Depends a lot on the type of games you want to play. AAA or competitive FPS probably gaming PC. Older games, casual, indie, etc. SteamDeck is great.

I have to say that the SteamDeck brought a lot of fun back to gaming for me. Everything's in one package, it's portable, I can play docked or lay in bed. I can suspend it and come back whenever.

I've mainly played the Witcher 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Noita, GC roms, Disco Elysium, Dishonored, and Stardew Valley. Some of those games I've owned for a long time and I never played them until I got the SD.

But it does make a great streaming device/glorified controller too when I want to run more demanding stuff on my PC.

You're being down voted, but it's the truth. Depends a lot on the particular computer though. The biggest consideration is personal value of mobile gaming.

Aside from that, it is damn hard to beat a steam deck in performance at the same price, but if you can stretch to even a bit most gaming desktops will handely out perform one

Depending on your definition of “gaming”, it definitely can be for some folks

I love my deck, but yeah, if OP can get a full desktop, I'd recommend that first. More scalable over time.

My biggest problem after owning a deck for a year is the controls. If you like to play PC games designed around a mouse and keyboard the deck is just a chore. I struggle to play games on my deck when the controls make playing the game take far longer than on a PC where I can quickly hover my mouse over things or click and drag. Yes it has trackpads but it's definitely not the same experience.

That said if it's a console first game then it usually works pretty well.

It kinda is tho. You can even connect a monitor, mouse and keyboard to it if you want to.