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.
@@darkemperor418sadly this is not true anymore. 1. Cryoutilities has not been updated since a long time, therefore it's not taking into account all the new changes and improvements of the latests version of SteamOS. 2. The main purpose and little FPS boost you were getting from Cryoutilities was the creation of a swapfile, but SteamOS 3.6 has implemented that since then. So if you run Cryoutilities now you will create an useless swapfile of a few GBs. If you want to recover those GBs I recommend the video of MonroeWorld about SteamOS 3.6.
@cqllel5186 You're doing something wrong. Please refer to the steam support page for Steam Deck - Basic Use & Troubleshooting Guide, you only need to keep the volume + button held to go into BIOS. I start by Holding the Volume + button and tap the power button to switch on the device, I only let go of the volume + button after the BIOS menu shows up.
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
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.
@oswaldoculo OLED, but my LCD Deck actually overlooked more. With it I got -40/-50/-50. Not sure which revision my LCD was, but it must have been 2nd, I got it like a year after release.
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
@lmaoroflcopter you're one of the lucky ones. It doesn't happen often, but i can definitely recall my system crashing 2-3 times in the past. Ive never under volted and run a very stock system. I think it depends how demanding the games that you play are. You could just be very lucky.
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!
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!
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).
Let's be honest. You can. It's recommended that you don't. I had a laptop in my checked bag the last time I took a flight and I had a 100w power bank on my person. Nobody came and asked me how many watts it is.
@@ThorGodofThunder420 You can do a lot of stuff you're not supposed to. While I agree, you're unlikely to ever be asked (I was asked once at a Japanese airport), if your battery ends up pillowing up or anything on a flight, the consequences are probably not a slap on the wrist.
In America, TSA is not responsible for checking the capacity of your battery banks, that is a rule set out by most airliners, and they aren’t really at liberty to search every passenger bag looking for a power bank that isn’t allowed lol
@@amdy7783 You're not going to get caught before you get on the plane 99.999999999%. But if your Aliexpress quality battery pack decides to throw a spicy fit on the airplane, you might be in for much more than you bargained for in the aftermath since it's above the stated allowance.
@@KM-hk8tc Its highly unlikely that the oleds are going to ever go on sale. The only times the LCD deck went on sale is bc of steam anniversary and recently black friday where they are prob trying to clear inventory. if u want you can wait until christmas and if it doesnt go on sale its highly unlikely its going to go on a summer sale.
Do you think the legion go is better than the steam deck? I order my steam deck and a friend of mine is telling me it’s not compared to the legion go so now I’m like conflicted lol hopefully I can get a reply from you
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 🙌
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.
if you need a game to max the deck out use no man sky 7 days to die or a similar open world game with fast moving vehicles. Turn shadows up to high to tax the gpu and start flying on a new ungenerated planet as fast as possible or use a motorcycle in 7 days to die on a singleplayer instance moving fast in an open world game is the best way to stress test cpu and ram overclock at the same time IMO synthetic benchmarks make you use more voltage/heat for a scenario that never happens. Palworld with a 15 pal base being raided is also a fantastic way to test if its not stable it will crash in seconds if you starve the SOC of too much voltage.
On the other hand, since you're primarily using the Deck for gaming, an test artificially pushing limits you will, by your own admission, never push at the same time, means that you'd be holding back performance for phantom crashes that will never happen. Better to test your most demanding CPU game and your most demanding GPU game, and one that pushes them both for good measure. If you don't get any crashes there, who cares if some synthetic benchmark would in theory crash the system?
@Xbob42 the Deck has multiple issues* with games crashing by itself due to the nature of the games being non-native to Linux and having to pass thru Proton. The more and more you add modifiers like OC/Undervolt, you add more chances to have bugs happening, making things even more complex to find your issues. Making sure the hardware is fully stable would, therefore, help a lot in the problem diagnosis. *I'm not saying the Deck is unstable or problematic, just that when something happens, it is more related to compatibility bugs than others.
If you want to skip to just how to undervolt, yes, but I also think it’s good to know what you’re doing and what the results might be which is what I was saying earlier in the video
@ThorGodofThunder420 Yeah, had to dial it back down to -30, started getting random crashes that needed a complete power off and on to fix. Going to experiment further.
Just grabbed a 1TB OLED to "upgrade" from my LCD first batch deck. Never messed with this before so will do it on the new beast! Subbed, appreciate the content man
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.
Isnt there a chance of bricking? I remember someone saying that you could brick the Deck by doing this and only way to unbrick it is to reflashing the bios. Just wondering cuz i dont want to mess with something if i dont completely know the risks
It’s not worth it based on the benchmark. The FPS increase is nonexistent and power consumption is 0.5W lower. You can achieve it by lowering screen brightness 🤣
i mean there's always a chance, but if you go -10 at a time, that risk is incredibly low, i mean incredibly low. and even if you skip to -50 on all, its still a relatively small undervolt so i'd be surprised if it bricked devices, but if you were trying to brick it, thats how you'd do it.
@@ProtectusCZ The point of the benchmark wasn't to increase FPS, how did you watch the video and come to that conclusion? How do you look at something for 13 minutes straight and come away with such an incredibly wrong conclusion? Oh wait, you probably skipped ahead, didn't listen to a word that was said and then made this comment. "FPS increase" jesus dude he says "1% low increase" like 30 times in the video, and that can increase by nearly 30%, just watch the video.
After extensive testing, I couldn’t even get -10 without crashing all over the place, even having graphical glitches just on the Home menu, troubles booting up the system, etc. I really won the lottery here…
I think I managed -50mV on all right off the bat and it seems stable. Will have to play more but Death Standing on max settings is stable even during more intense scenes.
be nice to hear valves opinion on this I get the feeling they wouldn't recommend it. thought if it is purely a silicone lottery issue why the voltages are all set in a way that makes them stable.
well i got -40mV on everything first try on my LCD 64gb (1tb ssd installed) steamdeck and i think ill just leave it at that since it didnt crash after cpu stress test and max settings gaming
Hey, hopefully you can shed some light for me, there's currently a sale on steamdecks, about 330 for 512gb LCD, while the 512 oled is still 550, do you think the oled is worth an extra 200 bucks? without the sale the 100 buck differential would be more tempting, but 200 cheaper is hard to pass up on
If you're actually willing to spend 550 on a handheld I would go for the Lenovo legion go tbh. If you still want a steam deck I would go for the LCD version. The OLED is cool and all but not worth the $200 extras, but 330 sounds fair.
OLED deck here, also able to run steady -50mv. Don't have super demanding games, however, able to run ultra on horizon no crashes (27-30 fps) . Also did a few hunts with mhw, no crashes (~60 fps). Awesome so far!
I set everything to -40 and it seems fine with my testing (GTA IV) I wanna push my luck and go all the way but I'm too lazy so I think I'll just keep it this way lol.
I don’t recommend messing with this stuff in the bios only thing you should do is up the umd frame buffer to 4g from 1g it improves performance but don’t do what this guy is saying this can’t result in you breaking the steam deck
I don't recommend people being scared of the BIOS. It's a normal thing to tinker with and "breaking" a device via the BIOS would require a lot more than a minor undervolt.
There is more to this than meets the eye, stability can be compromised in a couple of ways, its not just does the game/system crash and if not you are all good, you really need to test various games to see how the system behaves, for example i was in a save room on persona 5 and dabbled with undervolting, at -40mv across the board the game dropped 5fps but it was completely ''stable'', knocking that down to -30mv across the board got me my 5fps back and perhaps another 2-3fps more but if you was not aware of your exact performance before hand you may not realize there was a drop at all and just think everything is gravy.
I’d say legion go because it’s more powerful and has halo sticks that basically never wear out. You’ll have stick drift on the steam deck before the legion and it’s hard to fix.
@JonathanSwift-h2t what is in the steam deck much more user-friendly remember I'm not a PC person I heard dealing with Windows 11 is a lot of headaches
Does undervolting affect other power modes? like if i set the steam deck to 5w instead of 15w would any problems start happening compared to 5w with no undervolt
great question! short answer, they do! long answer, because each APU has variance, they kinda apply a general undervolt but with testing, we can give a more accurate undervolt
Because they won't test every Deck about their silicon lottery. It is too much work to be done right. Nobody does this,. It is nice they let you do it so easy.
Silicon lottery. The way chips are made means that they have a range of possible performances per volt. Valve sets the values to a baseline that is guaranteed to be reached by every Steam Deck sent out to the market.
1% lows basically represents the 1% lowest framerate you can get during a gaming session, on any game. The higher the lows, the less stuttery the game feels.
So you won’t see improvement to battery life or any improvement to fps. How ever what you will see is dips in fps being less shallow. If you’re using 15w then it doesn’t matter if it’s 4v 3.75a or 5v 3a it’s 15w how ever this will balance your voltage curve/spikes so you’ll drop to less extreme low voltage due to more stable v cause by using a low voltage compared to input.
Also most of the improvement besides the one percent lows are not really happening it’s a Mandela effect you mind plays on you to help you work harder.
I love your vids man and I've def been seeing you more and more in my suggested. As someone who also has long hair, man def stretch your hair ties a bit before you put them on your wrist lol I can feel the pain of those wrist marks haha I hate when that happens.
@sam.alexander.reviews they do!! Haha gotta wrap both hands in one and then open your hands to stretch them out a bit 🤣 that's what I do. Not sure if I'll under volt my sd though but I do like this 😁
pulled the trigger today on a 512 GB Oled SD, after selling my complete setup 5 months ago. i’m so excited because with the little time i have to play, i cant stand sitting down on a setup no more after working 8 hours on my job and some more on my business. hopefully the steam deck will spark my joy for gaming like my psp did back in the day !
Same here man! Just got outta check out couple minutes ago on a 1 tb oled. with a 1 year old, another baby on the way and other responsibilities there's barely no time to sit on a couch in front of a TV. Hope this SD sparks the joy that I know for sure I'm going to have! Happy Gaming/Holidays!
I have a launch lcd… pretty old now. I can get -20 on everything. I prolly could do better if I adjusted individually… I feel like my gpu was the weak link here cuz at - 40 everything ran fine untill I got into the rdr2 bench… at -30 it would start the bench but crash a few mins into it.. at -20 perfectly stable… seems like -20 isn’t bad though since Iv seen posts on Reddit talking about -10 being some peoples limits
very nice of you to link to a 256 gb ssd for people to upgrade their 512 ssd to. also, undervolting is far more important on a desktop, compared to the ridiculous differences you attempt to showcase here. very sloppy video and a first strike in my book.
-50 on my gpu was just fine. But Playing cyberpunk and just watching the performance monitor it seems like -30 was much better. I test i turned up the graphics to ray tracing medium and would run a little under 20 fps, not very playable but just to test, setting the gpu to -50 ran fine but only 8 to 12 fps. So going to much definitely made performance worse. Both were just fine on the steam deck preset graphics in cyberpunk.
I ended up setting all 3 voltage offset to -30 and gpu max speed at 1700, cpu at 3700. I am very happy with the performance. It is noticeable. The clock speeds very rarely go above the default max speeds, but occasionally do, at -30, -30,-30 mine is great, I use fantastic on decky and in games like cyberpunk i run the fan curve very aggressive to keep everything cool, i don't care about noise or battery. If i play simple games like getting over it, or creeks, or otherwise non demanding games and running on battery i set the fan curve to default. The way i see it, if i am playing games like cyberpunk or fallout 4 then i will be plugged in anyway so power use is not a concern and the fan is an easily replaceable item if i wear it out. It normally runs 7000 rpm when i play with my custom fan curve.
And fyi, in cyberpunk i set my max fps to 50 and graphics settings to steam deck, but then turn on ray tracing. It runs around 40fps most of the time and i am happy with that. I have not tried without ray tracing to see what fps it would get. 40 seems smooth enough for my eyes.
not that i'm aware of, it actually should reduce the overall ware of the APU because it wont produce as much heat, but overall i'd say long run system health should be unchanged. (unless you undervolt way too mcuh and you're getting a lot of crashes (like daily), then it might be bad)
anyone tried this with cryoutilities and larger swap file? i’m pushing for highest fidelity possible while locked at 40 (i find it smooth enough and the visual hit many games take to get up to 60 fps is just too much) great vid btw!!
You may want to clarify that undervolting can DAMAGE the hardware and REDUCE the performances of the hardware. This is Physics 101... You are cutting the gas to the engine, the engine WON'T GO FASTER, it will go LEANER and more STABLE. This is in a nutshell what undervolting does. On top of that OVERCLOCKING after undervolting is like starving someone for sugar and then asking them to go run a marathon... A great way to put stress on a system. If you reduce the voltage going to the CPU, Power is still the same because physics say so; as such W=V times I; which means the Wattage output is still the product of the voltage multiplied the current; and since you reduce the voltage, that means that the current flowing in the circuit will raise, to maintain the same 15W output. This is why it is important to explain WHY it is dangerous to not go UNDER or OVER the specified voltage of an electronic component. If you reduce the voltage too much, there will be too much current in the hardware that may damage components that are not made to work with that current value; and on top of that you cause instabilities in the system because the transistors may not activate correctly, causing current fluctuations (which means in layman terms crashes in the os or shutdown or hangs). The benefits of undervolting are what you mention: a more STABLE system and less heat, which in turns EXTEND THE LIFE of the components. But the Deck won't go FASTER; you still have 15W and the CPU and/or GPU speed may even go LOWER than the usual working speed as result of a lower voltage supplied to the APU Just be careful with the values used; as not every Steam Deck is the same because the components inside are not from the same EXACT BATCH, so you may end up with slight differences that may cause problems or even damages.
Reduce the performance, possibly yes. Cause damage? No. Screw your physics, this is electrical engineering 101: Heat, physical defects and overcurrent is what kills components, there is nothing mechanical in electrical circuits that breaks from a lack of power - they just simply won't run.
@@Yuzuki1337 Heat is part of thermodynamics, which is part of physics. Ohm's law is part of physics. When you force more current in a system by changing either the resistance or the voltage you are varying Ohm's law... Physics exist either if you believe in it it or not. Mechanics has nothing to do with this; you try to run something that require 2A with 3A when that component is not made for that current and tell me if it pops or not. Why do you think LED require a resistor, even if you use the appropriate voltage? Why do you always see capacitors around power sections of most circuits and voltage regulators? The smaller is the current you deal with, the smaller is the tolerance for the delta in the current; this is not an industrial motor that can take + -24V and 6A variations; this is a game system that works at 3.3V and 5V for most part, with some components working at 1.2V with a tolerance that is quite low. While you have shutdown transistors that safeguard the circuits, you can always get passive current damaging small components like capacitors or resistors here and there; and eventually you blow up the bigger components. Happens with overclocking where heat literally eat up the components like you see in an incandescent bulb where the filament become thinner and thinner until it breaks; and it happens in a very smaller scale if you undervolt too much. Every electronic component is made of physical materials that have physical electrical properties and safe specs; every time you go beyond the specs tolerance you are risking to damage them. Plain and simple. The fact something won't happen to you does not mean it won't happen. As long as people are aware of the risks, they can make the call themselves.
He said probably the worst thing can happen is reset of your device. Imo this undervolting is less risky than playing with stock defaults on game that causes your system to overheat.
My steamdeck sucks ass. Smooth 30fps on all my games. Great. Go play it the next day and i'm down to 10/15fps every 30 seconds or so. Seems like I now have a very expensive paperweight.
Just a heads up, It’s 100% common for people to undervolt desktops as you lose barely any performance(if any) while dropping a decent amount of heat. Kinda surprised you didn’t know that
1% lows are the least amount of fps the game can get If the game has 10 %low and 60avg fps then it will stutter a lot and be unenjoyable But if %low is 40 or more the game will be much smoother and stutters might not exist
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.
Don’t forget cryo utilities 😉
@@darkemperor418sadly this is not true anymore.
1. Cryoutilities has not been updated since a long time, therefore it's not taking into account all the new changes and improvements of the latests version of SteamOS.
2. The main purpose and little FPS boost you were getting from Cryoutilities was the creation of a swapfile, but SteamOS 3.6 has implemented that since then. So if you run Cryoutilities now you will create an useless swapfile of a few GBs.
If you want to recover those GBs I recommend the video of MonroeWorld about SteamOS 3.6.
There are stories that -50mV bricked the Steam Deck, and they weren't able to get back into the bios
@@kohiek in new bios versions, when the CMOS is reset, the undervolt is also reset
This is what bothered me about this video. He said what to do but was admittedly "too lazy" to do it himself.
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
Thanks
good to know! works either way :)
Yep!
Just tried it. It only opened BIOS when I held the power button
I held vol up and pressed power button once and it just booted up normally
@cqllel5186 You're doing something wrong.
Please refer to the steam support page for Steam Deck - Basic Use & Troubleshooting Guide, you only need to keep the volume + button held to go into BIOS.
I start by Holding the Volume + button and tap the power button to switch on the device, I only let go of the volume + button after the BIOS menu shows up.
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
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.
Nice, that's a really good undervolt!
What steam deck do you have? First revision, second or oled?
@oswaldoculo OLED, but my LCD Deck actually overlooked more. With it I got -40/-50/-50. Not sure which revision my LCD was, but it must have been 2nd, I got it like a year after release.
Gonna test this in my oled
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
Tbh mine is stock and I get weird reboots every now and then as well, so may not be related.
@@Vanilla_Jocan second this
Mines a stock launch lcd. Never undervolted and I've not had any weird reboots.
Ive had 2 lcds and 2 oleds and they all have there own weird qualities like random shutdown its just the os
@lmaoroflcopter you're one of the lucky ones. It doesn't happen often, but i can definitely recall my system crashing 2-3 times in the past. Ive never under volted and run a very stock system. I think it depends how demanding the games that you play are. You could just be very lucky.
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!
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!
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).
Let's be honest. You can. It's recommended that you don't. I had a laptop in my checked bag the last time I took a flight and I had a 100w power bank on my person. Nobody came and asked me how many watts it is.
@@ThorGodofThunder420 You can do a lot of stuff you're not supposed to. While I agree, you're unlikely to ever be asked (I was asked once at a Japanese airport), if your battery ends up pillowing up or anything on a flight, the consequences are probably not a slap on the wrist.
In America, TSA is not responsible for checking the capacity of your battery banks, that is a rule set out by most airliners, and they aren’t really at liberty to search every passenger bag looking for a power bank that isn’t allowed lol
@@amdy7783 You're not going to get caught before you get on the plane 99.999999999%. But if your Aliexpress quality battery pack decides to throw a spicy fit on the airplane, you might be in for much more than you bargained for in the aftermath since it's above the stated allowance.
You can absolutely put a battery in your checked luggage. It advised not to but definitely not forbidden
I just bought SD OLED 1TB and I consume all your videos about it, haha. Thanks for the tips!
Haha excited for you! I do the same when I buy a new piece if tech
What made you buy now and not wait for a few months? Only asking as I’m on the fence to buy now or wait until summer sale (for SD OLED(
Same here. Waiting on mine.
@@KM-hk8tc Its highly unlikely that the oleds are going to ever go on sale. The only times the LCD deck went on sale is bc of steam anniversary and recently black friday where they are prob trying to clear inventory. if u want you can wait until christmas and if it doesnt go on sale its highly unlikely its going to go on a summer sale.
Do you think the legion go is better than the steam deck? I order my steam deck and a friend of mine is telling me it’s not compared to the legion go so now I’m like conflicted lol hopefully I can get a reply from you
Got -40 -40 -40 on my Steam Deck LCD!! Thank you!!
Did anyone notice that while running the benchmark, undervolted is using 12.5gb ram and the stock is using 10.6gb?
This earned you a sub. Very unique video. Other youtubers are still making "first things to do with steam deck".
Thanks for the sub! Appreciate the support! 😄
I had no issues with -50 on all on my OLED model so far, tested in Elden Ring DLC
Thanks. I tested Elden Ring on -20 on all 3 and saw no issues.
What steam deck?
@@empebe Black SteamDeck OLED.
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 🙌
I just rawdogged -50mV and seems to work out just fine on mine. Played Deadspace for a couple hours and worked.
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.
I hear ya, it would be nice to have a built-in stress tool!
if you need a game to max the deck out use no man sky 7 days to die or a similar open world game with fast moving vehicles. Turn shadows up to high to tax the gpu and start flying on a new ungenerated planet as fast as possible or use a motorcycle in 7 days to die on a singleplayer instance moving fast in an open world game is the best way to stress test cpu and ram overclock at the same time IMO synthetic benchmarks make you use more voltage/heat for a scenario that never happens. Palworld with a 15 pal base being raided is also a fantastic way to test if its not stable it will crash in seconds if you starve the SOC of too much voltage.
Just download a Linux copy of furmark and use stress-ng.
On the other hand, since you're primarily using the Deck for gaming, an test artificially pushing limits you will, by your own admission, never push at the same time, means that you'd be holding back performance for phantom crashes that will never happen.
Better to test your most demanding CPU game and your most demanding GPU game, and one that pushes them both for good measure. If you don't get any crashes there, who cares if some synthetic benchmark would in theory crash the system?
@Xbob42 the Deck has multiple issues* with games crashing by itself due to the nature of the games being non-native to Linux and having to pass thru Proton. The more and more you add modifiers like OC/Undervolt, you add more chances to have bugs happening, making things even more complex to find your issues.
Making sure the hardware is fully stable would, therefore, help a lot in the problem diagnosis.
*I'm not saying the Deck is unstable or problematic, just that when something happens, it is more related to compatibility bugs than others.
video starts at 5:00
Video starts at 0:00
Damn 5min to get to the point
Thanks man
If you want to skip to just how to undervolt, yes, but I also think it’s good to know what you’re doing and what the results might be which is what I was saying earlier in the video
The hero no one thought they needed.
this is a "Here's why" video with instructions lol. the video starts at 0:00. instructions start at 5:00 **
5:00 for tutorial
Bruh thank you lmao
Looks like I won the Silicon Lottery, -50mV on all 3.
Been playing Elden Ring for about an hour with no issues
Any issues yet?
@ThorGodofThunder420 Yeah, had to dial it back down to -30, started getting random crashes that needed a complete power off and on to fix.
Going to experiment further.
Looks like the undervolted one was using more ram. That may be why you see the improvements.
yeah i noticed that too, any idea why that might be?
@@sam.alexander.reviews yup, was wondering why would it use more ram
I believe the under Volt actually provides a bit of headroom to boost up other elements as things aren't fighting for power as much
My LCD can do -50/-40/-50. The GPU on mine can't do -50, i get graphical glitches if i set -50
Same here, same settings
same exact settings for me as well on my lcd
Just grabbed a 1TB OLED to "upgrade" from my LCD first batch deck. Never messed with this before so will do it on the new beast! Subbed, appreciate the content man
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.
got -50 on all 3 and tested stability using cyberpunk, thanks for the tutorial!
Congrats on landing a sponsor wiht UGREEN! I love their batteries. I got one and I charge my work laptop and my Steam deck on the go!
Isnt there a chance of bricking? I remember someone saying that you could brick the Deck by doing this and only way to unbrick it is to reflashing the bios.
Just wondering cuz i dont want to mess with something if i dont completely know the risks
It’s not worth it based on the benchmark. The FPS increase is nonexistent and power consumption is 0.5W lower. You can achieve it by lowering screen brightness 🤣
i mean there's always a chance, but if you go -10 at a time, that risk is incredibly low, i mean incredibly low. and even if you skip to -50 on all, its still a relatively small undervolt so i'd be surprised if it bricked devices, but if you were trying to brick it, thats how you'd do it.
@@ProtectusCZ to each their own! +27% improvement to 1% lows alone is worth it for me personally
@@ProtectusCZ The point of the benchmark wasn't to increase FPS, how did you watch the video and come to that conclusion? How do you look at something for 13 minutes straight and come away with such an incredibly wrong conclusion?
Oh wait, you probably skipped ahead, didn't listen to a word that was said and then made this comment.
"FPS increase" jesus dude he says "1% low increase" like 30 times in the video, and that can increase by nearly 30%, just watch the video.
I bricked once my deck doing UV, then i must buy programer to load bios again, there is the way to do this, but this was very stressfull for me
After extensive testing, I couldn’t even get -10 without crashing all over the place, even having graphical glitches just on the Home menu, troubles booting up the system, etc. I really won the lottery here…
Needed this! Getting my white steam deck tue! Thanks man
I'm getting a Steamdeck after the holidays. I'm definitely doing this.
thank you for sharing for this, I can’t believe that I’ve got-50 -50 -50. still playing for an hour now with RDR2.
congrats! same here 🥳
Bruh no way
My SD LCD took -40mv just fine. Didn't noticed any temp improvements but my min fps did actually improve in Cyberpunk.
What game will be the best for testing? 😅
Either a AAA game or a benchmark tool
I think I managed -50mV on all right off the bat and it seems stable. Will have to play more but Death Standing on max settings is stable even during more intense scenes.
What am I doing wrong?
I've managed -50 on all with no issues. But no matter how I set it up I get worse performance than running at stock voltages.
I used to do this to gaming laptops and integrated graphics its a great way to keep the device from overheating
i wish my steam deck was stable at default bios settings
be nice to hear valves opinion on this I get the feeling they wouldn't recommend it. thought if it is purely a silicone lottery issue why the voltages are all set in a way that makes them stable.
I have -50 for all 3 and it was tested on Rise of Tomb Raider.
well i got -40mV on everything first try on my LCD 64gb (1tb ssd installed) steamdeck and i think ill just leave it at that since it didnt crash after cpu stress test and max settings gaming
Hey, hopefully you can shed some light for me, there's currently a sale on steamdecks, about 330 for 512gb LCD, while the 512 oled is still 550, do you think the oled is worth an extra 200 bucks? without the sale the 100 buck differential would be more tempting, but 200 cheaper is hard to pass up on
If you're actually willing to spend 550 on a handheld I would go for the Lenovo legion go tbh.
If you still want a steam deck I would go for the LCD version. The OLED is cool and all but not worth the $200 extras, but 330 sounds fair.
LCD will serve you fine.
OLED deck here, also able to run steady -50mv. Don't have super demanding games, however, able to run ultra on horizon no crashes (27-30 fps) . Also did a few hunts with mhw, no crashes (~60 fps). Awesome so far!
Can you share your settings in MHW?
Does this work on a regular Steam Deck or just the OLED version?
Thanks for the tips bro and have a happy thanksgiving!!
You too, man! Hope you get some good eats. 🦃
I set everything to -40 and it seems fine with my testing (GTA IV)
I wanna push my luck and go all the way but I'm too lazy so I think I'll just keep it this way lol.
hey that thing you did with the text during the ad, it made the text very hard to read
Ah, I’ll try to do better next time!
you sounds so much better when you're not talking right up to the mic imo
Is this real or just placebo?
Well I tested with a benchmark 5 times each way and averaged the results sooo
it's real, most AMD GPUs get improved performance from undervolting, that's why it works on the Steam Deck
I don’t recommend messing with this stuff in the bios only thing you should do is up the umd frame buffer to 4g from 1g it improves performance but don’t do what this guy is saying this can’t result in you breaking the steam deck
I agree about the frame buffer, the reason I didn’t have it on 4gb for this video is because it has problems with rdr2
I don't recommend people being scared of the BIOS. It's a normal thing to tinker with and "breaking" a device via the BIOS would require a lot more than a minor undervolt.
Just did -40 on all 3 on my OLED, works perfectly fine. thanks :D
So what is the difference in u dervolt between the bios option and the steam menu?
There is more to this than meets the eye, stability can be compromised in a couple of ways, its not just does the game/system crash and if not you are all good, you really need to test various games to see how the system behaves, for example i was in a save room on persona 5 and dabbled with undervolting, at -40mv across the board the game dropped 5fps but it was completely ''stable'', knocking that down to -30mv across the board got me my 5fps back and perhaps another 2-3fps more but if you was not aware of your exact performance before hand you may not realize there was a drop at all and just think everything is gravy.
has anyone played stalker 2 after undervolting?
So I’m guessing you could use mods on gta and rdr on steam deck ?
Cela Baisse t'il les performances en jeu ?
My LCD runs Cyberpunk at high better now and I put everything at ~50... DAMN
I'm still thinking about getting the steam deck and the legion go can you help me with this decision I'm not a PC person is on sale for $500
I bought both and neither is better, it’s a preference thing, I have another video on the deck vs the legion, check it out!
I’d say legion go because it’s more powerful and has halo sticks that basically never wear out. You’ll have stick drift on the steam deck before the legion and it’s hard to fix.
definitely legion go if its not the oled sd
Dob't buy legion go steam deck is will be supported for very long time the community is awesome no viruses on linux
@JonathanSwift-h2t what is in the steam deck much more user-friendly remember I'm not a PC person I heard dealing with Windows 11 is a lot of headaches
can u make a tutorial for legion go? pls
Arent these settings in the staem menu, on the right side?
I managed to get -50 on all three, The only time it crashes is if I try playing call of duty on Windows.
Will give this a try!
Does undervolting affect other power modes? like if i set the steam deck to 5w instead of 15w would any problems start happening compared to 5w with no undervolt
Does this work for LCD model?
I wonder if this helps on the OLED version…
Yup
I'm holding down the power button and volume and the same time and all it does it flash and noting happens
why does valve not do this by default?
great question! short answer, they do! long answer, because each APU has variance, they kinda apply a general undervolt but with testing, we can give a more accurate undervolt
Because they won't test every Deck about their silicon lottery. It is too much work to be done right. Nobody does this,. It is nice they let you do it so easy.
Silicon lottery. The way chips are made means that they have a range of possible performances per volt. Valve sets the values to a baseline that is guaranteed to be reached by every Steam Deck sent out to the market.
Stability
Can someone explain to me what a 1% low is?
He explains in the video.
But in a nutshell it’s when the game is stuttering and running laggy.
I should have explained that better! It’s the slowest 1% of frame rates. Aka your stutters and freezes in game
1% lows basically represents the 1% lowest framerate you can get during a gaming session, on any game.
The higher the lows, the less stuttery the game feels.
How do you get RDR2 to run in Saint Denis at a stable 40fps?
Dude. Are you related to Glen Powell???
I was thinking Jeff from naked and afraid
Does this also work on Ally X with Bazzite?
Anyone tried this with the 70hz trick for the lcd?
Would this work for the Lenovo legion go?? New sub by the way
Subscribed. Thanks bro!
Thank YOU 🫡
Why wouldn't they give us this option out of the box in the steam menu or though decky loader?
So you won’t see improvement to battery life or any improvement to fps. How ever what you will see is dips in fps being less shallow. If you’re using 15w then it doesn’t matter if it’s 4v 3.75a or 5v 3a it’s 15w how ever this will balance your voltage curve/spikes so you’ll drop to less extreme low voltage due to more stable v cause by using a low voltage compared to input.
Also most of the improvement besides the one percent lows are not really happening it’s a Mandela effect you mind plays on you to help you work harder.
I love your vids man and I've def been seeing you more and more in my suggested. As someone who also has long hair, man def stretch your hair ties a bit before you put them on your wrist lol I can feel the pain of those wrist marks haha I hate when that happens.
Hahaha the new ones HURT
@sam.alexander.reviews they do!! Haha gotta wrap both hands in one and then open your hands to stretch them out a bit 🤣 that's what I do. Not sure if I'll under volt my sd though but I do like this 😁
Yikes I won the lottery!!
pulled the trigger today on a 512 GB Oled SD, after selling my complete setup 5 months ago.
i’m so excited because with the little time i have to play, i cant stand sitting down on a setup no more after working 8 hours on my job and some more on my business.
hopefully the steam deck will spark my joy for gaming like my psp did back in the day !
Same here man! Just got outta check out couple minutes ago on a 1 tb oled. with a 1 year old, another baby on the way and other responsibilities there's barely no time to sit on a couch in front of a TV. Hope this SD sparks the joy that I know for sure I'm going to have! Happy Gaming/Holidays!
glad to hear it brother. good luck and happy holidays to you and your family !
I have a launch lcd… pretty old now. I can get -20 on everything. I prolly could do better if I adjusted individually… I feel like my gpu was the weak link here cuz at - 40 everything ran fine untill I got into the rdr2 bench… at -30 it would start the bench but crash a few mins into it.. at -20 perfectly stable… seems like -20 isn’t bad though since Iv seen posts on Reddit talking about -10 being some peoples limits
very nice of you to link to a 256 gb ssd for people to upgrade their 512 ssd to.
also, undervolting is far more important on a desktop, compared to the ridiculous differences you attempt to showcase here.
very sloppy video and a first strike in my book.
-50 on my gpu was just fine. But Playing cyberpunk and just watching the performance monitor it seems like -30 was much better. I test i turned up the graphics to ray tracing medium and would run a little under 20 fps, not very playable but just to test, setting the gpu to -50 ran fine but only 8 to 12 fps. So going to much definitely made performance worse. Both were just fine on the steam deck preset graphics in cyberpunk.
I ended up setting all 3 voltage offset to -30 and gpu max speed at 1700, cpu at 3700. I am very happy with the performance. It is noticeable. The clock speeds very rarely go above the default max speeds, but occasionally do, at -30, -30,-30 mine is great,
I use fantastic on decky and in games like cyberpunk i run the fan curve very aggressive to keep everything cool, i don't care about noise or battery. If i play simple games like getting over it, or creeks, or otherwise non demanding games and running on battery i set the fan curve to default. The way i see it, if i am playing games like cyberpunk or fallout 4 then i will be plugged in anyway so power use is not a concern and the fan is an easily replaceable item if i wear it out. It normally runs 7000 rpm when i play with my custom fan curve.
And fyi, in cyberpunk i set my max fps to 50 and graphics settings to steam deck, but then turn on ray tracing. It runs around 40fps most of the time and i am happy with that. I have not tried without ray tracing to see what fps it would get. 40 seems smooth enough for my eyes.
Didn't you make this video 11 months ago?
Similar but I tried to make things more clear in this one
What's the advantage of doing this vs setting a lower TDP limit in the QAM?
You can do both, lowering tdp is different than undervolting, use both for best results 🫡
So no issues doing this on the LCD Deck? Same process and same underclocking numbers?
yup, identical process for the LCD. I have been running with -40,-40, -30 for about a year with no issues
@@robotuprising1711 And does it make a good difference?
Same process, you’ll always have slightly different numbers but similar
@@iKevinF I did no scientific testing, but it sounded like the fans weren't working as hard and were quieter in normal use.
Anyone get good results with Baldurs Gate 3?
Subscribe guys, this man’s content is gold
🥲🥲
@sam.alexander.reviews happy Thanksgiving
Would this damage the system in the long run? I was always curious to do this to my
Steam deck but worried it would fry my chips
not that i'm aware of, it actually should reduce the overall ware of the APU because it wont produce as much heat, but overall i'd say long run system health should be unchanged. (unless you undervolt way too mcuh and you're getting a lot of crashes (like daily), then it might be bad)
@ thanks for the reply I will definitely test this out. 👍🏻
What ever you do, do not forget to turn down the 4 watt!
To turn down what? Please, explain in more detail.
anyone tried this with cryoutilities and larger swap file?
i’m pushing for highest fidelity possible while locked at 40 (i find it smooth enough and the visual hit many games take to get up to 60 fps is just too much)
great vid btw!!
You may want to clarify that undervolting can DAMAGE the hardware and REDUCE the performances of the hardware. This is Physics 101... You are cutting the gas to the engine, the engine WON'T GO FASTER, it will go LEANER and more STABLE. This is in a nutshell what undervolting does. On top of that OVERCLOCKING after undervolting is like starving someone for sugar and then asking them to go run a marathon... A great way to put stress on a system.
If you reduce the voltage going to the CPU, Power is still the same because physics say so; as such W=V times I; which means the Wattage output is still the product of the voltage multiplied the current; and since you reduce the voltage, that means that the current flowing in the circuit will raise, to maintain the same 15W output. This is why it is important to explain WHY it is dangerous to not go UNDER or OVER the specified voltage of an electronic component.
If you reduce the voltage too much, there will be too much current in the hardware that may damage components that are not made to work with that current value; and on top of that you cause instabilities in the system because the transistors may not activate correctly, causing current fluctuations (which means in layman terms crashes in the os or shutdown or hangs).
The benefits of undervolting are what you mention: a more STABLE system and less heat, which in turns EXTEND THE LIFE of the components. But the Deck won't go FASTER; you still have 15W and the CPU and/or GPU speed may even go LOWER than the usual working speed as result of a lower voltage supplied to the APU
Just be careful with the values used; as not every Steam Deck is the same because the components inside are not from the same EXACT BATCH, so you may end up with slight differences that may cause problems or even damages.
Reduce the performance, possibly yes. Cause damage? No. Screw your physics, this is electrical engineering 101: Heat, physical defects and overcurrent is what kills components, there is nothing mechanical in electrical circuits that breaks from a lack of power - they just simply won't run.
@@Yuzuki1337 Heat is part of thermodynamics, which is part of physics. Ohm's law is part of physics. When you force more current in a system by changing either the resistance or the voltage you are varying Ohm's law... Physics exist either if you believe in it it or not.
Mechanics has nothing to do with this; you try to run something that require 2A with 3A when that component is not made for that current and tell me if it pops or not. Why do you think LED require a resistor, even if you use the appropriate voltage? Why do you always see capacitors around power sections of most circuits and voltage regulators?
The smaller is the current you deal with, the smaller is the tolerance for the delta in the current; this is not an industrial motor that can take + -24V and 6A variations; this is a game system that works at 3.3V and 5V for most part, with some components working at 1.2V with a tolerance that is quite low.
While you have shutdown transistors that safeguard the circuits, you can always get passive current damaging small components like capacitors or resistors here and there; and eventually you blow up the bigger components. Happens with overclocking where heat literally eat up the components like you see in an incandescent bulb where the filament become thinner and thinner until it breaks; and it happens in a very smaller scale if you undervolt too much.
Every electronic component is made of physical materials that have physical electrical properties and safe specs; every time you go beyond the specs tolerance you are risking to damage them. Plain and simple.
The fact something won't happen to you does not mean it won't happen. As long as people are aware of the risks, they can make the call themselves.
Will this work with the legion go ?
My man…you said at the beginning of the video no downsides. Then at the end you said you risk messing up your console. That’s a downside. A big one.
He said probably the worst thing can happen is reset of your device. Imo this undervolting is less risky than playing with stock defaults on game that causes your system to overheat.
Ok, you’ve convinced me. I’ll give it a try. Currently testing -50v on all 3. Thank you for the information.
Na a tiny micro drop from 60 to 59 or a drop from 30 to 29 mean nothing as long as the game is not dropping like 10fps then I’m ok with it
1% lows means the lowest 1% of frames, so it might be a drop from 60 fps to 5 fps
I don't have time to watch this right now. How does this affect battery life?
No thanks, my oled works perfectly well with default settings.
Fair enough! 😊
My steamdeck sucks ass. Smooth 30fps on all my games. Great. Go play it the next day and i'm down to 10/15fps every 30 seconds or so. Seems like I now have a very expensive paperweight.
Just a heads up, It’s 100% common for people to undervolt desktops as you lose barely any performance(if any) while dropping a decent amount of heat. Kinda surprised you didn’t know that
lol
my steamdeck can set all3 to -50mv😂
What the game at 1:40?
Shadow of war
Why would you wanna increase your 1% lows, wouldn't decreasing that be better?
1% lows are the least amount of fps the game can get
If the game has 10 %low and 60avg fps then it will stutter a lot and be unenjoyable
But if %low is 40 or more the game will be much smoother and stutters might not exist