You should undervolt your Steam Deck: Here's why

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What I use with my Steam deck (affiliate):

🧠 Steam Deck SD Card:

🔋 Battery bank:

📺 My 4k monitor (works great with steam deck, has usb-c and power, one cable does everything):

👾 Usb-c dongle to hook up to TV/monitor/external drive/etc:

🔍Steam Deck Screen protector:

🔌 Long charging cable (usb-c to usb-c):

⚡️ 45w charging brick:

🎮 Controllers I use with steam deck:

📀 Internal storage m.2 nvme 2230:

🎹 Wireless keyboard (also works great with mac, can connect to mac and steam deck at the same time and switches with one button push)

🪑sit/stand desk:

[bsmarques]

Here’s a faster strategy to discover your silicon limits: set everything to max (-50mV). Test it. Worked? Good, the end. Crashed? Set limits to ~half (-30mV). Worked? Great, increase ~half (-40mV) and test again. 30mV didn’t work? Decrease ~half to ~20mV…. This strategy allows to jump directly to closer performance and get closer and closer with smaller steps afterwards.

[_BBAGG_]

Correction for how to enter bios, you only need to hold volume up when powering on the device, you don't need to also hold the power button

[Ludecan]

This has to be said more often! Thanks for sharing. I got -20/-50/-40mv but the difference is really noticeable.
Plus more quiet fan and about 15% longer battery life.

[RoyalXSoda]

Did a whole spreadsheet testing out fps in cyberpunk 2077 after watching this video! New to undervolting but its really weird seeing how unexpected the results were. When stress testing, my game crashed at gpu -50 and "stable" at -40. Had launching and loading issues when soc at -50 and "stable" at -40. Cpu was able to go to -50 no problem with cpu intensive games for me. What I DID noticr is that even if you undervolt, lower undervolt did not mean more performance in my testing. Tested for max settings and steam deck settings for me indicated that (tested all undervolt values equal) -10 and -30 offset had the most performance gains if i was concerned about the performance gain over the power consumption and this included increased min fps. Thank you so much for introducing undervolting to me and im so glad that the steam deck is so tinkering friendly for beginners like me. What an amazing device

[Bagasl]

My OLED runs stable with these settings:
-30 mV CPU
-50 mV GPU
-40 mV SOC

Results in the RDR 2 benchmark:

before applying these settings:
min: 16.63
max: 61.5
avg: 47.45

after applying these settings:
min: 24.94
max: 62.9
avg: 48.54

Thank you!

[CUTIE_POXX]

The RAM usage is very different between both testings. Seems like undervolting your device enables RAM to use more power, which is a positive, and performance seems to be about the same. If that means longer battery life and less heat then it's always a good thing. Thanks for this video!

[SuperiorMikeDrew]

I have a launch OLED & straight up put -50 on all of them day 1, it's been stable since launch. Maybe one or two weird reboots were probably caused by it but I just checked and it's still at -50 on all

[Medaichi]

Got -40 -40 -40 on my Steam Deck LCD!! Thank you!!

[xdanny]

Thanks for the video! I undervolted my deck to 30/30/30 and in uncharted the stutters are absolutely gone, way more playable now!! Appreciate the tips 🙌

[prakash]

This earned you a sub. Very unique video. Other youtubers are still making "first things to do with steam deck".

[djlucasd]

Saving up for a Deck, so excited! Saved this video for when I get it.

[rychukot]

I just bought SD OLED 1TB and I consume all your videos about it, haha. Thanks for the tips!

[Dan_Richards_a]

Holy crap and a half. Poe2 ran really rough for me. Wild fps swings from low 40s to 20s. With, of course, the type of jitter you were talking about.

With - 30 across the board, fps is now 40s to mid 50s, no jittery mess. This also allowed the image to be crisper, with upscaling, than before.

This did more for the graphics than any other things. But it didn't make me breakfast in bed.

[TommyCrosby]

I wish we had native stress tools for the Steam Deck, something like OCCT, Furmark or stuff like that.
I haven't overclocked for ages but IIRC, doing stability test which full use the CPU and GPU were always the first step because NO games will fully stress out both CPU and GPU at constant level for long time.
I remember that games could be stable on a system but running a stress test would crash everytime.

[Rouzuki]

Edit: it's watt hours not watt output, that's my bad. Should be good up to 27000 mAh for flights.

A note that might be important about the 140w battery you're advertising for, airplanes generally only allow 100w or less output batteries in carry on luggage (and you cant put it in your checked luggage either).

[SonikTheone]

Did anyone notice that while running the benchmark, undervolted is using 12.5gb ram and the stock is using 10.6gb?

[emeraldnoir]

Thanks. I tested Elden Ring on -20 on all 3 and saw no issues.

[Aethelbeorn]

I just rawdogged -50mV and seems to work out just fine on mine. Played Deadspace for a couple hours and worked.

[Blackbirddc]

I'm getting a Steamdeck after the holidays. I'm definitely doing this.

[postholocene]

thanks for the suggestion. seem to have won the chip lottery for this at least - rock solid stable at -50/-50/-50.

noticeable gains even in poorly optimized games (remnant 2), and everything kind of feels snappier in general. thinking about overclocking now too, although that not be as useful for a mobile device with thermal restrictions like the deck.