Computer

Steam Deck disappoints in battery life: problems with its APU

Few presentations today need the Steam Deck, Valve’s portable PC-inspired game console. And it is that after the last declarations of a developer we have been able to know some new details about its operation and characteristics. With the delay in its production caused among other reasons by the lack of semiconductors in the industry, the first Valve console that integrates an AMD APU processor, may meet the autonomy expectations that everyone places on it. What battery life does Steam deck?

The developer who remains anonymous in statements to Boiling Steam, tells details about the characteristics of the Steam Deck in its dev Kit version, its hardware as well as the general experience of use. Many details remain a secret under NDA.

Steam Deck and its battery: silent and with up to 5 hours of autonomy

Steam Deck case

One of the most interesting data when talking about a portable device, whatever its purpose is autonomy. According to the statements obtained by Bollind Steam, the duration and management of said autonomy of the new Valve console ranges between 2 hours and 5 hours, where this time is linked to the use of the load of the APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) that integrates Valve on your Steam Deck and it is draining the battery on high load.

It seems that depending on the load of the AMD APU that integrates Steam Deck, depending on the graphic level of the game in question, the autonomy of this laptop varies greatly. We can understand that if we are playing an Indie 2D game we will obtain an approximate autonomy of about 5 hours, while if we play a game with a high graphic load like the last AAA and this makes the Steam Deck work at its maximum performance. it will decay from this to a scarce 2 hours.

Steam Deck Architecture New Details

We also believe that this cannot be the only factor causing its short battery. Other factors such as its seven-inch LCD panel, surely much to blame for those consumptions that are shortening life on the autonomy of Valve’s console.

Another of the details known in this interview is the sound level of the Steam Deck, a point to take into account where we cannot ignore that although Valve’s new device does not stop mounting hardware of a laptop, the statements made are really interesting The Steam Deck has a “barely perceptible” sound level under normal use conditions, but the loudness values ​​at high load have not been disclosed, only in idle, so this opinion could change substantially.

What has not been specified are its temperatures, which seeing the hardware that it implements should not be low, although not worrying, since we know very well that RDNA 2 as an architecture is an obvious jump of 50% compared to RDNA 1 and more than 100% efficiency compared to Vega. In this aspect is where there is more expectation with this Steam Deck, since it is precisely its iGPU that is making the difference with its competitors.

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