this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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Steam Deck

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Hey all, just wondering how the battery life is after you've had it for a while? I'm getting one soon and wondered if it would have a noticeable impact on the battery if it was on a dock for most of the time.

Cheers

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I haven’t noticed a huge difference and I’ve been playing it like crazy on both the dock and handheld. Battery wildly depends on the game and performance settings. It’s my primary gaming device and I love to tinker with it but I haven’t noticed a degradation at all.

[–] Matty_r 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Cool, I was a bit concerned about the battery life getting worse over time.

Thanks for that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I know it’s been almost a month but I somehow stumbled on the battery health on the deck and it says it’s at 84%. I assume that means after years of heavy, almost daily use it’s dropped by 16%. Ifixit has battery replacements for ~$100 USD so if I don’t replace this baby in another couple years the battery won’t be too bad to replace.

I’m more worried about wearing out the bumpers and triggers. The LB is getting a little worn down and I wouldn’t say unresponsive but some days it rides the struggle bus for sure.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The deck has passthrough input and you can set a charge limit of 50% if it's docked most of the time to reduce battery wear.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Is this new? I tried to figure out how to do that a while ago but couldn't find anything about it

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Passthrough input, or charge limiting? Charge limiting was added after release but that was a while ago.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The charge limiting, is it in the settings somewhere? I haven't seen anything about it

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Ahh excellent, I'll definitely be checking that out. Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Legend, I have been looking for that for a while, and it is the cherry on top that it does not require booting into the uefi!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oh man, thanks for linking this. I'm glad there's someone out there writing plug-ins but Valve should really provide this out of box.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Valve is doing a decent job of replacing plugins with stock functionality. Progress is a bit slower there than I would like, but many of my decky plugins have been partially or fully replaced.

Some replaced plugins off the top of my head

  • Animation changer (although I still recommend the plugin for easier downloads of community boot videos)
  • Vibrant deck
  • Decky Recorder
  • Bluetooth (let you quickly reconnect to BT devices, but the QAM menu now lists BT devices directly)
  • Controller tools (let you see controller battery levels, which is now in QAM)
  • That plugin for managing what BLE devices would wake the deck

and probably some more I'm probably forgetting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Yeah and the fact that they allow plugins in the first place is great. It's a great way to gauge what's in demand and how it could be implemented. Reminds me of games that allow modding/addons and often key features are later added officially.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Is it on by default for people on the stock firmware without any modifications?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

FWIW most lithium wants to be between 20% and 85%.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Also fwiw most devices manage this automatically and you do not need to concern yourself with maintaining any given battery percentage

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago

I swapped to an OLED deck about a year ago, but I didn't notice any battery degradation on either my original LCD deck or my new OLED deck.

The OLED deck battery is a major improvement over the LCD in highly demanding games. Games like Baldur's Gate and Cyberpunk went from 1.5 hour battery life to 2.5 hours, which is very noticable.

[–] MajorHavoc 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I haven't noticed any loss of battery performance in the year I have had mine.

Weirdly, the time I notice the battery the most is while playing Lunati. Because playing Lunati for two hours somehow costs no battery at all on my SteamDeck.

The Lunati developers are some kind of mad geniuses, I figure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Luanti (minetest)?
Lunati the name of another game?

[–] MajorHavoc 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yep. Luanti / MineTest. My battery life while playing it is so good, it's weird. I certainly don't mind. But I thought my SteamDeck had a battery tracking bug, at first.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I've had mine for a year and 3 months (LCD) and it will run me Horizon Zero Dawn for an hour and 15 minutes (give or take) since day 1. No difference that I've been able to appreciate.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

First i read 15 minutes and thought that's kinda bad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

This seems low, idk i havent tried horizon on it but ghosts of tsushima is probably the most demanding game ive tried and i still got over 2 hours with it. Are you playing it off an SD card?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Had mine since first release. Depends on the game of course, no change since first playing to now that I've noticed. I can get about 2 hours of gta4 in before it shows the low battery warning

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Oled model. Never got much more than an hour, but it depends on compute requirements. Imho it's portable not wireless

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Only 1 hour on OLED is crazy. Something is definitely wrong with your battery

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

At max power draw, you should get 2-2.5 hours minimum. I would recommend recallibrating your battery and see if that improves things.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

What are you playing to only get an hour? I get just over an hour playing resident evil 4 and my SD is very old at this point.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

2022 LCD Q2 or Q3 can't remember which but still running good. I can get 3.5 hrs in a light game like vampire survivors and 1.5 -2 on a heavy game depending on the options. I dont play it docked and only plug it in to charge of it. I also dont charge it over night. I play it frequently , almost daily.

[–] MXX53 4 points 1 month ago

I have a Q2 2022 model. I don't have any hard data, but it feels about the same to me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I got mine pretty early on, one of the first waves to be shipped, and only issue I've had is having my battery level drop go zilch when switching to a 2.4Ghz Wifi network. Then I would have to plug it in, open the BIOS and switch to battery storage mode, unplug and wait about a minute. Plug it back in to boot it up, and battery levels are normal. I can fortunately just stick to 5Ghz networks nowadays and haven't had a problem.

[–] Matty_r 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

That's seems like a pretty specific issue. Did you try other networks or was always just one 2.4ghz network?

[–] MajorHavoc 3 points 1 month ago

Lots of devices will kill their own battery to maintain Wifi connection rather than drop.

When is happened to me, it's always a combination of a specific place I'm sitting and a specific wifi access point.

I haven't, myself, noticed it happen to my SteamDeck, though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

It happens on any 2.4ghz network. I'm apparently not the only one, as there are some old reddit posts about it, too. It's an oddly specific problem and I can't figure out if it's a software issue or if my battery really is borked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Mines been fine, but It's fairly easy to replace of ot ever isn't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Pretty good