime for some pointers. I can't wait for his video on this.

how would this compare to rog ally z1

Austin, the Windows partition is probably still there. You most likely split the drives, installed Steam OS onto the second drive, and created a new partition.

I wanted this to work with the either the Holo ISO or have a better chip sooooo bad.... I LOVE the white and orange aesthetics!

my question is is the screen actually 60z because everygame ran a 40 or less fps or is the device locked to run ames a 40fps

The process of installing Steam OS looked like Austing was trying to jailbreak an iPhone. And the fact that you lose functions of some of the buttons is a huge oversight. This thing is going to flop hard.

Very disappointing, I would have liked to see a return to 2016 where we had low-budget handhelds like this. But ditching SteamOS and incrrasing the price probably for the Windows license was a horrible decision

but why is the OS so hard to install?

There are many reasons why I waited patiently for a big company to come out with a handheld. There are many more reasons why I will wait patiently for a true competitor to the steam deck. You're not just buying a device, you're buying an experience. Nothing beats Valve in this regard. Still.

Cyberpunk is a game that shows decent sometimes great fps for a handheld when you benchmark. But the second you jump in game your averaging high 20 to mid 30 fps, while some areas are 45-60.

That's even better a $350 Windows 11 PC 💯

I feel like Steam is on to something with it's SteamOS. If they work on it to make it functional with PC's and other handhelds, more people will jump on this Linux version.

I had the original aya neo with the 4500u and tested holo iso it was buggy and took hours to install just like you and straight away I had to go back to windows so I knew they wouldn’t add it

You should of tried ChimeraOS instead since that one is more up to date since HoloISO stopped updating their OS.

Need an official update from Ayaneo. I’m pretty sure something went really really wrong with the OS install. This has some potential, too bad about HoloISO not working as expected.

1:46 is that Susu's outro music?

Is that Laguna Seca on the shirt?

I'm not sure how valid Austin's problems were I'm not sure the Holoiso install was completed correctly. It's definitely not user friendly but I'm not sure what was done was correct.

I think whoever can compete with Switch prices, and still make a good mini PC, wins.

@Austin Evans you probably have better luck with bazzite os rather than the dead holoiso

does bazzite work?

Why did you try to clone the ISO on the machine instead of ditching Ventoy (very nice tool when used correctly) for a direct image to stick copy using rufus, balenaEtcher or even dd? I get that this is meant from a consumer point of view but even then someone with actual computer knowledge could have tried to install it again instead of Austin.

This could be pretty decent if you use it for emulation-only and some older games

You should try installing tiny 11

Main problem of ALL this "Steam Deck killers" is on Windows and no optimisation of Windows for this devises Steam Deck is more optimised by software (SteamOS + Proton and another software from Valve) to components inside the Deck, thats why Deck is standing on the top on this price segment Ayaneo have better sollutions, BUT on more bigger prise

Do one about the rog ally

FYI, the Next Lite will sell for $300. It's - $300 - 4500u - 128gb - March/April $350 - 4500u - 512gb - March/April $400 - 4800u - 512gb - April I've been having great fun with mine on windows/JELOS.

And this is exactly why the steam deck is the only one of these devices that ever caught my attention. I can barely deal with windows on my computer and now on a handheld the experience is just a mess.

It's not bad. A windows machine for less than 300 means you can play nvidia geforce now or gamepass cloud on it, but also dock it for light pc work

i have a lg cloud and a rg405 im looking for something to play 2d action games

For some reason I can only see this video in a low quality, and no way to even choose 1080p…just tried watching a different video and is perfect…just this one with the quality error

It's almost as if they didn't realise that Home + A didn't exist and wasn't a button combo that opens the quick access panel... There are also better SteamOS-lile images out there that would work much much better, such as ChimeraOS or Bazzite.

If they want this to be a real competitor to the steam deck it really needs to come with a properly setup install of HoloIOS.

Yeah, a pre-owned Steam Deck is better in every way. I was a pre-order for the original Steam Deck and my uncle came round, saw how awesome it was, and immediately bought himself one on eBay and has been emulating all of the old games he used to play as a kid on super old hardware. Didn't need to spend full price on it. It works perfectly and he loves it!

There is a steamos shortcut to bring up the QAM menu(the right menu), I believe it's STEAM + A. That being said it shouldnt be necessary and they really should fix this.

Idk i dual boot my steamdeck and well to be honest outside of need for speed games most of my games run about the same in windows vs steam os. And even the windows experience is pretty decent not as slow as this device which is saying a lot, because it has 2 more cores and those cores clock higher so why it runs so slow in windows i think something is wrong with the device. Outside the UI there really shouldn't be much of a difference.

I have the 512gb LCD Steam Deck. I bought it last summer when it was on sale. Ironically, this was literally a few months before the OLED was released. If only I had known this, I would have just bought the OLED. Ah well...

So SteamOS is reading the input as just an Xbox controller. You can bring up the Steam Settings with the "Home" button + A. Might give an option to adjust TDP and all that. But the fact that it took them a couple of weeks to make the HOLOISO image available is... not good. Ayaneo should probably just stick with emulation.

Somewhere in a parallel universe there is a machine reviewing a $300 Austin that's not Mahone nor from Texas.

Hold the Home button and press A to open the right side options menu.

It seems like an bios problem? Maybe they'll fix it in future bios updates...... And that's a big maybe

I can't wait gor the day that a competitively priced Windows handheld launches.

This is just a repackaged version of the original Aya Neo, which is five years old now. It was very good for the time, but has been far surpassed since then.

I love to watch non-Arch users struggle to set up Arch on standard x86 hardware and yes, SteamOS3 is based on Arch - Holo only is a toolbox to get it to work until valve finally reaslse some official stuff to me it's austin here at fault just not get his head around how to install Arch ...

I wonder if Austin will cover the flip DS. Its due to ship soon. Im personally excited.

Right now you can still get the 64GB LCD Deck for $350 while supplies last. Lmao.

Valve really needs to release an universal steamdeck offical ISO so other manufacturers can create their own steamdecks to increase gaming on linux. That 50 dollar pricebump was probably just the windows licence nobody asked for.

Austin should say goodbye video for Matt Pat

The $300 price point just sucks for these devices because $100-$150 extra can get you a significantly better experience. Even $50 for the 64GB eMMC Deck (while it's still available) wouldn't be a bad idea if you get an SD card with it, and you can upgrade to a larger NVMe SSD later.

I just bought a used oled steam deck with custom carry case and a 500gb SD card in new condition for $400. Aahh gotta love the used market

13:16 Come on, charge your deck.

This is a prime example of why people prefer the steam deck and other consoles over PC/ PC handhelds. It just works no need to fix software or mess with settings

But will it play helldivers 2?

if you only like the form factor, remove the motherboard and put the steamdeck one in it's case. I see people do that all the time with things like game boys, game boy advances, and even steamdecks.

Using Google Drive to store your consumer files is the lowest foul ball you can throw :)

10:05 that bad piggies ahh laugh

Ayaneo releases a new device like every other week. They have saturated the market space and over price their devices to make them even worth looking at.

Anyone who cannot trust Valves Updates have no faith in Valve at all. It's not one of those "Trust me Bro" situations.