iFixit on Steam Frame: repairable, but the fan is buried too deep

iFixit has torn down Valve's Steam Frame headset and largely praised its repairability — with one notable caveat.

The optics-and-computing unit detaches from the headband, which houses the battery, speakers and mounting pads. The soft face and rear inserts and the nose bridge can be replaced independently — a solution iFixit says it is seeing for the first time.

The lenses and displays sit on a rail for adjusting interpupillary distance and are held magnetically, so a broken screen can be pulled out without taking the whole headset apart. The catch is that the cables are glued to the back of the panel, so the swap won't be quick or patience-free.

The device is powered by a 20.9 Wh battery, and that's where the compromises begin: it's glued in with no pull tabs. They managed to extract it with isopropyl alcohol and careful prying, but iFixit would have preferred a proper removal mechanism.

The biggest disappointment was the fan: getting to it means working past the optics and densely packed internals, and a routine dust cleaning turns into serious surgery. For a moving part that cooling depends on, that's a clear misstep — all the more so because the Index had no fan at all, and that ended in overheating.

There are good decisions too. The controllers run on swappable AA batteries instead of the hard-to-reach built-in battery used in the Index, and the sticks rely on tunnel magnetoresistance sensors, which lowers the risk of drift. An external microSD slot lets you expand storage up to 2 TB. One downside: the sticks are soldered to the board, so replacing them will require a soldering iron.

Parts for the headset will show up in the iFixit store later, and batteries won't be among them at launch — with the headset priced above a thousand dollars, that's a complaint of its own, since the battery wears out within a couple of years. iFixit sells parts for Valve hardware under a partnership, but stresses that Valve did not review the editorial conclusions of the teardown.

Image: Valve Corporation Public domain

Translation editors: Соловьев В., Пеков А.