OLED Steam Deck Undervolting tested: Better battery life, performance and lower temps
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- čas přidán 29. 11. 2023
- Check out tomtocs carrying case for both the deck and deck OLED:
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What I use with my Steam deck (affiliate):
🧠 Steam Deck SD Card:
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🔋 Battery bank:
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📺 My 4k monitor (works great with steam deck, has usb-c and power, one cable does everything):
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👾 Usb-c dongle to hook up to TV/monitor/external drive/etc:
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🔍Steam Deck Screen protector:
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🔌 Long charging cable (usb-c to usb-c):
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⚡️ 45w charging brick:
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🎮 Controllers I use with steam deck:
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📀 Internal storage m.2 nvme 2230:
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🎹 Wireless keyboard (also works great with mac, can connect to mac and steam deck at the same time and switches with one button push)
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🪑sit/stand desk:
amzn.to/3LqL76s - Věda a technologie
The battery is nice. I played Half Life for 40 minutes today and noticed it only went down 8%! I know it’s not that demanding of a game but still! ❤
I'm confused you didn't mention the battery life gains?
It's probably only a few minutes longer under load.
@@kohiekweird , on the lcd deck people mentioned gains of 1h and sometimes more
yeah i did some testing and saw what looked like minor improvements, but its hard to say, i'd guess anywhere from 3-15%
I’ve accepted that the more I try to modify the steam deck, the less time I’m actually playing games on it. I’ll still use the built in TDP adjustment when I need to, but I’ve decided I’m fine just playing, then charging, playing, then a charging, and so on.
thats me, i bought the steam deck to play games and thats what im doing
I’m curious if we can bump up the memory to 7200 M/Ts on the OLED Steam Decks.
Another thing to mention about the TomToc case, arguably the biggest benefit over any other case, and the reason I bought mine is that it can fit the Steam Deck + Killswitch case. I don't know of any other cases off the top of my head that can do that, and definitely not while being so slim.
ohhhhh good point!
The case the deck comes with fits the killswitch and steamdeck inside no problem....
Does it fit the jsaux case?!
@@Olemrac11 Not really. It can fit, but it's a tight squeeze. Even then, you still have a bigger and more bulky case. The TomToc case is barely any thicker than the Steam Deck itself, and fits the Deck+KillSwitch comfortably.
@@Drivenby Sorry, I don't know that one. Only own the Killswitch case. I would imagine that it could though.
This is pretty interesting. But i think ill abstain from doing this on my Deck since the gains are admittedly pretty minimal. And even so the OLED is already a pretty big improvement over the LCD.
I wonder if we will ever get actual overclocking on the oled like we used to have on the lcd
The fun part begins haha, I've gotten -50c on CPU and GPU with -40 on SOC. I noticed the deck can lock at 1600mhz on GPU which is probably where the small performance increase is
Ty for this vid! For anyone looking in to battery life for games. With -50 for all settings, i was able to squeeze about 15-16 minutes per game: Wind Waker 3hr 46min at 30 fps. 50% brightness; Elden Ring 2hr45min at 30fps and Football Life 2024 (PES2021 mod) 2hr 16min at 80fps
Thanks, exactly the information I was looking for!
Cool. I love hardware getting pushed!
Me too!
Thanks for the comparison!
you can take the inner case out of the steam deck case and you get a much slimmer case, the outer shell is just velcro'd on and the zipper is par of the inner shell
only on the 1tb model, mine is the .5 tb model and you cant remove the sleeve
@@sam.alexander.reviews didn't know they were different cases!
@@DDraceeyeah unfortunately only the 1tb or LE come with that case. I wouldn’t have used it on my 512 now 2tb anyways but would have been nice to have.
I've seen someone recommend the Horizon Zero Dawn benchmark, to test the undervolt stability. Apparently its great at catching instability
If you own the game it is an option. But honestly only if you were planning to play it anyway. Otherwise you have a huge download and associated waiting time just to benchmark. I went with mprime and Unigine superposition which are both free and quick to install.
Hi Sam which Games do you Recommend to Stress Test the Steam Deck only Borderlands 3 and Cyberpunk comes to my mind because they have separate Benchmark as option.
cyberpunk is great, i'd recommend running the most demanding games like cyberpunk or elden ring, if you want to install a seperate benchmark program, that would be great too
Thanks I have the 512gb version and -40mvolt works for me too. I got on average +1 extra frame, used Cyberpunk to test it.
The OLED being that much cooler, temps wise, isn't too surprising. If you've seen GamersNexus' teardown of the OLED, Valve's engineers basically redesigned the entire mainboard from the ground up, removing a lot of redundant components, going from 4 LPDDR modules to 2, having fewer VRMs and MOSFETs, etc. All of those heat generating components aren't there anymore. Also, I'm really glad I found this video. I didn't know Valve had implemented undervolting as part of their own BIOS. The tutorials I had seen had to use a third party utility called Smokescreen.
Yup! I used smoke screen when I last undervolted a while ago, much easier now
Excellent coverage! I love that Valve added this to the BIOS.
This has been a fun pastime on laptops, too.
Quick notes others may find helpful to avoid crashes later on.
Don't just stress test at max load. I've had laptops stable at full load that crashed under light loads after undervolting.
When undervolting like this, without a curve editor, you're applying the -40mV across every clock speed and voltage point the system already has defined, even low clockspeeds.
Also, silicon _can_ degrade over years, especially with high heat, and require +10mV later.
Have fun!
I'm missing the part where you compare the battery life. You have some data to share? Otherwise good video
at -30 -30 -30 i dropped temps from 72c to 70c playing persona 5 with 200 percent scaling to shift load on to gpu. no gains in performance though, fan speed reduces and i find actually some games run better at 3w where i think before they needed 4w. i played cue club 2 yesterday at 3w and was averaging 12 hours battery life at 50 percent brightness, just insane.
however at -40 -40 -40 in my persona 5 test i noticed average framerate dropped by about 3 fps and the frametime graph was way less stable, fans reduced further and cpu clocks seemed to peak far higher now but performance was effected, clearly not stable. going back into bios and changing gpu offset to -30 while keeping the cpu and soc -40 fixed the persona issue for me and in fact i didnt just have my 3fps back i gained 1 more fps too and frametimes were super stable.
Sounds like some degree of clock stretching was happening or something. Also if you do plan make sure to test performance at low battery. I had a decent performance drop when at low battery if undervolted when playing baulders gate on an undervolt that seemed otherwise stable at higher battery %
@@Demon09-_- ive not noticed any performance drop at low battery... but to be honest ive not gone below like 30 percent before plugging in, thanks for the heads up ill drain it off a bit and see if it holds up.
You deck it the matte screen one? And with a glossy screen protector?
glossy with a glossy screen protector!
Which game/benchmark into the game better/enough to use for stability of system tests?
I use a few different ones but the red dead 2 bench mark or cybuerounk both work well
Punk *
@@sam.alexander.reviewsok, thanks!)
Are there really any risks in undervolting? Lol
I’ve never heard of anyone messing up their systems by undervolting.
Now that I say that I don’t want to undervolt my oled lol
There’s an extremely low chance that the device won’t be stable to boot into bios to reverse the undervolting, and resetting BIOS also failing somehow. But I think you could still take it apart, the bios should reset without a battery connected.
@@Akaos88 The firmware before the one that allowed undervolting had some safeties introduced to supposedly prevent exactly that. My guess is that undervolting is only applied after POST
You can corrupt your data though if you crash while writing into it.
yeah not really as long as you go slowly, you reallyy will just cause crashes, i do think there's a small chance it wont be stable enough to boot, but thats really only if you rank it to the max undervolt right from the start IMHO
I tried this yesterday and went straight to -40 in all 3 and I can’t say 100% is stable because I don’t have big games beside D4 but never crashed yesterday.
Still I’d stick with -30. So nothing bad happens
@@dio8070 nothing happens is just like working on a pc if by any SMALL chance your device gets a black-screen all you need to do is do a CMOS reset its a safety feature valve added.
@@Ragnar0321💯 👍🏻
awesome!! yeah take those gains
I can only get -20 -20 -20 on my OLED without getting random game crashes. I can run benchmarks at -40 across the board. However while playing games like Outer worlds, Little Nightmares, or Cold Steel 3 after playing for 10-30 min before it happens.
Notice any difference at -20?
Not sure yet lol right now trying to figure out what is stable. Not sure how much of a difference its going to make framerate or battery wise. I've had some more luck lowering SOC to -10 I think that might have been some of my issue.@@alex1212456
yeah thats pretty standard I'd say, on my LCD model that was about where i was too
Try keep cpu and undervolt the other two further
Someone told me that SOC was very sensitive I'm attempting -30 -30 -10 now@@yuxia2019
Undervolting helped alot on my LCD Deck because the battery was not that great, Red Dead Redemption 2 was one of the games i played where it chugged through the battery so fast, Undervolting and TDP Limiting helped me out and i get 1 Hour and 30 Minutes of battery. After getting my OLED i immediately undervolted to get the absolute most battery i can possibly get. Will also mention Undervolting got me much more consistent target framerates for many demanding titles.
Hey, I’m kinda digging your t shirt pattern 😂 where is it from?
yoooo thanks! thrift shop 😂
Feels like Radeon is always big clock swings for little actual result
Pull out the inner liner of the steam deck carrying case if you own the 1TB OLED
Why is that? Is there extra protection in the 1TB version?
Any idea on how to automate the benchmarking?
Nah I don’t but if you figure it out let me know because I want to
Is there a risk of bricking the Deck with undervolting?
Like if you can't even turn the power on?
yeah there is, its pretty low especially if you take your time and only under volt a little at a time, but it could happen
OK, thanks.
I've read some reddit posts about this and seems like -20mv is the average stable.
I'm currently using that for all three.
I’m at -50 on the lcd model no issues yet playing horizon zero dawn
Stable at -50mV with 3-4 fps and 4c-5c cooler
I change the backplate JSAUX RGB and i get - 10 temperature
What temps are your vrms and m.2 ssd?
Really useful video thank you. This is definitely just me but little feedback, the music choice in this video was a bit off-putting to me. Nothing wrong with the beat but with headphones on the frequent 'whisper' voice was really distracting (and definitely wondered where it was coming from). Great video, just my feedback 🙏
thanks for the feedback!
How does undervolting improve performance? Doesn't that mean that your system is running with less performance? Where are the gains coming from?
Kinda a complicated answer, long story short it’s limiting power from places that don’t need it so other places can use it
@@sam.alexander.reviews Interesting, you would think that it's the GPU and CPU that are the limiting factors which need the power the most
Part of it is the whole system being cooler, so that it can push max-clock frequencys more constant increasing the average framerate.
reduces voltage at the same frequency, meaning lower power usage/temps so there is room to boost to/hold higher frequencies more of the time
TLDR It's because of the silicon lottery. Not all Cpu and GPU cores are of equal quality when made (Google " Cpu die wafer yield" if you want to know why) . And some chips need a slightly higher voltage to operate than others. Since valve (or anybody else for that matter) cannot test this to dial in individual voltage offsets. A general voltage is decided on that's should be stable across all. Hence if you're lucky. You can get one that works at a Lower voltage than others with undervolting.
So I guess it's safe to assume that Valve did a good job with (at least) an OLED version of the Deck, since undervolting doesn't actually provide any real benefit, especially compared with what we've seen in the past with some of the GPUs/laptops.
yeah agreed, it still does help but not as much as i'd hope (but thats kinda a good thing since most people wont ever undervolt)
It's cool that you're using your Apple watch to monitor your video
right?? its actually really helpful even though its a TINY screen
My LCD did triple minus 50mv. My OLED is not as good undervolter, it does 10 50 50.
You have to win the cpu lottery to get the performance boost
yeah its luck of the draw :/
Wouldn't it be better to first test gpu, then cpu, then soc = testing all three at the same time seems rather like a lot of hassle.
Increase shared vram from 1G to 4G and you get better performance yet
He put a note when he displayed his settings that the 4gb setting doesn't sit well with RDR2, hence it's at 1
what about temperature and battery life?
How is it that every youtuber i see is able to undervolt -40mv while my Deck Oled starts having crashes in games at just -20mv? I bet that your Deck is not really stable at -40mv, try to play some intensive UE5 games like The Invincible or Switch emulation for a couple hours, not just some benchmarks for few minutes
Silicon lottery is a thing my friend
@@shariarrahman7562yeah but -40mv is unrealistic unless you don't really know how to test for true stability.
Bro I'm stable at -50mV on my old SD and I've done a lot of ocing so I know stable
i cant speak for everyone else, but i've been playing the most intensive games i have for the past week or so, haven't had any stability at -40
including looping a CPU/GPU benchmark for hours while i was asleep. silicon lottery my dude
One minute into the video and it siund like its not even worth watching or doing what's to be explained. Fantastic
While charging plugin steam-deck increase performance fps
does it? i dont think so? or at least not in my testing
How much more battery life did you get in elden ring on the oled. Are we talking like 10 minutes or something more substantial.
i haven't done the official test yet, but its substantial, if i had to ballpark it i'd say it went from 1.2 hrs on the OG deck, to around 2 hrs (again i haven't done a full 100-0% test yet, but its significant)
@@sam.alexander.reviews great I'll try it out on my OLED deck. Oh can you do a specific elden ring test for me what's the battery life with elden ring with HDR at max brightness before and after undervolting would greatly appreciate it
I can run -40 -50 -50 stabile.
Battery Life??????????????
...the liner that comes with the steam deck can be removed and used as a slimmer case by itself lmao
That’s only available on the 1TB OLED models I think. But I agree.
only on the 1TB option 🤙
Elden Ring
Undervolting “could” help FPS but will definitely introduce input lag, a lot of input lag.
oh really? hows that? i wasn't aware
@@sam.alexander.reviews within the APU there’s a separate IO Micro processor. All of the units inside the DIE requieres a designed voltage. Undervolting can lead to throttle and stutter as transistors become slower. Micro Stutter can occur when the APU can’t match its designed communication speed with the vRam and Cache. Input lag happens as micro stutter gathers up during gameplay (batches of data gathering waiting to be released).
Frame rates “seemed” to be faster, but it’s just an illusion for the FPS software you’re using. As micro stutter occurs, frames are being skipped which leads to higher frame rate.
Just think of it as you adding (FPS SKIP) to a retro console to make the game playable, but you can definitely notice the game skipping frames and the controller lagging. Tho the FPS counter will report higher FPS. But it’s all a misunderstanding from the software not being able to counter for FPS SKIP.
90% of the OLED Steam Decks have a defective headphone jack. 20% have an inferior brand lower quality screen.
What is a “defective headphone jack”?
Where are these stats cited from?
@@SkylerFuhrman people not having bluetooth headphones. The inferior brand is only built into the limited edition.
@@SkylerFuhrmanthe headphone jack causes static even when no sound is playing but ive seen people say that they are getting this after updating their lcd decks as well so it may be a software issue
I've soley used wired headphones (Sony xm5) since the launch of the OLED..i haven't had any issues