Ready to ship around the middle of June, eXtremeRate have now put up pre-orders for those of you brave enough to mod the entire shell of the Steam Deck.
The current models they're offering right now are Clear Atomic Purple $35.99, Clear Custom (no colouring) $35.99, White $45.99, Clear Slate Black $35.99 and Chameleon Purple Blue $45.99. Seems like they're quite reasonably priced and they sure do look great.
A reminder though: it's not easy to do, and requires taking apart pretty much the whole of your Steam Deck. The guide over on iFixit shows just how long a process it is and they labelled it as "Difficult".
You can see them all on the eXtremeRate website.
The other company about to do it is JSAUX, although we don't know when it will be sometime soon. Will you be picking one of these up to try and mod your Steam Deck?
I hate that I know my answer to that.
Are they licensed or did they just do it and Valve doesn't bother to do anything about it, because why bother? lol
I’ve always learned stuff by breaking stuff, sadly.
But the guide might keep me from breaking my deck.
But I also would like more customisation.
Different colour schemes in buttons, touchpads, keypads and triggers. Hopefully we are getting there in the future ☺️
Last edited by Zelox on 10 June 2023 at 3:59 pm UTC
I really really want a black or purple one. But I’m also clumsy when it comes to working with hardware and software.
I’ve always learned stuff by breaking stuff, sadly.
But the guide might keep me from breaking my deck.
I totally relate to that. Especially with the guides online, it's not bad at all on paper. The biggest pain for me was that a few of the screws for my backplate (and one inside on a later adventure) came extremely overtight from the factory and with how soft the heads are, they immediately stripped. I used the new screws that came with my backplate and even they are far better than the ones that came originally.
They are NOT kidding when they say to allocate 6ish hours to this task. I flew through disassembly and reassembly due to prior experience in small electronic repair but by far the biggest time sink was removing the old adhesive from the touchpads and display. The shell is well made but all of the screws are thrown together in a few plastic bags making the reassembly process unnecessarily tedious in my opinion, especially when paired with the install video's vague this-screw-goes-here pictures.
My advice if you want to do this and value your time: Have a new screen (sans adhesive) ready to go, and maybe some new touchpads else take your time and be sure to not get isopropyl alcohol under the LCD backing.
My advice generally: a skin is by far easier to install. My steam deck 2 will remain stock.
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