This Redditor says it wasn’t even that difficult to get a sub-$100 broken Steam Deck working again with parts from an old Nintendo DS Lite: ‘not that hard at all’

2025-07-18 06:51:00
www.pcgamer.com

It feels like, at long last, at least some technology is moving in the direction of repairability. This is no doubt in large part thanks to the public pushing for the right to repair, which has probably encouraged some companies to make popular products that are very upgradeable and repairable (hello, Framework). Still, I was a little surprised to hear a Redditor call their Steam Deck repair “not that hard at all.”

David recently shared his “$80 Steam Deck” on Reddit (though it looks like perhaps it was €80, which is still well below $100), explaining that they picked up the Valve handheld for cheap after the previous owner had attempted to solder in new buttons and failed. “After many sleepless hours repairing the traces and replacing the buttons”, David says, he also replaced the trackpad for $30 and has finally got it working.

80$ Steamdeck finally complete from r/SteamDeck

I spoke to David to learn a little more about the process, and he says it wasn’t too difficult to get the whole thing repaired. The “botched button replacement” the previous owner attempted had “damaged around 70% of the pads”, but while “it looked rough at first … it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

And while David didn’t have official Steam Deck buttons to hand to replace them with, he did have other handheld consoles to siphon from: “So I just went to lurk into my console graveyard. Luckily an old controller had quite fitting buttons which I just had to modify a bit.”

Interestingly, the Nintendo DS Lite ended up being the perfect fit for the job, at least as far as the shoulder buttons were concerned: “An old Nintendo DS Lite had the same shoulder buttons as the Steam Deck. Since these consoles couldn’t be saved anymore, I’ve desoldered the buttons and neatly put them onto the Steam Deck PCB.”

A Valve Steam Deck that a Redditor has repaired with replacement console buttons

(Image credit: David, Existing_Housing4845 @ Reddit)

After replacing the buttons, the trackpad was next, and unfortunately these were expensive on eBay. But then he found the trackpad being sold on a “shady Chinese website”: “I ended up paying around $30 for the trackpad including shipping. While I did have to wait a couple of months for it, when it arrived it worked perfectly.”

While we might envision somewhat of a Frankeinstein’s monster as the result, looking at the pictures it looks like… well, just a Steam Deck, albeit with a lovely translucent back (that’s really coming back into fashion right now, isn’t it?). And apparently it “works perfectly”, so if ever there was a story of budget inspiration in a world where handheld PC gaming is looking increasingly prohibitively expensive, this would be it!

I did ask David whether there were any parts of the process that were difficult: “The harder part was repairing the broken traces that I had to scratch off the solder mask to expose the copper and then reconnect them. It sounds scary but as long as you have patience and a steady hand, it will be easy.”

Even the difficult part, then, just requires a steady hand.

I also asked what he thought of the Steam Deck in terms of repairability, and he says he thinks did a “pretty good job”: “The Deck is surprisingly more serviceable than most modern hardware and consoles . If there is anything they could improve, perhaps making board diagrams accessible and selling more parts on iFixit.”

The Steam Deck is already (and still, after all these years) one of our favourite handheld gaming PCs, and that’s largely because of how cheap it is. With that extra sprinkle of repairability in the mix (board diagrams and more spare parts) it would shop up the other more expensive handhelds, as great as they are, in very unequivocal terms.

For now, though, it seems the occasional shady site might be required for those replacements. Still, you can’t argue with a little over $100 all-in for a Steam Deck, can you?

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