Steam Deck: Overclock & Undervolt Results

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LittleBuddy

Limp Gawd
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Jan 3, 2023
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I bought a Steam Deck last week. Decided to undervolt and overclock it. I think I got a very good chip. Here's my results.

CPU: -80 mV (did not try -90, not sure if it does anything past -30 mV didn't see any noticeable difference in temperature/power)
SOC: -80 mV (did not try -90, not sure if it does anything past -30 mV didn't see any noticeable difference in temperature/power, after further testing it seems to reduce performance past -30 mV maybe -40 mV is still beneficial, didn't go back and test it)
GFX: -50 mV (crashes at -60 mV in Cyberpunk)

CPU/GFX TDP: 23W
GFX: 2200Mhz (would need a higher TDP to actually hit this in games)
CPU: 4200Mhz (would need a higher TDP to actually hit this in games)

Still toying around with the undervolt since I overclocked it first but played about 1hr of Tekken 7 and 2hrs of Metro Exodus and everything is stable so far.

Anyone else undervolt/OC the Steam Deck? Post your findings/results if you have, I'd like to learn more about the limits.

Edit:
Continued undervolt testing and here's the points I ran into instability.

CPU: -100 = crash in Cyberpunk 2077. (Going to set it to -85 and play Metro Exodus a few hours)
GFX: -60 = lockup in Cyberpunk 2077. (I'll test -55 in Metro Exodus after I test the CPU at -85)

For SOC I ended up keeping it at -30 because any lower seems to hurt performance, I couldn't get it to crash even at -100 so I stopped testing it and just raised it.
 
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RAM OC to 3200MHz or 6400MT/s adds about 5-6% performance (in the 2 games I tested which are Cyberpunk 2077 and God of War) with no additional power consumption since the voltages are not touched for the RAM.

I needed to disable powerdown mode to make it stable.

I am going to do the RAM timings this weekend when I have time to see if it can gain further performance.

Edit:
Ended up reverting RAM to 5500MT/s since Metro Exodus failed to load on occasion. I am still in the process of doing the RAM timings though. It will be a very long process since I use SteamOS and don't have all the testing tools that exist on Windows.
 
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How did you do this? BIOS or through software?
 
Axman said:
How did you do this? BIOS or through software?
Click to expand...
Things needed: USB-C Hub or Dock, USB Keyboard, Flash Drive

1) Undervolting/Overclocking/Increasing TDP: Smokeless UMAF (Universal AMD Form Browser) https://github.com/DavidS95/Smokeless_UMAF -- this is a bios editor, it pretty much shows the hidden options of the steamdecks bios. To access these options it is Volume Down+Power On then select your USB Flash Drive.

2) This is required for #3: Decky https://github.com/SteamDeckHomebrew/decky-loader -- This is an addon for Steam, which includes a free store to download more apps

3) Power Tools (downloaded through Decky Store) -- This is is for applying the higher TDP, there's also other options such as clock limiting

Edit:
This guy's video explains the process except for RAM overclocking.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNEI7BTc87Q

You don't need CryoUtilities to do this as recommended in the video.

However I do recommend CryoUtilities as it increases performance on the level of an overclock. For example a Stock 15W Deck gets about 34-35 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 at Steam Deck settings during a benchmark run. Just installing CryoUtilities (recommended settings) and changing the UMA Frame Buffer to 4GB will net you 40 FPS in the same benchmark without overclocking. I could also run Tekken 7 (after CryoUtil+overclock) at Medium+High settings 60FPS at 15W and the Stock Deck is Low Settings and -10% resolution scale to get a stable 60FPS.

With a overclock+undervolt and CryoUtilities (recommended) even at the default 15W tdp it's up to a 15-20% performance improvement and increases battery life as well. I think 15W is the most efficient in terms of performance and battery life, though 17W is pretty nice too since you don't have to change the fan profile.
Increasing the TDP to say 18-23W will require the old fan profile and performance gains are arguably not worth it, it's maybe an additional 5%. Anything above 23W probably will require a blower fan accessory, which is probably fine who use the Steam Deck as a PC replacement more than a handheld.
 
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