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
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.
Cool, I was a bit concerned about the battery life getting worse over time.
Thanks for that.
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.
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.
Is this new? I tried to figure out how to do that a while ago but couldn’t find anything about it
Passthrough input, or charge limiting? Charge limiting was added after release but that was a while ago.
The charge limiting, is it in the settings somewhere? I haven’t seen anything about it
You’ll need PowerTools for Decky: https://git.ngni.us/NG-SD-Plugins/PowerTools
Ahh excellent, I’ll definitely be checking that out. Thank you!
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.
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.
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.
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!
Is it on by default for people on the stock firmware without any modifications?
FWIW most lithium wants to be between 20% and 85%.
Also fwiw most devices manage this automatically and you do not need to concern yourself with maintaining any given battery percentage
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.
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.
Luanti (minetest)?
Lunati the name of another game?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.
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.
First i read 15 minutes and thought that’s kinda bad.
Lol
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?
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
Oled model. Never got much more than an hour, but it depends on compute requirements. Imho it’s portable not wireless
Only 1 hour on OLED is crazy. Something is definitely wrong with your battery
At max power draw, you should get 2-2.5 hours minimum. I would recommend recallibrating your battery and see if that improves things.
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.
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.
I have a Q2 2022 model. I don’t have any hard data, but it feels about the same to me.
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.
That’s seems like a pretty specific issue. Did you try other networks or was always just one 2.4ghz network?
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.
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.
Mines been fine, but It’s fairly easy to replace of ot ever isn’t.
Pretty good
