Introduction

Steam Deck is a Valve’s handheld device, which blends the concepts of portable console and PC, providing to its owners the best out of both worlds: console’s comfort and out-of-box capabilities and PC’s wide room for customizing and control over your own system. As soon as it is a Linux PC, there is whole lotta ways of how you can improve and modify the system, both software and hardware.

Steam Deck’s upgrades can be split into three categories including:

  • OS Tweaking and Software, which stands for such things as: modifying operating system and installing applications, which extend gaming and customization capabilities;

  • BIOS Tweaking means basically increasing effectiveness of your system in terms of its battery life and performance by either overclocking or downvolting;

  • Some of the Hardware Mods can reduce Deck’s heat or improve gaming experience.

OS Tweaks and Software

CryoUtilities

All of the OS Tweaking can be done via simple, but really effective little utility called CryoUtilities. All of the information regarding this project can be found on GitHub. The installation instructions can be found in Install and the instructions regarding functionality can be found in Usage. After performing actions described, you’ll get 0,1% Low FPS increase up to 75%, and as a result reduced freezes and stutters. Also I would recommend watching the author’s video to get a deeper understanding of what’s happening to your OS.

Decky Loader

Decky Loader is a homebrew plugin launcher for the Steam Deck. Available plugins include:

  • Themes and style tweaks;

  • Adjusting settings;

  • Fan Control;

  • ProtonDB compatibility badges;

  • Power tweaks;

  • HowLongToBeat integrations;

  • Many-many others…

Installation process is described in Decky Loader GitHub page.

Heroic Games Launcher

Heroic Games Launcher is an open-source launcher, that allows you to play Epic Games Store and GOG games on your Steam Deck, or any other “Big” OS like Windows, Linux or macOS. That’s the best way to access the game library you have on these platforms.

As for the features, it supports importing installed games to Game Mode, so you won’t have to switch for the Desktop to launch the games. You can add games outside Epic Games and GOG as well as download custom Wine and Proton versions.

You can find additional information on Heroic Games Launcher website.

Lutris

I personally enjoy the description left on a Lutris website:

Lutris is a video game preservation platform aiming to keep your video game collection up and running for the years to come.
Over the years, video games have gone through many different hardware and software platforms. By offering the best software available to run your games, Lutris makes it easy to run all your games, old. and new.

That particular piece of a software has a really hard task to solve, yet is shows really high hopes and great promise.

So, Lutris is an open-source freeware game launcher, which, as told above, unifies game libraries and also makes it easy to install, configure and run games on Linux. You can use it for emulation purposes too, but unfortunately the emulation topic is not going to be discovered in this article.

BIOS Tweaking

Default BIOS

The most important tweak for the Steam Deck BIOS is UMA Frame Buffer Size. By default it’s only 1GB of RAM is allocated to GPU. Then the value gets increased automatically when it’s needed, which leads to slowdowns. I would recommend increasing this value to 4GB.

So the steps are the following:

  1. Power off your Steam Deck.

  2. Press and hold volume up button (+) and power button.

  3. When you hear beeping sound, wait for the BIOS to load.

  4. Select Setup Utility in the menu.

  5. Go to Advanced.

  6. Find UMA Frame Buffer Size.

  7. Hit A and choose the 4G.

  8. Save your changes and go to your system.

Unlocked BIOS

More information on this topic can be found on Steam Deck HQ.

Running the Unlocked BIOS

In order to boot a unlocked BIOS on your Steam Deck you’re gonna need:

  • FAT32 USB Drive;

  • USB-C male to USB-A female adapter;

  • USB-A or USB-C keyboard;

The steps to run the unlocked BIOS are the following:

  1. Download the UMAF_BETA.zip archive from GitHub page.

  2. Paste the archive content into a formatted FAT32 USB drive.

  3. Plug the USB in Steam Deck and shut it down completely.

  4. Hold the volume down button and the power button.

  5. Choose USB drive in the menu and here we go!

Undervolting

Undervolting helps you increase your battery life by simply keeping the performance as it was before, but with lower power consumption.

Go for the following path to find undervolting settings, you can use Steam Deck buttons to navigate, so no keyboard needed for now:

Device Manager -> AMD CBS -> SMU debug options > SMU feature config limits

Go to SVI3 Voltage control and change it from auto to manual, and then another options gonna appear. Here we need VDDCR_VDD for the CPU, VDDCR_SOC for the chipset and VDDCR_GFX for the GPU. Here we need to switch the corresponding Voltage Offset Sign for Negative and then update the corresponding Voltage Offset to 10. This undervolts the corresponding component by 10 millivolts.

It’s recommended to do undervolting very accurately. So after this step we need to save the changes made via the keyboard. You can simply remove the USB drive and plug in the keeb. Then go back to the menu with Escape button, exit the custom BIOS and boot into the system.

You should check if the system is stable and behaves as it was before. When it’s not, guess it’s the signal that you went too far and you should keep the previous result.

I would recommend doing the same algorithm for each of the component, so basically push it down for 10 millivolts and check if the system is stable, then go to UMAF and repeat.

As for me, I’ve undervolted all of the components by 30, yet I didn’t even try to push it further.

Memory OC

Sometimes RAM can be a bottleneck, so I tried out overclocking it for my Deck.

These are the steps to OC your RAM:

  1. Run the unlocked BIOS;

  2. Go for Device manager - AMD CBS - UMC Common Options - DDR Common Options - DRAM Timing Configuration - Accept;

  3. Set Overclock to Enabled;

  4. Set Memory Clock Speed to 3200MHz;

  5. Go for Device manager - AMD CBS - UMC Common Options - DDR Common Options - DRAM Controller Configuration - DRAM Power Options;

  6. Set Power Down Enable to Disabled;

  7. Go for Device manager - AMD CBS - UMC Debug Options - DDR Debug Options - DDR DRAM Timing Configuration;

  8. Set Enforce Supported Frequency to Disabled;

  9. Go for Device manager - AMD CBS - UMC Debug Options - DDR Debug Options - DDR DRAM Controller Configuration - DDR DRAM Power Options;

  10. Set Power Down Enable to Disabled;

  11. Go for Device manager - AMD CBS - UMC Debug Options - LPDDR Debug Options - LPDDR Dram Controller Configuration

  12. Set Lowest DDR Speed to DDR3200;

  13. Save changes.

Hardware Mods

Here you can find some hardware upgrades for Steam Deck. There is gonna be a iFixit link on how to perform disassembling operation for a specific upgrade.

CPU Thermal Pad

Steam Deck stock thermal paste is absolutely awful and it’s pretty rational to think about re-thermalpasting.

Stock Thermal Paste

You can use any thermal paste or thermal pad you want. As for me, I’ve used Honeywell PTM7950.

iFixit link: Steam Deck Heatsink Replacement - iFixit Repair Guide.

SSD Heat Sink

M.2 SSDs are pretty hot and the heatsink on Steam Deck is basically a piece of foil wrapped around the disk.

Stock SSD

I would recommend upgrading this heatsink for a better one. Here is one of the variants: Steam Deck SSD Heatsink.

iFixit link: Steam Deck SSD Replacement - iFixit Repair Guide.

JSAUX Back Plate

One of the essential upgrades for your Deck. It provides different features such as:

  • Transparent design;

  • Customizable rear buttons with different height;

  • Thermal grease and aluminum heatsink;

iFixit link: Steam Deck Back Cover Replacement - iFixit Repair Guide.

Also I would recommend loosening the upper screws, cause my right trigger button was quite sticky after the whole process.

Conclusion

The main purpose of this article is to uncover the efficient and simple ways of improving Valve’s Steam Deck handheld. Most of those improvements are aimed at extending device’s battery life, lowering the temperatures and bottlenecks removal.

As for CryoUtilities, it was found out that 0,1 FPS Metric has increased up to 75% after all of the operations, including increasing UMA Buffer Size. Undervolting could increase battery life by 15%. Talking about hardware stuff, after upgrading the back plate temperatures have lowered by 3-10° depending on a game and the play time.

The results are pretty satisfactory, yet I hope there’s even more tweaks could be done to the Steam Deck, which will push it to its limits and provide even smoother experience.