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 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
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!
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.
