Finally, finally, the Steam Frame is here!

Five years ago, rumors of an internal Valve project codenamed Deckard rocked the VR enthusiast world. Since then, gamers have salivated over the dream of a wearable all-in-one PC that could play both dedicated VR games and the rest of their Steam libraries, without the hassle of a tether or base stations.

We’ve been partnered with Valve since 2022, selling parts and tools and making guides for hardware including the Steam Deck and Index. But until very recently, we were left speculating with the rest of the enthusiasts: was the Frame really coming? Would it be cordless? Would it have micro-OLED panels? Would it be repairable?  

We had high hopes for repairability, given that we gave the original Steam Deck a 7 out of 10 for repairability, among the highest scores we’ve given handheld game consoles. And though it’s not perfect, we’re glad to report that the Frame carries much of that repair-friendly thinking into a much less forgiving shape.

Disclosure: iFixit partners with Valve to provide parts, tools, and repair guides for Valve hardware, including Steam Frame. Valve had no input on our editorial process and did not review this teardown before publication.

The optical and compute side of things detaches from the headband, which includes the battery, speakers, and consumable foams. No top strap or extended light blocker on our model, since we didn’t opt for the ergonomic accessories DLC.The Battery Gets Its Own Exit

Beat Saber is an excellent way to discover just how much sweat your forehead can produce. So our first question when we take apart a VR headset: can you swap out the stuff that touches your face? Indeed, the Frame’s face and headrest foams come off for replacement. Good. The next person to borrow your headset deserves that much. Valve’s even gone one step further than we’ve seen before. The nose bridge is also modular and independently replaceable. 

The detachable strap makes a more substantial repair easier, too. With it separated from the optics and compute section, we can work on the battery at the back without maneuvering the whole headset around the bench.

Then we hit the glue, with a little disappointment. Electronics manufacturers have come a long way, innovating new methods to get batteries out cleanly. But the solution here is old-school, no sign of stretch-release tabs, easy-peel adhesive wraps, or electrically debondable adhesive. We were able to get the battery out with a little isopropyl alcohol and gentle prying, but we’d much rather see a deliberate release mechanism. 

This little battery board has two solder points, but it’s attached to the headband with a press connector.

The curved, two-cell lithium-polymer pack in our headset is rated at 20.9 Wh. Reviewers say that this translates into 1-2 hours of use; Sean Hollister reports that he hasn’t seen more than 2 hours of battery life, even in battery saver mode. The shorter the battery life, the faster the normal decay of a lithium battery will become noticeable. You can expect you’ll want to replace a battery within a couple years of the life of this headset. 

We won’t yet be selling Steam Frame batteries when parts go live in our store. We hope that will change. Gamers who drop over $1000 on this headset will rightly expect to be able to use it for more than a couple of years.

Clever little connector.

On the bright side, the strap connection invites reverse engineering, and we expect to see the community developing third-party battery packs. It may not be an easy reverse engineering job. Power, audio, microSD data, and services from the rear USB-C port all pass through this tiny port. If one of those functions stops working, this shared connection is a sensible place to inspect for dirt or damage before digging deeper.

Speaking of microSD data, that’s another bright spot in this design: it has an external microSD slot, which makes storage expansion easy. The device comes in a 256GB model and a 1TB model, and you can add up to 2TB via microSD. While it’s not super relevant to repair, we always love seeing upgradeable storage, as it helps keep devices in use longer.

Check out the scan below, thanks to our Lumafield Neptune CT scanner. Can you find the speakers? Beefy heat pipe? MicroSD card reader?

Magnets Behind the Lenses

To keep this thing in use as long as possible, you might need to replace the lenses someday. Index users reported scratched lenses, deteriorating lens housing clouding the picture, and sun-damaged LCDs (don’t let sunlight burn your display through the lenses, like ants on the playground!).

The optical assemblies are refreshingly serviceable. The lenses and displays move on a rail for interpupillary distance adjustment (aka IPD), matching the spacing of the optics to the distance between your pupils. Moving them to their widest setting exposes the screws that give us access. Once inside, we find that the lens stacks are held to the rail magnetically.

Lenses are magnetically attached to the IPD rail.

Lifting a stack off its mount is pleasantly straightforward, though freeing its cables takes more patience. They’re adhered to the back of the LCD, so despite the magnetic mounting, this isn’t a tool-free display swap. Still, once we free those cables, the assembly comes out cleanly. It’s among the most approachable optical-module replacement procedures we’ve seen.

These displays are LCDs, which has bummed out the VR enthusiasts who hoped for micro-OLED. There is a real visual tradeoff. OLED microdisplays make their own light, with the emitting layers built on a silicon backplane. An LCD uses a backlight; its pixels control how much of that light gets through. OLED can produce deeper blacks because a dark pixel doesn’t have a backlight leaking through it. That’s a particularly appealing quality when the display fills your view.

We’d love micro-OLED contrast, but micro-OLED panels are more expensive. Unfortunately, we won’t be offering displays right away, so we can’t say what they’ll cost exactly. But when they become available, we expect the LCD choice will make display replacements less expensive.

For now, we’re glad a broken display can come out without taking the whole headset apart.

Your Eyes Help Decide What Gets Streamed

The Frame has another way to make its wireless picture work: foveated streaming. Maybe you’ve heard of foveated rendering, which has been a feature of headsets for a decade. Foveated streaming operates on the same principle.

The idea starts with the fovea, the part of the retina responsible for our sharpest central vision. Eye-tracked foveated rendering uses your gaze to concentrate rendering detail where you’re looking, reducing graphics work elsewhere in the image. The Steam Frame Unreal Engine offers foveated rendering via variable-rate shading.

Streaming adds another job after the PC renders a frame: compressing and sending the image to the headset. In Valve engineer Jeremy Selan’s explanation, the Frame’s system sends a lower-resolution view of the full scene for each eye, plus a high-resolution region around where that eye is looking. Eye tracking tells the system where those detailed regions need to go.

That allocates more of the available data to the part of the picture you can inspect closely. The surroundings receive less detail, reducing the bandwidth needed compared with transmitting that detail everywhere. An included wireless dongle provides the link to the PC. Foveated streaming doesn’t, by itself, lower the game’s rendering workload on that PC. It makes better use of the connection carrying the resulting picture.

Two inward-facing IR cameras on the inside edge of the lenses, just above the nose bridge, make all this foveated magic happen.

A Long Way to the Fan

Under the optical assemblies, the Frame starts looking more like the tightly packed VR hardware we’re used to. A copper thermal structure runs across both displays. Farther in, thermal compound covers the processor area and cables reach around the motherboard from seemingly every direction.

The board carries 16 GB of SK Hynix LPDDR5X memory stacked over Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Nearby, our unit has 256 GB of SK Hynix flash storage. There is an awful lot of computer in this little space. It’s basically a gaming smartphone strapped to your face.

On the reverse, another heatpipe curls up over the fan. The thermal hardware and fan appear to be separate parts, which is welcome. Getting to them, though, is the problem. Removing the fan takes us past the optics and through the dense internal assembly, disturbing far more hardware than we’d like for a replacement.

The fan is the Frame’s clearest missed opportunity. Blowing dust out of a fan is a normal part of hardware maintenance, and you’ll definitely notice things start to heat up if the fan dies. In fact, the Index had no fan, and it got so hot that a lot of users installed third-party fans in the device’s “frunk.” A moving part that keeps the computer cool deserves the same attention to access that Valve gave the battery and optics.

There’s a more photogenic discovery on the board’s edges: twelve infrared emitters, six on each side. Our infrared camera makes their output visible. These emitters track the boundaries of the play space, even in low light conditions. 

The controller shells have their own scattering of infrared emitters, visible around the top, underside, and stem.

AA Batteries and a Better Way to Read a Thumbstick

The controllers make a particularly welcome choice about power: replaceable AA batteries. Compared with the hard-to-reach rechargeable battery in the Index controller, that’s a huge improvement. 

Because we’re going to be making repair guides from this same device, we stopped at battery removal and used our CT scanner to look inside the rest of the controller. The scan shows a full-size thumbstick soldered to its board. Valve says the Frame uses the same magnetic sticks as Steam Controller, whose sensors use TMR. The sticks also have capacitive touch sensing to detect a resting thumb; TMR measures their movement.

TMR stands for tunneling magnetoresistance, which we dug deep into earlier this year. To understand why we like it, consider what it replaces. In a conventional potentiometer, a wiper slides along a resistive track as the stick moves. Wear and contamination can change that electrical reading, leaving the controller reporting movement when the stick is centered. That’s drift.

A TMR sensor reads a moving magnet without that sliding electrical contact. Inside the sensor, two magnetic layers are separated by an extremely thin insulating barrier. One layer’s magnetization stays fixed; the other’s follows the external magnetic field. Electrons tunnel through the barrier, and the resistance changes with the layers’ relative alignment. The controller can use that changing signal to determine stick position.

So the sensing mechanism avoids the resistive-track wear that troubles potentiometer sticks, thanks to literal quantum tunneling. That doesn’t make the whole joystick incapable of developing drift, but it removes a familiar source of it.

We wish Valve had made the stick easier to replace. It’s soldered in, so changing it will require soldering work rather than simply unplugging a module. Even with less wear on the sensor, we’d like to be able to swap a broken stick without reaching for the iron (though you know we love a chance to get out our FixHub Smart Soldering Iron).

Valve Leaves Us Room to Fix Things

The deeper we got into the Steam Frame, the more we appreciated the repairs that let us stop early. A battery replacement doesn’t require disturbing the displays. An optical assembly can come out without excavating the motherboard. Valve has packed a complicated computer around your eyes and still left room to work on it.

We’d change the battery adhesive, move the fan somewhere more accessible, and make the controller sticks replaceable without soldering. Those are meaningful shortcomings in hardware we want to keep running for years.

Even with those frustrations, the Frame delivers on much of what we hoped Valve would bring from the Steam Deck. When a cushion wears out, a battery fades, or a display breaks, there’s a plausible repair ahead of you. That gives this headset a better chance of staying on someone’s head long after the excitement of its launch has worn off.

Keep an eye out for parts, coming to our Valve Repair Hub soon.