I Upgraded The Steam Deck - 16GB vs 32GB of RAM.
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- čas přidán 16. 05. 2024
- A Steam Deck with double the RAM... What does this actually do?
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Update for anyone asking about the possibility of an OLED upgrade -
Right now there is no source for higher density chips for the OLED model. I've been told Micron will soon be making these chips available for sale soon.
Also, I'll have links to all the parts I use with the Steam Decks - as well as some shops if you'd like to upgrade your Deck.
Big thanks to Ridge for sponsoring this project and allowing me to pickup another Steam Deck for testing. Thanks again for watching.
What chips did you use?
Please do a video when they do! Would love to see a 32GB mod on an OLED.
The original memory was Hynix. I installed Samsung. I re-soldered the jumper. After this, there is no image on the built-in screen. There is an image via HDMI. The screen is intact. The screen cable is intact. What could be the problem? Flashing BIOS doesn't help
The original memory was Hynix. I installed Samsung. I re-soldered the jumper. After this, there is no image on the built-in screen. There is an image via HDMI. The screen is intact. The screen cable is intact. What could be the problem? Flashing BIOS doesn't help
just shooting the shit here but is there any chance of a 48 or 64 gig mod on either version of the deck?
While not much of a difference outside of ram-heavy games, this could be a no brainer for someone that uses the deck both as their gaming machine and their desktop pc.
Most of the current Linux users are software developers or academic researchers in tech related fields. 16GB is perfectly fine for working over ssh at a server. GUI application can use port forwarding. If none of these phrases makes sense to you, you really shouldn't be using Linux as desktop pc.
Hopefully at some point Linux has a distro that's actually friendly to general public.
Steam deck is desktop lol. That’s cool
@@patrickH206if you never max out more than about 13gb (which is the usable ram shown) yeah, power users need more.
@@Saif0412 I have sniffed at the limit of 64GB, but i blame Windows 11 for that
@@tokehgekko9455😂
I think for most cases you fix this issue with just having lower quality textures... In Cyberpunk I find it kind of absurd that it defaults to "high textures", when it is actually quite hard to appreciate that level of detail on 800p... I reduced the textures to medium and a lot of the stuttering disappeared. I don't always think that throwing more hardware at the problem is the right way to go. It's a balancing act. And I think most gamer's need to acknowledge that medium textures look really good on a Steam Deck. :)
This
Phenomenal work with this explanation! I couldn't agree more and truly thank you for sharing! 💪🤓
it’s a $600 device i shouldn’t have to worry about that
I have an OLED on order and videos like this get me more comfortable with my purchase 👍👍👍
Same!!! I was considering getting a used LCD model when I saw one at CeX, but deep down I wanted the OLED and went for a new one!
I ordered a refurbished one for 299 euros. I think it's still a great option for the price. The oled version was to expensive for me, especially because I have a desktop computer at home that will do the majority of my gaming tasks
I just bought one yesterday and I’ve been doing nothing but looking at Steam Deck videos and tutorials. I’m so excited man.
@WavyMac i truly hope you enjoy it! Its so awesome and fun to use!
I bought an oled a month ago, no regrets I love it
i just wanna give you props for 2:28 i was like which is which? saw the plates and went "oh!" lol
I'm talking about PC here but imo in -current year- EVERYONE should get 32gb of ram for gaming. I'm constantly surprised but how many games happily use more than 16gb when they have access to it. Also, using Hogwarts: Legacy is just cheating. That game will devour 32gb of ram and still have the audacity to crash regularly LOL
16gb should be enough just for gaming now, but normally we never have just the game running, we have other apps that eat the ram, so 32gb would be the safepot for now. For steamdeck, steamOS specifically where you can only be doing 1 thing at a time, 16gb ram is just fine.
Going 16 instead of 32 doesn't save a lot of money these days, so it almost doesn't make sense to just get 16GB.
But purely from a technical perspective, it's far more useful to increase from 16 the 32 on a shared memory device like the Deck. On desktop the GPU will usually have its own memory and most games are fairly economical about system memory usage.
Dont want to burst your buble but steamdeck is a pc.
16gb is fine for most gaming workloads. Handhelds should be at 24gb or 32gb just so more ram can be allocated to the GPU
16gb plenty. Not everyone games at high details and resolution
Excellent video! Been looking for info about this for a while!
Would really love to see more comparisons (Especially modded Fallout!) and maybe even emulation.
Finally - someone tested the difference!! Thank you for putting the effort in. Would love to see more 🤘
This is exactly the question I had when I started seeing these 32 GB mod videos. Thanks for taking the time to address these questions. Definitely interested in seeing how this affects desktop mode in RAM heavy apps and emulation. I'm also curious to see the effects of increasing the memory allocated to the GPU on the upgraded deck. Does the custom bios allow you to allocate more RAM than the default bios? And if it does, how does it affect performance and stability in games that can make use of the additional memory?
Wow, I loved this video. Super well made, and your voice and presentation are top notch. Thanks for the info about the 32GB!
Nice video. Good production. Really like the nice touch of putting the mari on the cars plate
you should have tested games that are known for being a problem with 16GB
like avatar: frontiers of pandora and alan wake 2
or maybe crunk texture up in some recent AAA, usually if u have enough vram/ram high texture is a free visual upgrade.
Finally video comparing the performance of Steam Decks was something I was curious about, seeing how the tuned version stacks up against the unmodified one
I think you could increase fps even more if you could increae the UMA buffer size to 8gb alongside applying cryoutilities swap fixes.
Emulation tests would be neat. TOTK eats through ~14 gigs total from the start on Ryujinx as I recall it, even crashed my steam deck
Will you be making a tips video for the Rog Ally ?
Finally somebody did some actual benchmarking! I would love to see if a ram upgrade makes any difference for the oled model
how much of the ram does the custom bios allocate to the igpu?
Please do follow up( in reference to the 6 minute mark question) I'd love to see what you bring to the table, I most definitely subscribed!💪🤓
Good video. I enjoy tweaking hardware and thinking outside of the box.
3:55 game ?
It's called Midnight Fight Express.
Thanks!
Where did you get those Thumb Stick Covers at 0:05
now how does this perform on windows 11? can you use the upgrade to its potential?
Would love to see more AAA games with higher texture settings that max out the 8gb VRAM allocation limit on Steam OS as well as 1% lows and how much of a reduction in stuttering and frame times. Great video nonetheless, was wondering about doing the upgrade. 👍🏽
Finally some updates fot this mod, thanks!
Good video. I'd like to see at least 24GB on the Ally 2, Legion go 2, and Deck 2.
Why? I rather get better APU or faster memory
@@MrQuay03 Because after testing so many games on the Rog ally, working around the 16GB has been the biggest problem Ive had so far. Having a faster APU is nice but if its still bottle necked from not enough system ram, it wont make new games run that much better than the previous model.
Great video and the red/black skin on your Oled looks badass
Dbrand
Awesome, THANK YOU. Like you say, tons of videos on doing the swap, but none actually show performance.
I did the research on how to upgrade the ram. it requires pulling off the ram modules off the main SOC and soldering in new RAM modules.
No thanks. Ive pulled my steam deck down fully, replaced plates, cleaned the button contacts, replaced trigger springs, changed and swapped out SSDs and am a person who loves how easy it is to pull the SD down. But that? Nah son, if I have to solder in new RAM modules obtained from a questionable source id would rather wait for SD2
My Steam Deck always overflows with RAM when playing God Of War, is there any way to completely fix it?
IIRC, the steam deck has quad channel memory, so allocation would be 4 gig blocks and I believe it is 1 gig to GPU by default. This is then dynamically adjusted to find balance that gives the best performance while leaving a little free for background and misc. tasks.
Definitely interested in an emulator follow up video!
Why you dont press keys on your screwdriver? :D
Can’t you replace the cpu/gpu chip?
how do you make a red steam deck grip stick?
3:55 what game is this?
you should try comparing the 512gb and 1t b of storage, thats if it's even possible for you within your budget, I'm curious about buying one myself but with like lots of storage personally for me
Star citizen, ARK ( old and new ) and heavily modded Skyrim and fallout 4 are the only games that come to mind that will greatly benefit from 32GB of ram. In most cases you’ll run out of VRAM way before system ram if you sticking with 16GB.
In steamdeck CPU and GPU use the same memory pool
Any chance that faster RAM can be installed? I feel like that would make more of a difference.
What game is this at 5:44 ?
How would this do with a lcd deck running windows trying to play cal of duty? I hit 30-45 fps in warzone 3 .. rather play on my gaming laptop and hit constant 120fps but modding my deck would be cool and more portable than laptop
what is the music in this video?
wow what an amazing video i thank you sir
Which steam deck was starfield bricked on?
Why not oled with ram upgrade?
it would be interesting to see how's the performance on rpcs3 or xenia (i would like to see Sonic Unleashed performance on rpcs3 since it's a game that a lot of pc's can't run it well, on xenia runs good tho)
The ram upgrade seems to help but if your goal is more fps notice the vram usage was basically the same it looks like there's a built in cap on vram no matter what which makes senses because when you look it up steam and everywhere else says it caps out at 8gb of ram which could mean it doesn't share 50/50 no matter what their might be a way around this or maybe not the gpu probably can't handle more than 8gb due to low power and cooling if you add better cooling with a way to supply maximum power for the cpu and gpu that they would typically use in a pc then it could be way better I think what should be done to see the max performance is hook the gpu up to a pc with the pc ram equivalent of a steam deck and see what happens
Good vid, subbed
Did Valve gave some date on when they'll release steam deck 2?
Whats the game on 3:55 ? Thx
I dunno how/why RAM/VRAM would make a difference, but if you look @ 3:23 the GPU clock on the LCD32 is nearly DOUBLE the LCD16 and OLED16 and the CPU clock is about 200mhz higher. Maybe it's bottlenecked on swapping so it's clocking the CPU/GPU lower since it's waiting for data transfer? The CPU also seems to be using less power at a higher clock speed on the LCD32 vs the other two as well. This isn't seen necessarily in the other games, just in BeamNG, so maybe in VERY RAM heavy situations only.
Hi! I'm a pc idiot. Why is hades running at almost 400 fps? That seems excessive or wrong? Thanks!
I thought the same thing (they dont show performance) and finally someone did it
4:00 What game?
Cryo utilities is sufficient which doesn't require any hardware upgrades aside from the SSD.
Agreed, cryo utilities really helps with no hardware upgrades necessary.
Cryoutilities helps but SSD is nowhere near as fast as RAM, constant paging to and from the SSD will cause stuttering.
Whats that martial arts game you played called?
This is what I wanted to know
Midnight Fight Express
A test with an NVMe with good constant writes and a SWAP partition (not as a file because of overhead und please no ZRAM since it's inferior) compared to the modded 32GB model should be nice. Also many tweaks are available in that matter: like RAM page compression with ZSWAP (zstd with z3fold is a no brainer) and max ratio (standard should be 20-30%). Meaning you can compress RAM pages in real time (If i remember zstd is used at level 3) with zero performance lost before them even being swapped in the first place.
THIS NEEDS TO BE TESTED. Looks like you really know your stuff.
So one question about ZRAM, you say it's inferior, but I've seen people say it's better than what SteamOS was using before, so what's going on there? Why is it inferior / superior?
@@cheater00 ZSWAP also compress ram pages even before them being pushed toward either a swap file or partition. So for example if you choose a small swappiness, 1 for example to only use swap at the last resort, it will still compress unused ram pages. ZRAM is limited in that matter since it only compress ram pages virtually. ZSWAP is used by standard on newer Kernel. Nowadays ZRAM should only be used on very limited devices with verry little or slow disk space.
@@InternetD1991 so zswap is basically zrwm that can swap out?
@@cheater00 More or less: yes. I recommend the Archlinux wiki an its commented sources in that matter.
You should test out; Last Epoch, Ratchet & Clank. These games are ram heavy, test it for longer periods of time.
I'd be interested to see how the RAM in the OLED performs if put in the LCD.
interesting!
Finally someone who test the performance of 32gb mod
What game were you playing after Hogwarts at min 3:55 ??
Midnight Fight Express
Please could you consider testing Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West? HZD usually has good framerates but then it also loves to get stuttery and I wonder if this fixes it.
I would appreciate this a lot!
There's also another test that you could run.
So currently games that need more than 16 gigs of memory will spill over into the ssd for virtual memory. But there's something in the works called ZRAM, which SteamOS 3.6 uses by default, which instead of using SSD, just "zips up" memory and keeps that "zipped" data in the ram. So it would be interesting to see if this is helped by the 32 gig mod, and if maybe the algorithm needs to be tuned for 32 gigs.
The difference will be clear only in AAA games that's vram hungry. Try to put textures or image quality at the highest possible setting to see the difference. Also, does this custom bios allow you to dedicate 8 gb to vram? If not, I don't see the benefit because I don't think it can use 50% of ram for graphics only...
Iirc the RAM vs VRAM on the Steam Deck is not 50/50. By default the Deck is configured to use 1GB of VRAM in the bios, and you can configure it up to 4GB.
The BIOS setting is the minimum amount that the GPU is allocated, and will automatically increase if it needs more and the CPU isn't using the extra RAM.
it's not the 1GB limit VRAM, but instead hard limit of how low the VRAM can be. You can image it as a container that have faucet on both ends, whichever fills faster will take more of the RAM, but the BIOS setting is to make sure that the VRAM will not take less than the specified amount.
1GB is is the default minimum allocated VRAM, you can increase the minimum allocated VRAM to 4GB. Steam OS has the ability to use beyond the minimum allocated VRAM to a max of 8GB. That's about half the total system RAM.
Give Star Citizen a shot. Since 3.20 or so it's gotten a bit more memory intensive so it would be a solid test.
5:18 game name?
it surprises me how the Steam Deck can struggle managing its 16GB of RAM, while the PS5 and Xbox Series X run the exact same amout like it's no deal, and before anyone says it's because power well that'd be even more reason for them to struggle even more since they're way more demanding which would also require way more RAM, specially in 4K where a TON of VRAM is required, like over 10GB, leaving even less for system, how do those ones manage their RAM
They don’t have separate isolated RAM and VRAM in traditional sense at all.
Their GDDR6 video ram equally accessible to CPU and GPU at full speed at all times. Some very small amount are may be dedicated to strictly GPU / CPU but in general they use it as one big pool
Steam os id more hesvy than console operating systems
Thanks, like you I see everyone doing this upgrade but nobody shows results..
3:56 What game is this please?
Also want to know!
Midnight Fight Express
i really want to see how this handles dragon's dogma 2. that game seems to be mostly memory bottlenecked on the steam deck
What game is that @ 3:58?
Midnight Fight Express. Awesome Beat 'em up, kind of like John Wick on steroids.
@@BaNeArroW You are CLUTCH, thank you! I've been trying to figure out what it was for nearly 24 hrs! Thanks again!
With all the AI assistive graphic processes I don't think you're going to see any graphical issues in future steam decks, the technology for graphical upscaling it's getting really good to the point where nobody's going to know what's happening.
I tried upgrading my laptop ram to 32GB and unfortunalty the videos on youtube didn't fully cover the tricks and ended up screwing both my ROG Ally and my Flow x13 laptop. Very sadly scratch the pads underneath of the ram chips and screwed up the MB. if you are trying to upgrade please verify your capabilities as it is a very sensitive process and you may end up in full dissapointment like I did.
3:55 what Indy fighting game is this ?
I got interested too, and started searching for it, LOL. Its called Midnight Fight Express.
@@senshimak thanks for this.. just got it on Steam
What is the game in 3:58?🙏
Midnight Fight Express
I would like to say what about Re4 remake with a 32 ram steam deck
Given you have to allocate 4gb to vramr, you are only left with 12gb of usable ram . So a bump to minimum 24gb would be nice.
My key takeaway from this video is: Wow, does 720p ever look terrible.
Id watch some emulation testing on them.
Finally! Some 'deditated WAM' benchmarking
what is WAM?
@@cheater00 WAM is WAM. 'Deditated WAM'
Just look up "SuperKai64"
What’s this game? 3:55
Please make follow up videos!
what is the game at 3:55?
Midnight Fight Express
Man I am curious what Deck 2 will be like
same as now , but with a stronger APU and probably a smaller dye for better efficiency and battery life
Audio sync is off
What’s the game at 5:41 ?
Just Cause 2
@@brc4423 Thanks for the reply! I might give that game a go on the steam deck.
You should have tried Dogma 2
The oled is Amazing
Just cuz you have the computing capabilities doesn’t mean you have the cooling capabilities
The original memory was Hynix. I installed Samsung. I re-soldered the jumper. After this, there is no image on the built-in screen. There is an image via HDMI. The screen is intact. The screen cable is intact. What could be the problem? Flashing BIOS doesn't help
An then a better screen and processor was released.. 16 is enough for the power.. This is an exercise
Test Undisputed🥊🥊
32gb OLED next?
A 32GB OLED would be really interesting
Should test Alan Wake 2. Alan Wake 2 literally won't run on the Steam Deck because of the 16GB of VRAM minimum. It throws an error and you have to add a flag to the epic games launcher for it to ignore that check so that the game will load
I will save this for 5 years in the future
1:45 what game?
Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
@@BaNeArroW i appreciate the reply but i meant the game right after
@@Novak596 Ah I see. I Gotcha mate. That one's Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. Awesome western shooter!
@@BaNeArroWthanks duuude
@@Novak596 Glad to help mate! Happy gaming!
Uh, Starfield hasn't had an update since March 6th...
i wish I ever get a steam deck, it became my biggest dream now
It is absolutely worth it
should upgrade the Oled to 32gb and then compare the performance between all 4