Significant. The Steam Deck’s APU is 15W max. Just a desktop CPU is usually at least 65W, but some can draw 250W+ at the high end, and a dedicated GPU is anywhere from usually around 100W to even as high as 400W. Now, granted, desktop CPUs and GPUs can certainly run in more efficient power states than that, but it’s still pretty night and day overall.

Of course, all that extra power gives you a huge boost in performance, so it’s not a apples to apples comparison. That extra performance doesn’t scale linearly, though, so things get more inefficient the more power you’re pushing though it.

Well the steamdeck charger is only 45 watts. No charger is 100% efficient so let us assume it pulls slightly more from the wall, maybe 50 watts if you were playing the most intense game ever on it and charging the battery at the same time with brightness on max, etc etc…

That is about the same as a typical gaming monitor power usage. Without even counting how much power your computer draws.

Oh and if your steamdeck battery is full and you are playing something like a 2d indie game, the charger will only be drawing about 15watts fromt he wall. I know, I have measured it.

It is a lot more efficient than a desktop with a full sized monitor.

Compare it to a laptop however and it starts looking quite similar.

My xbox uses 180w and my gaming pc is about 400w. The steam deck uses around 20w.

If you want to play any normal AAA game (excluding indie pixel software rendered things - but sometimes even those), the difference in power consumption is not even a challenging comparison - a desktop CPU alone pulls more wattage than the deck under maximum load (2-4x deck), before we even get into GPU power usage (usually 10x the max usage of the deck). If you are looking to save on that power bill - a mobile system that has to worry about batteries will always save energy that a desktop won’t.

…you doing some kind of off-grid trip or living out of a vehicle…? I don’t know man…what do you think it would take to plug in a desktop tower, speakers, and monitor as opposed to a single SteamDeck charger…?

Devices intended to run from a battery will always be much more power optimized than their plug-in brethren, and the Deck is no exception. You do, of course, pay the price in terms of perfmance, as it’s a trade-off.