Up until today, if you wanted a handheld gaming PC, the most recommended device has been Valve’s Steam Deck. Even through the releases of all of these modern handhelds from the likes of Lenovo, MSI, and Asus, the Steam Deck was the one that everyone, myself included, would recommend due to its ease of use, overall hardware and software experience and, most importantly, its competitive price. Well, unfortunately, that recommendation has come to an end because Valve, in one of the most un-Valve moves, has dramatically increased the price of the OLED Steam Deck.

In the U.S., the 512 gigabyte variant is now $789, and the 1TB variant has ballooned to a whopping $949. I won’t even tell you the prices up here in Canada because it’s a harrowing sight to behold. A thousand dollars for a four-year-old handheld. Now, we all know why this price hike is taking place. It’s the same reason all tech products—computer hardware, specifically—are seeing price hikes. Because of the billionaire parasites that are circle-jerking over their precious data centers, gobbling up the world’s RAM supply and artificially inflating their prices to continue shoving their AIs down our throats.

If you’re in the market for a handheld gaming PC, the best course of action would be to wait until things (hopefully) stabilize. However, with how things are going, that wait could be longer than initially expected and things might get worse from here on out. So, what are your options? Well, if you want a high-end PC handheld and have about $1200 to burn, the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and the ROG Xbox Ally X are what I feel you should be eyeing.

I wouldn’t even look at the Legion GO 2 because Lenovo are taking RAM-ageddon a bit too seriously and have lost their damn minds with their price hikes. I’ve had the Claw 8 AI+ for over a year now and it’s become one of my all-time favourite tech purchases. It still gets regular updates and is powerful enough to play every triple-A game. Both it and the ROG Xbox Ally X are yet to be hit with price hikes as of writing so I’d suggest pulling the trigger soon.

If, however, you need something around the $500-$600 mark, then I’d say you have two options. You could get the less powerful but still viable base ROG Xbox Ally. Or—and this would probably be the better bang for your buck—you could look into the second-hand market and get Asus’s last generation, non-Xbox ROG Ally X, which is still plenty powerful (even more so than the base Xbox Ally) and should hold up great, even today. You could also consider getting a used Steam Deck, but only if you can find an OLED variant for less than $500.

Things are looking pretty grim in the PC hardware space, but here’s hoping all the madness comes to an end soon.