NewQ Steam Deck Kickstand Dock

It's great to see new and Innovative products coming into the Steam Deck accessory market, however, some of them are definitely better than others.

Thanks to NewQ for sending the kickstand dock over for us to have a look at it.

First off, the kickstand isn't the easiest to pull out, especially when it's on the deck however it does clip on incredibly quickly and easily, my only bugbear is about the way it clips on, as it hooks into the fan outlets, although it doesn't seem to effect the airflow, however, the positioning of the dock is what concerns me, not only the position of the dock but also the dock connector wire, why there isn't an easy way to tuck that away and why it wasn't top mounted with a much shorter cable I do not know.

The kickstand does hold the deck in an extremely nice position for watching or playing content directly on the screen and it's very stable and it does actually look quite cool.

The next problem though is it has two USB 2.0 ports, to put that into perspective you can see it caps my disk usage at 40 megabits per second but if I connect it to say the official dock I can actually pull over 130 megabits per second on the usage, so USB 2.0 is not the most useful if you're going to be using an external SSD but if you are only going to be using it for something like keyboard and mouse then it's not going to be a huge problem for you.

NewQ USB 2.0 Connected SSD

Official Dock USB 3.0 Connected SSD

If you are still using the official Dteam Deck case then you have no chance of fitting it with the dock connected. You can take the dock off and have a look at trying to tuck it into the back plate of the case under the strap and it is fairly stable because of the lips on the dock, but it doesn't look great.

If you have the JSAUX carry case it does actually fit inside the case if you take it off and put it underneath the bottom section or open the bottom section up and place it inside but you have no room for any other accessories.

When it comes to using this as an actual dock it's perfectly run of the mill apart from these USB 2.0 ports. You are able to get the HDMI connection just fine, power distribution is perfectly capable of 100 Watts pass through so you will be able to get the 45 Watts required for charging the Steam Deck.

From testing my fear of the hotspot is confirmed with running Fenyx Rising for a good 15 minutes we see temperatures up to 87 degrees C for both the CPU and GPU with a fan hitting 6700 RPM, but if we take the kickstand dock off and run it for the same 10-15 minutes we're a good 2-3 degrees lower with the fan 1000 RPM less. So unfortunately, covering that hotspot is going to make it run hotter and the fan a bit faster also being a little bit noisier.

The price point for this is around the mid-range at £35 pounds or $ and you can pick on up using this link.

We have been told there is an upgraded version coming in the next couple of months with USB 3.0 ports but we have yet to see more details on it to see if the cable issues have also been addressed.