Has anyone who mainly uses their deck docked tried a cooling fan on it? Are they worth it in your experience?
Completely useless. A JSAUX backplate improves cooling more than any of those auxiliary fans.
With the big chunk of alumunium? I don’t think they actually improve cooling (certainly, the fan doesn’t run any less), they just put the heat in a place where you can accidentally rest your fingers on it.
They ran thermal load tests and it did improve performance while adding an unnacceptable ammount of weight and imbalance. They turned it into a dock-queen, basically.
That chunk of aluminum has a big thermal pad on its back that connects it to the SOC heatpipe. It gets quite hot and my steam deck is noticably quieter after installing it.
Yes, I’ve got one. I did a couple of (fairly unscientific) tests and couldn’t see a difference in temps or fan volume though.
What if I just point a fan at it?
Then it won’t make a difference because the deck’s outer shell is plastic, which doesn’t conduct heat very well.
The only things you can do to improve cooling are pushing more air through the cooler inside the deck or adding more surface area for the heat to dissipate.
A JSAUX backplate will do just that.
What if I point an air conditioner at it.
J/k
First the hardware can survive at over 90 degrees without any issues and it can save itself if it gets dangerous, second I don’t think you’d want better cooling, not like this at least - there are other parts that need to be cooled that don’t have temperature sensors on them, and making the fan run at lower speeds might be a bad idea. However, third, cooling fans positioned like this (which this apparently isnt?) are worthless, cooling off the plastic cover is hard enough for them which doesn’t do much for the hardware itself.
Respecting the designed airflow (which imo is important) I think you’d have better results for your money if you play the Deck in front of a fan lol, that way lower temp air will be pushed on the intakes and you’d be kept cool as well.
Speaking of high temperature, the other day I tested my M2 Mac Mini in an unrealistic stress test: Handbrake doing software conversion plus AI image generation so I would use all the cpu cores, the gpu ones and the ML ones too. Apple is clearly a fan of silence, because it just kept the fan at minimum speed until one of the cores hit 100 degrees: that was worth half speed.
On the Deck… lately it’s so hot that I feel more comfortable with enabling the old fan curve. Aside from that I don’t worry :)
Thanks for the input. What do you think of something like this?
My wife got one like this. Thing is I don’t think we have attached it once as I tend to undock and go without bothering to attach it.
Back in the day I had a laptop with an Nvidia 7800GTX Mobile graphics card that I had over clocked to match the specs of a desktop 7800GTX. It ran at 117 Celsius under load and never had an issue. The system would shut down if I pushed the clocks and got to 120C, but 117 was fine. That system ran great for many years, and I’m guessing still works today.
These chips are designed to run at high temps. I never understood people trying to keep their GPUs at 45C with insane cooling when you could comfortably run at 90.
To be clear, not every chip is designed to handle temps above 70C, but TSMC manufactured ones generally do.
The other complication is the turbo/boost modes, which often are temperature based and throttle back after around 70C or so. Not sure to what extent that applies to steam deck, but Linus Tech Tips didn’t see a performance benefit of having a beefier cooler in the deck, just less temps and noise.
That’s not really a fan cooling system in the picture, it’s something called a peltier cooler or thermoelectric heat pump, thing nearly goes to zero on most of them, very cool
None of the add ons are going to have enough power to make a noticeable difference outside of getting in the way of, and heating up, your fingers.
I would suggest watching this video by cryobyte
I have the larger version of that “fan”. It’s actually not just a simple fan. It’s a peltier cooler, i.e. it gets actively cold on one side. I also have the matching replacement rear housing with metal plate that sits over the soc/ssd/etc area.
I removed the thermal paste from the soc and replaced it with Honeywell ptm7950 thermal pad. I then swapped out the thermal pad that sits on top of the heatsink over the soc, and added a thermal pad onto the ssd, then replaced the metal shield that goes over that and contacts all of the pads. I then added a thin thermal pad on top of that shield, which makes it tightly contact that metal plate in the housing.
The end result is that a ton of heat is dumped into that metal plate. Then the peltier cooler magnetically pops onto that plate.
I have the tdp whacked up to 22 watts, the cpu and gpu are undervolted, and overclocked to 4ghz and 2ghz, respectively. With no cooling mods, running Elden Ring at high would get me temps in the mid 90’s before the system crashed. With just the Honeywell thermal pad, mid-high 80’s. With the hosting with metal plate, low 80’s. And with the cooler, mid-high 70’s.
I then manually adjust tdp and click speeds in powertools, depending on whether I am docked and using the cooler, or handheld and not using the cooler. With a mix of medium and high settings, Elden Ring is a nice smooth experience, docked or handheld.
And no, I have never burnt my fingerson the plate. Not sure why people think they are going to be shoving their hands half way across the back of the deck while playing, rather than resting their fingers on the back buttons, or holding the grips.
The only thing I still want to do is use a dremel to add air vents to the new back, in the spot where the stock back housing has them. Just need to source a nice bit of metal mesh to install there, like the stock one has.
Was all of this necessary, or even worth it? To me it was. I plan to downsize(and reduce power use) of all of my electronics, and part of that will be dual/triple booting the Deck, and making it my main(and sole) PC. Pushing the Deck as hard as possible, plus adding a dock, cooler, monitor, other accessories, will still use worlds less power than my current gaming laptop and its associated accessories. Even if you add my phone and tablet into the mix.
By itself, no not really. It can probably be paired with a Jsaux backplate to effectively cool though.
The Jsaux backplate by itself improves temps, but only for 15-20min. After that the heatsink plate has reached max temps and can’t shed the heat fast enough to make a noticeable difference to the thermals. Pairing it with a cooling fan though would probably keep it effective in reducing temps after that initial warm up period.
This is the second time JSAUX backplate gets recommended here. I’m definitely checking it out. Thanks for that!