you should probably undervolt your steam deck because if you do it right and I'm going to teach you how to do it right in this video you can dramatically increase your 1% lows among other things but your 1% lows which are going to drastically improve the overall smoothness and feel of games with no downside which is awesome we're here for it and because I don't want to waste your time I'm going to tell you exactly what my results were so that way you can decide right now up front if it's something that's going to be worth your time to actually do and I'm going to tell you right now it's probably worth your time to do because it's really easy and it doesn't take that much time but here are my results this is using the Red Dead 2 Benchmark and I got a 27% Improvement to my 1% lows a 10% Improvement to my Max FPS and a 2% Improvement to average FPS now you might hear that and think 2% Improvement to average FPS who cares that's nothing that's basically neg negligible and yeah 2% Improvement is basically negligible but what is not is a 27% Improvement to 1% lows those 1% lows are what make the game feel like it's lagging because you get these stutters and they make the game feel a lot worse if you can improve 1% lows it will dramatically improve your overall gaming experience even though the average FPS might look identical the game play is going to feel a lot smoother so hopefully we cleared that up you might not get the same results as me you might get worse results you might get better results even but those are the ballpark of what you may be able to expect if you undervolt your device oh and real quick only about 1% of you are subscribed and if a few more of you subscribed I'd be able to buy more devices to test out and I'd be able to spend more time making content so if you enjoy this type of content I'd really appreciate it if you subscribed and liked the video it's free for you and it would make a really big difference in my life but either way I appreciate you being here all right let's keep going and now that we've talked about what the results are let me real quick just go over what is undervolting and long story short we're not going to get super technical on this but what undervolting is is you're feeding less voltage to the Apu in this case our Apu is just our CPU and GPU combined with the steam deck so we're going to be giving it less voltage and if done right you can lower the voltage which means less power is being used but you can get the exact same performance and because the steam deck is power limited meaning for the steam deck itself the Apu is limited to a 15 watt TDP if you successfully reduce the voltage that's going to the CPU GPU the steam deck can then use that extra power elsewhere so even though you're still using 15 watts the wattage hasn't changed you can be getting better performance because the wattage is going to the places that it actually needs to go instead of being turned into heat because of inefficiency so that's what undervolting is with the steam deck it's also going to slightly and only slightly and we'll talk about this later in the video it will slightly reduce your fan noise your overall thermals meaning the chip will run slightly cooler and it will increase your your battery life those are all things that will happen they're just going to be very small so you might not notice them but the thing that is noticeable is going to be the 1% lows so that's kind of what I'm focusing on for this video but just know that you're also going to get better thermals better battery life and slightly better average FPS and overall a better experience before we jump into how to undervolt your steam deck I want to take a quick second to thank today's sponsor ug green even if you do undervolt your deck you will need to charge it eventually and ug Green's nexe power Bank 25,000 Milah 145 watt has you covered this battery bank is an absolute unit it can output 140 Watts out a single type c Port which is enough to charge a MacBook Pro 16in from 0 to 56% in 30 minutes and because it has such a giant battery it can charge a steam deck LCD about twice fully from 0 to 100 and the OLED a bit less than that but either way it's going to give you a ton of away from the wall gaming time or you can completely recharge laptops up to 1.3 times and mobile devices up to 5.2 times I personally love how it has a display that shows you the exact amount of power that's left versus a lot of other power supplies where they'll have just little LEDs that'll show you within 25% of how much power is left this is just a lot more accurate but batteries will only take you so far and when you do need to plug into the wall ug green has you covered with their ugreen nexe 100 wat charger this power brick can put out up to 100 Watts from a single type c Port which is enough to charge a MacBook Air M2 from 0 to 55% in just 30 minutes what I love about the nexe 100 watt is that while it's incredibly compact it can still charge my laptop steam deck extra battery and Kindle all at the same time and it has a USB type a port just in case you still need it which I always end up needing anyways if you're interested in either of these devices I'll leave links in the description and also check out ug Green's Black Friday deals for up to 40% off all right and now going to actually undervolt our steam decks and the first thing we need to do is boot into the BIOS and the way you do that is if you hit the steam button you can go down and turn the steam deck off I recommend doing shut down not restart it's it's going to be easier and then once it is fully shut down so we'll give it a sec then what you're going to do is you are going to press the power button and the volume up button at the same time and you're going to hold them until you hear a chime so it'll go like this I'm going to press both of them at the same time and you hear a chime I'm going to keep holding and there we go then you can release once you see this menu pop up and this is where we're going to be messing about in and we're going to use the d-pad to navigate so if you go down and over we're going to set up utility and in setup utility we're going to go down to Advanced and we are going to go over to the right and now we can scroll down with the d-pad and this right here this is our under voltage right right here this voltage offset that's undervolting right there so we as you can tell we have CPU voltage offset GPU voltage offset and S so voltage offset and you can see mine are all set to zero I restarted it I set them to stock so that we could do it all together so here's the thing with undervolting if you were going to do it by the books and this is how you should do it uh what you would do is go to the CPU voltage offset change that to -10 molts do that and now you're going to go play games and run benchmarks I would recommend doing a AAA game something that's really going to push the system hard and play it for at least 15 minutes and if you don't notice any problems playing for 15 minutes everything seems to be normal then what you can go what you do is you would go to the GPU voltage offset and you would change that to -10 and now you go play for another 15 minutes on your demanding game and then eventually you will get to a point when you keep upping and upping and upping and let's say now this is at50 eventually you'll get to a point unless you just hit the Silicon Lottery and you won where you will start having stability issues and generally speaking what stability issues look like on the steam deck is you will have the game's crash it'll be going through a difficult part and the game will crash or the whole steam deck itself will turn off if that happens you know you've pushed your undervolt a little bit too far and then all you're going to do is dial it back let's say it crashed while you were set to let's say I was set to all 30 on everything and I had just bumped up my S so voltage to -30 and it crashed all I'm going to do is take that down to -20 which I know is safe because I tested it at -20 take that down to -20 and there you know where your limits are there is an amount of luck in this which is that basically there's What's called the Silicon Lottery and it means some chips are better than others you don't have any control over if you got a good chip or a bad chip as far as undervolting is concerned so some chips you're going to be able to hit neg 50 on all uh CPU GPU and S so some chips you might only be able to hit NE 10 on all of them it just depends on what you got obviously if you get50 on all of them you will get the best results but that's how you do it the safe way is you just go -10 at a time slowly testing in between each phase now I'm going to be perfectly honest with y'all I didn't do that because I'm lazy and that takes a while to do what I did and I'm not recommending you do this but if you're lazy like me and you just want to save time what I have noticed from Reading Reddit posts and SC scouring the internet is that most steam deck Leeds can go to -20 or -30 so what I did is I put all of these to -30 and then ran it and I ran benchmarks and mine was totally stable at -30 and that saved me a ton of time in testing now if it's not stable at30 you can just go down and turn everything to -20 and run the same thing and then if that's stable you can bump up one of them at a time and see if that works I'm not recommending you jump to -30 I don't think it's the best way I'm just saying it's the fastest way and so it's an easy way to do it and again if it's crashing you just dial it back of course with undervolting there is inherent risk you could cause some issues to your device but what I've seen generally speaking and the only problems I've ever had personally with undervolting is that you'll have crashes then all you have to do is go back into this screen turn down whatever the last thing you changed was and everything will go back your stability will improve so I don't think it's very dangerous but just know that there is some amount of risk whenever you're messing around into the BIOS you're you're taking your steam deck in your in hand so do that appropriately but let me just go through the full cycle just so you can see it so let's change all of these to -30 and let's say we're in our testing phase that looks good so everything is -30 then what we're going to do is do save and exit which is Select hit that exit saving changes hit yes now the steam deck is going to boot up just like normal it'll boot into the regular uh home screen and then once you get into the home screen you are going to immediately start benchmarking or testing and again make sure it's a triple game or some game that's very demanding if you run an indie game that's not very demanding it could be you've undervolted too far but you're not pushing the system hard enough to see the instability so that's why you need a really demanding game is cuz you're trying to push the system to its limits so I actually think the Red Dead Benchmark uh is great because it's a AAA game uh The Benchmark runs well and what I really like about it is that unlike some benchmarks it shows what the minimum and maximum fpss are which is really useful for under bolting because the minimum FPS or the 1% low is the thing where you're probably going to see the most change so what I would then do is just boot up Red Dead Run The Benchmark once maybe twice it's about a 5 minute maybe a 5 to 10 minute Benchmark and then if that's not having any problems then you just get to enjoy the better performance that you now have and just to show you my fully undervolted system versus the stock system I have them both running the Red Dead 2 Benchmark right here and they're side by side the stock one is on top and the undervolted is on bottom and it looks like if we were to pause at any given point the stock System is using between 0.5 and maybe 2 Watts more power and that might not sound very significant and to be fair it's not the craziest amount of power it's not that significant but considering the steam deck oled's entire Peak power usage for the entire system is generally in the low 20s for wattage that means between .5 and 2 Watts could be up to 10% less power usage which means you're just going to get better battery life and lower fan noise and lower temperatures which is just everything we want so again while it's not the most significant thing ever because valve has made it so easy to undervolt it's built directly into their bios and it's really easy to get to I still think it's worth doing just because it's so easy yes the gains aren't huge but the gains are noticeable and they are there and since it's so easy might as well do it you know and while if you're talking about your average gaming PC undervolting isn't really that important because most desktops can get a ton of power from the walls so you don't really care about that it's not battery powered and they can also have a ton of thermal dissipation because they have massive coolers and that's great for a desktop uh but that's also some of the things that makes them not portable whereas the steam deck has a relatively small battery and relatively small cooler so any amount that we can do to reduce the wattage that is being taken from the battery great we get extra battery life and any amount we can reduce the heat that's being produced great we get less fan noise and less heat in our hands and overall a better experience all right that's it that's how to undervolt your steam deck if you have any questions let me know in the comment section below and I'll try to get to them but if you like the video leave a like if you loved it seriously think about subscribing it would really help out the channel it would help me grow and it would help me make more videos like this all right I'll see you guys in the next one peace