Most people will not have a need (or a desire) to undervolt their Steam Deck. However, doing so can result in your hardware performing better than it did had you not made any changes. The only question is, how much better will your games play, how less heat with your Steam Deck generate, and how much longer can you use it after you have reduced the voltage of your CPU, GPU, and/or SoC?
And that’s quite the difficult question to answer.
Table of Contents
- What are the Benefits of Undervolting the Steam Deck?
- How to Undervolt the CPU of the Steam Deck?
- How to Undervolt the Steam Deck GPU?
- How to Undervolt the SoC of the Steam Deck?
Undervolting the Steam Deck can result in all of those. . .but you are likely to only see certain benefits when playing certain types of games. So before I get into the “How to Undervolt” of this guide, let me first share the benefits with you.
What are the Benefits of Undervolting the Steam Deck?
When you “undervolt” something, you are reducing the amount of voltage that is being sent to that component. So if you are under volting the CPU of the Steam Deck, then you are no longer giving it as much power as you were before. Undervolting the GPU drops the amount of power sent to that piece of hardware. And lastly, when we undervolt the Steam Deck SoC, we are reducing the power to the entire chip.
Battery Benefits
Some people may want to undervolt so they can play games on their Steam Deck for longer. Since the hardware is not using up as much of your battery as it was before, in some instances (like when playing an indie game), you’ll be able to play those games for much, much longer.
Thermal Benefits
Now some other people may enjoy the benefits of less heat generation when they choose to undervolt their Steam Deck. This is more apparent when playing games that are more graphically or computationally intensive.
Performance Benefits
When your Steam Deck heats up less frequently (or less intensely) then you are usually able to enjoy more performance from the hardware. Less heat generally means the hardware is hitting its thermal limits less often, which allows for the CPU and GPU clocks to stay higher for longer.
How to Undervolt the CPU of the Steam Deck?
If your only goal is to under volt the Steam Deck CPU, then you will first need to power down your device. So bring up the Power Menu and then shut it down completely. Once you see the screen has turned off (and it’s black), I suggest waiting another 5-10 seconds so that you’re completely sure that it has turned off.
- Boot into BIOS
- Then tap / select the Advanced tab.
- And scroll down until you find the “CPU Voltage Offset” option.
- Drop this by -10mV.
- Reboot back into Steam OS.
- So you can test the new change.
If you’re not familiar with how to access the BIOS Utility menu on the Steam Deck then please refer to my Complete Steam Deck BIOS Guide here on the website. Right at the top I walk you through how to access this hidden menu, but there are a ton of great things we can do here that you can read up on, too.
While in BIOS, you’ll look for the CPU Voltage Offset option from within the Advanced menu.
You can change this to one of the following. . .
- -10 mV
- -20 mV
- -30 mV
- -40 mV
- -50 mV
And different people will have the hardware capable of handling different voltage offsets. This is what some people commonly refer to as the silicon lottery. Which, in this case means, that the CPU in your Steam Deck may be able to handle 50mV less than the CPU in my Steam Deck. It might only be able to handle a voltage offset of -10 mV, though. Hence the use of the word “lottery.”
When you’re done changing the voltage setting for the CPU, you’ll want to reboot back into Steam OS and then stress test the chip.
Some are okay with just loading up some games they’re playing and checking to see if they continue to play without a crash. Others will want to perform a much more intensive stress test of both the CPU and GPU, at their peak, at the same time. I’ve seen both mprime as well as Unigine Benchmark be suggested for those instances.
How to Undervolt the Steam Deck GPU?
There are some games out there that will be CPU bound on the Steam Deck, but most of the time we’re going to have the GPU hitting its limits. So it makes sense that a lot of people see more benefit from undervolting the GPU of the Steam Deck. At least when compared to the CPU. There is a benefit to both, but if you had to choose one or the other then you’ll likely see more improvement on the GPU side.
Think about what’s happening when we undervolt the Steam Deck GPU.
It will receive less voltage, which will result in that part of the chip getting less heat pumped into it. Less heat means it will take longer for the chip to reach its thermal limits and that allows the Steam Deck to be at its peak clock speed (boosted). So as a gamer, your performance numbers will be higher than if you had not undervolted the GPU. All of this can be said about the CPU side of things, as well.
- Boot into BIOS
- Then tap / select the Advanced tab.
- And scroll down until you find the “GPU Voltage Offset” option.
- Drop this by -10mV.
- Reboot back into Steam OS.
- And then test things out to see if anything crashes.
We basically need to do the same thing we did with the CPU, but this time we’re adjusting the GPU Voltage Offset value.
You can test out your undervolt implementation by either just playing some of the games that you currently have installed. Or, the more thorough option, which is to load up some benchmark/stress test applications and throw everything at the Steam Deck. Both methods have their merits so I won’t sit here and tell you which one I think is better. I will tell you, though, that I prefer to do proper stress tests when testing things.
How to Undervolt the SoC of the Steam Deck?
So the last thing that we can undervolt on the Steam Deck is the entire SoC. For those who may not be familiar, SoC stands for System-On-Chip (or System on a Chip) is actually a combination of the CPU, GPU, and many other parts of device (Bluetooth, memory controller, etc.). So when we talk about undervolting the entire SoC of the Steam Deck, you can see how that’s going to affect both the CPU, GPU and more.
So while I do recommend you drop down the CPU and GPU as much as you can, stay a bit conservative on the SoC.
- Boot into BIOS
- Then tap / select the Advanced tab.
- And scroll down until you find the “SoC Voltage Offset” option.
- Drop this by -10mV.
- Reboot back into Steam OS.
- And then test things out to see if anything crashes.
Since the System-on-Chip of the Steam Deck controls so many aspects of it, I keep it one notch above the lowest it can handle.