The reason you get better performance with Undervolting is not the thermals. It's the power limit. The Steam Deck is pretty much always Power limited, and with Undervolting you can get the same clocks at lower power or higher clocks at the same power.
Just want to mention that there is a bug in Halo Infinite that makes your graphics crash when playing zone capture and stronghold, just in case someone is playing Halo for the first time and encounters the issue thinking it was caused by their undervolting.
@@HiTechLoLifeit came along with season 4, there is a Reddit thread about it, but no workarounds as of now. I’ve been playing halo infinite daily and as long as you don’t play those modes you are fine. The new husky raid is a lot of fun.
I undervolted my Nintendo switch oled, cpu, GPU, ram, now I'm getting around 8 hours playing Zelda breath of the wild, or can OC to get insane performance on some games or emulators. Tried to do the same on my friends Switch, it crashed on the first uv level cpu, leave stock voltage for ram with some overclock, and just 10mV less on GPU... Very bad silicon lottery for my friend.
UV will do very little to improve consumption or temperature unless a power limit is in place. If so, an undervolted Deck can be run at a stricter power limit while maintaining clock speeds and performance.
i do not fully understand waht you exactly mean. The deck always has a powerlimit in place. The SoC is limited to 15W max. You can lower that manualy on the fly to save battery or reduce the games performance. So a powerlimit is always in place.
What does it do I hear it's both better for performance and battery life which seems optimistic. I love elden ring on deck I play all high settings fsr 1 480 upscaled to 720p. If I do this undervolt will I have less dips to the mid 20s
@@Spencerwalker21 Undervolting can help save battery by supplying less electricity to specified components, in turn generating less heat, in turn allowing your components to maintain boost frequencies for an extended period of time, thus increasing performance. The performance boosts undervolting can provide is more relevant on high powered gaming PCs. The main objective on deck is better battery life and better thermals.
If you update your Steam Deck to the latest 3.5 update then you can do everything in this video while on the Stable channel. It's not longer a Preview feature.
I have a question, i have undervoltet my pc but if you mess up you can always reset anything on the motherboard back to normal. I have also undervoltet and overclocked my phone but there all the things load after you boot, so if yo mess up you can go in recovery mode and set the hole system back. How does it work on the deck, can i always boot in to the bios? , does the bios run with normal voltage and aplays your change only if you boot up, because if you would go to far is there a chance to be unable to even start the bios? Thank you..
If you underclock the SD too much, it won't even turn on, however you can do a BIOS reset by holding Vol- + Three dots button, then pressing the Power button while still holding these two The SD should beep twice, then the charging LED will flash, you let go at this point, then the SD will start to recover itself, just wait for 2-ish minutes and it should turn on itself again with the BIOS resetted
In my experience, I could always just go back into the BIOS menu and lower the values once again when -50mV across the board was too unstable for me. But in case you can't do so, there's a new reset CMOS command introduced in Firmware 118 that resets all of the bios settings back to normal. Holding Volume Down button, the Quick Access (Three-dot) button, and Power button while the system is off.
@@HiTechLoLife very nice thank you. Does anybody know how much more Energy is saved? I am only playing cyberpunk right know and must use a Powerbank after a while
Ive seemed to be able to keep it stable at -40 on everything Thought I got -50 but then it crashed about 2 hours in so I just brought everything down a bit, haven’t had any issues sense
Hey there, I have a question. Is it possible that undervolting may decrease the performance after a while? I have a feeling that while playing, the performance gets worse after playing for a bit of time, but I'm not too sure.
That sounds like your system is getting too hot and it's thermal throttling. Do your fans sound loud too? That will still happen even if you undervolt.
@HiTechLoLife No, my fans aren't getting too loud and the system isn't too hot neither. Maybe I'm just imagining it. At the moment I'm playing Assassin's Creed Unity and sometimes it drops to like 30 fps and sometimes I've the feeling it isn't dropping that much. Maybe I'm really just imagining it :D Thanks for the fast reply btw!
Using the Quick Access Menu isn't "undervolting". Undervolting is the act of supplying less voltage to specific components. Essentially less electricity flows to said components at given performance levels.
Hello! The question is not entirely on topic... I have ACh 4 Black Flag, freezes in desktop mode, freezes on loading the game. But the game freezes, not the deck. This isn't due to undervolting, is it? As I understand it, if the undervolt were to blame, then the deck itself would freeze completely? I have a theory about Uplay loading incorrectly. Because in the big picture everything works well, but in desktop mode it freezes. My values are 20 40 40.
From my own super rudimentary testing, it seems I'm getting like a 15% increase in expected battery life while playing a AAA title. From 90 mins (1.5 hours) to ~105 mins (1.75 hours). I expect the gains to be more significant when playing lighter titles, like older PC games, indie titles, or emulating simple consoles like the NES or SNES. But again, no extensive testing has been done and a sample size of 1 test isn't enough.
@@HiTechLoLife Thanks. I’m indeed more interested in the battery life gain in lighter titles since I mostly play more intensive ones tethered to the wall.
wait what, I thought I was running at base settings but my steam deck says all of them are set at 0 mv. this is my first time opening these settings too
Dropped all 3 at a time in increments of -10mv, running Cyberpunk 2077's benchmark twice each time to test perfs and stability. Got all the way down to -50mv everywhere. In CP2077's benchmark, I gained a whopping 1-2fps and I still draw upwards of 26W. Which... is pretty much within margin of error. Did i miss something obvious or is undervolting just not worth it rn ?
I was exactly asking myself how is it possible that my steam deck still drains same power before and after undervolting. I expected less wattage to be drained
@@jakubholy131 Not necessarily. It just means the CPU could also overclock itself more and sustain itself there, thus providing more performance using the same amount of power. Or dedicating that extra power envelope to the GPU. This is the case for overclocking the desktop chips, they can usually sustain higher turbo clocks for a longer period of time when undervolted. One option for you could be to limit the CPU from 25W (or whatever it is currently set at) to 20W and undervolt and see if you suffer any performance while having lower TDP. Not having a Steam Deck I don't know if the TDPs are configurable, but at least the Z1 processors were allowing that on Linux.
You will always draw the max power with unlocked FPS while getting tiny bit more performance. UV helps a lot with FPS cap in place, meaning you will consume less power at the same FPS.
I wonder if there are any good benchmark apps in the steam store, or something you can add via desktop mode. I know a lot of games have benchmarks built in, but it would be easy to just have something available anyone can use.
what do you mean by stable? If im getting regular frametime and game doesnt crash it should be most likely alright? Ive tested all settings to -30undervolt on rdr2
Undervolting can result in better performance due to better thermals, but it isn't the primary benefit I'm concerned about when it comes to portable battery powered handhelds.
@@HiTechLoLife Yeah I found myself here, because I'm not too sure what's up with my battery life. I found battery being pretty inconsistent, as much as I understand why I'm gonna have ~2 hours of playtime on rdr2 I didn't get why it shows 3-4hrs on main menu or 1.5hour on Sam and max remastered.. yet original Isaac can play for around 5-6 hours. Battery life says it's 100% but I'm not too sure, I'm gonna try to calibrate it and see if it stays on 100
Personally i dont see the point when it can render your device unbootable & less stable. Thats more headache in my opinion. I can reduce heat by either tdp or limiting down my cpu slightly using powertools & i have the new jsaux fan which decreases heat by 10 to 15c.
It's unstable if done incorrectly and not meticulously tested. This also isn't a replacement for the existing per-game TDP settings, it's an addition to those. You can undervolt and lower TDP at the same time and you'd get better battery life from just lowering TDP alone.
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
FYI: You can now undervolt on stable branch.
this video was made when the new firmware was part of the preview branch so it's slightly outdated.
Can we overclock on the current bios version (120) or no?
Now I can undervolt on my Steeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam Deck
Gunna have to call em Cool Decks now .... hehehehe
Mmmmhhmmm
I like that we don't need to use 3rd party tools. I might just until this become part of the stable channel.
Lemme know what you end up using
Well it just did.
The reason you get better performance with Undervolting is not the thermals. It's the power limit.
The Steam Deck is pretty much always Power limited, and with Undervolting you can get the same clocks at lower power or higher clocks at the same power.
Huge help here, I didn't know you could make the Steam Deck run more efficiently this easily!
I'm thankful it can be done on the Stable build now too
This combine with PTM7950 dropped my temps by 8-10C. Fan is noticeably quieter.
Just want to mention that there is a bug in Halo Infinite that makes your graphics crash when playing zone capture and stronghold, just in case someone is playing Halo for the first time and encounters the issue thinking it was caused by their undervolting.
That's good to know. I didn't even know that myself!
@@HiTechLoLifeit came along with season 4, there is a Reddit thread about it, but no workarounds as of now. I’ve been playing halo infinite daily and as long as you don’t play those modes you are fine. The new husky raid is a lot of fun.
Bout to undervolt. Cheers. Smashing out playbable games at solid refesh rates with extended battery is the mission!
how'd it go?
@@chikitbh he died.
managed to go to -20, -50, -50 and it's been stable for the past 2-3 days.
-30mv on the cpu is super unstable
I undervolted my Nintendo switch oled, cpu, GPU, ram, now I'm getting around 8 hours playing Zelda breath of the wild, or can OC to get insane performance on some games or emulators. Tried to do the same on my friends Switch, it crashed on the first uv level cpu, leave stock voltage for ram with some overclock, and just 10mV less on GPU... Very bad silicon lottery for my friend.
bro those options dont show up in my bios edit: nevermind just fixed the problem
UV will do very little to improve consumption or temperature unless a power limit is in place. If so, an undervolted Deck can be run at a stricter power limit while maintaining clock speeds and performance.
i do not fully understand waht you exactly mean. The deck always has a powerlimit in place. The SoC is limited to 15W max. You can lower that manualy on the fly to save battery or reduce the games performance. So a powerlimit is always in place.
Got mine to 30 30 20, not the best but I’ll take any gains I can get
What does it do I hear it's both better for performance and battery life which seems optimistic. I love elden ring on deck I play all high settings fsr 1 480 upscaled to 720p. If I do this undervolt will I have less dips to the mid 20s
@@Spencerwalker21 Undervolting can help save battery by supplying less electricity to specified components, in turn generating less heat, in turn allowing your components to maintain boost frequencies for an extended period of time, thus increasing performance.
The performance boosts undervolting can provide is more relevant on high powered gaming PCs. The main objective on deck is better battery life and better thermals.
After I change settings in BIOS (reducing voltage), can I change back to Stable or do I need to keep Preview option at all times?
If you update your Steam Deck to the latest 3.5 update then you can do everything in this video while on the Stable channel. It's not longer a Preview feature.
I have a question, i have undervoltet my pc but if you mess up you can always reset anything on the motherboard back to normal.
I have also undervoltet and overclocked my phone but there all the things load after you boot, so if yo mess up you can go in recovery mode and set the hole system back.
How does it work on the deck, can i always boot in to the bios? , does the bios run with normal voltage and aplays your change only if you boot up, because if you would go to far is there a chance to be unable to even start the bios?
Thank you..
If you underclock the SD too much, it won't even turn on, however you can do a BIOS reset by holding Vol- + Three dots button, then pressing the Power button while still holding these two
The SD should beep twice, then the charging LED will flash, you let go at this point, then the SD will start to recover itself, just wait for 2-ish minutes and it should turn on itself again with the BIOS resetted
Hi, how do I get the System back up running again if I go to low? I am at -30 on all three values and did not go lower.... not to break the SD
In my experience, I could always just go back into the BIOS menu and lower the values once again when -50mV across the board was too unstable for me.
But in case you can't do so, there's a new reset CMOS command introduced in Firmware 118 that resets all of the bios settings back to normal.
Holding Volume Down button, the Quick Access (Three-dot) button, and Power button while the system is off.
@@HiTechLoLife very nice thank you. Does anybody know how much more Energy is saved? I am only playing cyberpunk right know and must use a Powerbank after a while
Ive seemed to be able to keep it stable at -40 on everything
Thought I got -50 but then it crashed about 2 hours in so I just brought everything down a bit, haven’t had any issues sense
I am waiting to update, and may “downgrade” my bios to 116, after I do update steam os, since I’ve got stable undervolt at 70, 70, 30.
-70 CPU and -70 GPU?
Damn you really DID win the Silicon Lottery.
Hey there, I have a question. Is it possible that undervolting may decrease the performance after a while? I have a feeling that while playing, the performance gets worse after playing for a bit of time, but I'm not too sure.
That sounds like your system is getting too hot and it's thermal throttling. Do your fans sound loud too?
That will still happen even if you undervolt.
@HiTechLoLife No, my fans aren't getting too loud and the system isn't too hot neither. Maybe I'm just imagining it.
At the moment I'm playing Assassin's Creed Unity and sometimes it drops to like 30 fps and sometimes I've the feeling it isn't dropping that much.
Maybe I'm really just imagining it :D
Thanks for the fast reply btw!
Can steam deck balance mode run old games like dishonored, max payne 3 60fps locked?
Edit: I refuse to play those on my 4080 lol. 😂
Ты ведь можешь вбить в поиске ютуб игру и нужную тебе платформу. И посмотреть видео с тестами
Why some ppl want us to flash the bios ? If you can do it in this way
Think it unlocks more options, if they’ll be useful depends on your deck
I did this through a third party bios tool. Gonna have to reset it there then update and change my tdp back to 20.
What is the difference between undervolting between bios and steam menu/game?
Using the Quick Access Menu isn't "undervolting".
Undervolting is the act of supplying less voltage to specific components. Essentially less electricity flows to said components at given performance levels.
Hello!
The question is not entirely on topic...
I have ACh 4 Black Flag, freezes in desktop mode, freezes on loading the game. But the game freezes, not the deck. This isn't due to undervolting, is it? As I understand it, if the undervolt were to blame, then the deck itself would freeze completely? I have a theory about Uplay loading incorrectly. Because in the big picture everything works well, but in desktop mode it freezes. My values are 20 40 40.
It's hard to know for certain but I recommend going back to stock voltage settings and testing Black Flag again just to be absolutely certain.
@@HiTechLoLife It freezes in desktop mode at any undervolt settings. I just haven't run black flag from the desktop before.
Isn't the W shape for the grips on the back to go into? lol
I was kinda hoping to get some info about how much the battery life increases when you undervolt.
From my own super rudimentary testing, it seems I'm getting like a 15% increase in expected battery life while playing a AAA title.
From 90 mins (1.5 hours) to ~105 mins (1.75 hours).
I expect the gains to be more significant when playing lighter titles, like older PC games, indie titles, or emulating simple consoles like the NES or SNES.
But again, no extensive testing has been done and a sample size of 1 test isn't enough.
@@HiTechLoLife Thanks. I’m indeed more interested in the battery life gain in lighter titles since I mostly play more intensive ones tethered to the wall.
wait what, I thought I was running at base settings but my steam deck says all of them are set at 0 mv. this is my first time opening these settings too
nvm I just realized it starts from 0
I think mines pretty decent, it’s stable at 40 50 30
Thanks for the video!
Dropped all 3 at a time in increments of -10mv, running Cyberpunk 2077's benchmark twice each time to test perfs and stability.
Got all the way down to -50mv everywhere. In CP2077's benchmark, I gained a whopping 1-2fps and I still draw upwards of 26W. Which... is pretty much within margin of error.
Did i miss something obvious or is undervolting just not worth it rn ?
I was exactly asking myself how is it possible that my steam deck still drains same power before and after undervolting. I expected less wattage to be drained
@@jakubholy131 Not necessarily. It just means the CPU could also overclock itself more and sustain itself there, thus providing more performance using the same amount of power. Or dedicating that extra power envelope to the GPU.
This is the case for overclocking the desktop chips, they can usually sustain higher turbo clocks for a longer period of time when undervolted. One option for you could be to limit the CPU from 25W (or whatever it is currently set at) to 20W and undervolt and see if you suffer any performance while having lower TDP.
Not having a Steam Deck I don't know if the TDPs are configurable, but at least the Z1 processors were allowing that on Linux.
@@michael.burman yes it is configurable.
You will always draw the max power with unlocked FPS while getting tiny bit more performance. UV helps a lot with FPS cap in place, meaning you will consume less power at the same FPS.
Got mine down to -50mv stable so far
Is there a way to do this on the Legion go or Rog?
But after switching to the preview channel and then applying volt can I switch back to the stable channel afterwards?
This video is slightly outdated now. You can now do all of this in Stable since the new Firmware is now a part of the Stable branch.
@@HiTechLoLife thank you sir...
I wonder if there are any good benchmark apps in the steam store, or something you can add via desktop mode. I know a lot of games have benchmarks built in, but it would be easy to just have something available anyone can use.
Geekbench is available on the Discover App.
I try with a built in rdr2 benchmark
@@HiTechLoLife cant find it anymore... any idea?
what do you mean by stable? If im getting regular frametime and game doesnt crash it should be most likely alright? Ive tested all settings to -30undervolt on rdr2
When I say stable I mean without your entire system crashing when under load.
@@HiTechLoLife oh alright, thanks for tutorial:D After playing for a while I noticed better frame rate in rdr2 when in town.
Undervolting can result in better performance due to better thermals, but it isn't the primary benefit I'm concerned about when it comes to portable battery powered handhelds.
@@HiTechLoLife Yeah I found myself here, because I'm not too sure what's up with my battery life. I found battery being pretty inconsistent, as much as I understand why I'm gonna have ~2 hours of playtime on rdr2 I didn't get why it shows 3-4hrs on main menu or 1.5hour on Sam and max remastered.. yet original Isaac can play for around 5-6 hours. Battery life says it's 100% but I'm not too sure, I'm gonna try to calibrate it and see if it stays on 100
After undervolt, we can return on stable steam os, not preview version ? It's not a problem ?
This is an older video. Undervolting options are now enabled on Stable Channel.
@@HiTechLoLife did you have a tuto to overclock the ram ?
@@HiTechLoLife thanks to your video. I have -50 everywhere and it's work perfectly. See it in few days
Thanks for the video
Do i need drop each one by 10 one at a time or drop all 3 CPU, GPU, SOC by 10 together at a time? Sorry if that is confusing.
I did all three at once. It may be faster to do that
@@HiTechLoLife Alright thanks
Ideally, one at a time.
@@Celphirio now if anything goes wrong you can reset your bios by holding … button, volume down button and power button about 10 seconds
I used to get 40 40 50 with the old method, guess I can just put 40 40 40 and call it a day
I would imagine you could still hit -40/-40/-50 in Firmware 118, but I could also be wrong. There's only one way to find out!
I do -50-50-50 and no problemo so far
I was only able to get down to -10 across all three without crashing rise of the tomb raider mine didn’t “like it”
That's unfortunate. Sometimes people do lose the silicon lottery.
@@HiTechLoLife I’m crying inside
What's the problem with the TDP settings? You can set it up and practically can fine tune it without much hassle.
You can actually use TDP settings in conjunction with undervolting.
great vid, especially this part 5:12 haha, 100% me
Mine i push with
-20cpu
-30gpu
-30soc
Pretty impressive now on RDR2 the temperature drop about 4-5°c and frame rate are the same
No one is undervolting ram?
Thanks for the video my favorite vtube mommy 🥵🥵🥵🥵
oled can oc?
Yeah, it can
@@NathanTruby how?gpu cpu??
bruh i didnt understand not 1 thing u was talking about smh
You are sacrificing performance on titles that need it. Not a fan of it unfortunately. (no pun intended).
?? Undervolting will gain you performance at the same power draw, what do you mean?
Personally i dont see the point when it can render your device unbootable & less stable. Thats more headache in my opinion. I can reduce heat by either tdp or limiting down my cpu slightly using powertools & i have the new jsaux fan which decreases heat by 10 to 15c.
It's unstable if done incorrectly and not meticulously tested.
This also isn't a replacement for the existing per-game TDP settings, it's an addition to those.
You can undervolt and lower TDP at the same time and you'd get better battery life from just lowering TDP alone.