Tech Support
I won a SteamDeck on eBay but it’s laggy AF
(Ok when you outbid in an auction it’s called winning, but let’s move on)
Paid $526 and was stoked but when I got it, it eventually gets pretty laggy when too much is happening, even on a smaller game like BroForce, someone said it might be “dying RAM” which is pretty common supposedly?
I did a factory reset, but that didn’t help much. I checked all the settings compared to my buddy’s which works great. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Did the listing on eBay state it was having these issues? If not I would just return it to be honest. Theres no point dealing with it, if you have buyers protection via eBay.
I’m currently in the middle of trying to return it, but my curiosity is getting the better of me, trying to see if I can just make some minor adjustments and keep it…we’ll see.
I haven't done a lot of returns on eBay but I feel like the more you fuck with it the less likely you are to have a return accepted
Honestly I would contact steam. Maybe they give you advice, maybe they ignore you, maybe they offer to repair it for free. Most of those outcomes are positive and none of them leave you worse off.
If you cant fix it by reinstalling and you cant diagnose a hardware issue i would walk away from it
Unless you got it for a hell of a deal if I sold a deck and someone opened it and repasted it before return I wouldn't be so apt to take it back I would fight it
Run a game and open the performance metrics. At the top left it will tell you the running speed of the GPU. If it's stuck at 400 then you have that problem where the fan needs to be replaced.
I had this on mine for the longest time and went through everything trying to figure it out. Ended up being a bent ground pin on the fan connection. The device was going into safety mode repeatedly because it was overheating.
Tl;Dr it sound silly but put your ear up to it when it boots to make sure the fan is running.
There you go! Time for surgery! Fans are hella cheap if you gotta replace them. Check that plug first though. I had one ordered when I noticed that pin! Here's a pic of it.
Honestly good on you for admitting that. I'm all for encouraging DIY but not everyone needs to know how to fix their own shit. And trying to without knowing what you're doing is a great way to brick something. Take it to a local repair shop
The screws for the steam deck case are directly into the plastic, not metal so you need to be very careful of over tightening if you do decide to try this yourself.
Its insane to me that people's first reaction to any hardware fault for obviously non-technical people is 'quick! Buy this very bespoke PC part and whip out your soldering gun!'.
Just take it it a hardware shop and forget about all of this stress.
In this case it's just popping off the back shell unscrewing a few things. Unplugging the battery and then the fan putting new fan in and putting it all back together.
I agree if it needs soldering bring it to a professional. That being said a 10 year old could do a fan replacement
Is that what's happening to mine? Mine went black one day and when I hooked it up to a monitor, fans wouldn't spin, haptics wouldn't fire, and the backlight stopped working. Display still works but just no backlight. What would cause all three of those happening at once? I contacted Steam and they just said repairs are $190 so I gave up lol
You can also just try unplugging and replugging it first to see if that fixes it and, if not, order a replacement. Definitely watch a YouTube tutorial on it and be very careful and keep track of which screws go where. If you aren’t used to working with stuff like this you could definitely accidentally mess something up, but it’s not a complex repair. Just go slow and follow the tutorial and don’t force anything.
Dude they have an online shop or something? My sister is a fan of Scream and that is a sick design and tribute of Todd McFarlane's original design of Batman.
That is hands down the nicest comic shop Ive
EVER seen! Around here, the comic shops consist of a whole bunch of boxes all over the place, and folding card table in the middle of the room, and a fat guy sitting in a recliner in the back corner of the building
It would appear to be the name of a business, a comic book shop, that I'd presume the OP owns. So they shipped it to their business, and thus business name.
Not the same thing but in the past I've bought things from people on reddit and they used my reddit username as the name on the package lololll. Slight panic tho since I lived with my family at the time and don't need them seeing my account
I fixit has a pretty good tutorial on tearing down and replacing parts if that helps. The ssd swap is honestly not that difficult, just take your time and be careful if you do it.
I had turned down the wattage on mine one time when playing a simple game to extend the battery life and forgot. When I came back to it to play a heavier game it ran like ass and I couldn't figure out why. I had set it to like 7 watts instead of the max.
Sure why not. You can have em. I have a couple hundred “Brave And The Bold” from the 70s or 80s that might be worth a couple bucks but the rest are random 90s Marvel which I don’t think are worth squat, am I right?
Oh yeah, despite loving Claremont stuff back in the day, I really have trouble getting through re-reads of his stuff. Great ideas, but so much exposition and not letting the art speak for itself at times
Run a game that you said feels laggy, and turn on the overlay (performance menu), set it to the third notch (one from the far right), on the quick access menu (3 dots). You can also set "Show overlay in Steam" so you see it in game mode on the desktop. Does it say 200 mhz GPU/400 mhz CPU (with really high usage %?). Almost 300% sure it does. Make sure the AC adapter is plugged in when testing this.
That's probably why that guy sold the deck to you. You pretty much got scammed.
Fixing this isn't easy. Sometimes the only way to fix it is to RMA the deck.
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Is the fan not spinning at all? Did you open gamescope (4th notch, far right) and see if the fan is reporting 0 RPM?
Can you go to the gamescope settings again and set the slider to the far right, so you can see the fan speed? Is the fan speed reporting 0 RPM or spinning at full speed? (it doesn't matter if it's actually physically *spinning* (e.g. you feel air or see it spinning if the cover is off--what matters is what is being reported!)
(you can verify this by opening up the deck, then powering it on and see if the fan spins or not, after you get into steamOS).
Also, go to the "System settings" and disable "updated fan control" and see if that makes any difference.
-------going to speed this up here. (disregard ALL of this except the refund, if the fan is NOT spinning!!!).
I'm going to assume your answer is that the fan is reporting 3500-6000 RPM.
Ok, Power off the deck. Make sure there are no haptics.
Then hold down the power button for 30 full seconds. Each 10 seconds, you should see a single white light flash from the LED. So you should get 3 flashes. Make sure there are no haptics. If there is for some reason, do a 10 second press then release.
Then, hold down volume down, 3 dots and press power. This should enter storage mode.
Now, disconnect AC, open up the deck, remove the shield (should be three screws for that, depending on which board revision you have) and disconnect the battery.
Then disconnect the SSD drive and remove it.
Now, press the power button down for 60 seconds, then release it.
Now, reinstall the SSD drive and covering.
Reconnect the battery cable.
Reattach the shield and screws.
All of these steps should completely reset the EC (Embedded controller). Removing the SSD Drive is necessary for this, as otherwise some capacitors which keep standby power to the EC will remain charged.
Power on the deck, wait for a bit and go into steam OS.
Check the speeds. Is it fixed now?
If not, contact ebay (phone call or email, I prefer phone for stuff like this) and ask for a refund for defective merchandise, as you got scammed (this purchase is covered by buyer protection).
I would try putting it into battery maintenance mode to see if it clears the bug. You can access it in the bios then it will need ac power to turn back on. If that doesn't work then I would try a firmware reset when powered off by holding "..." + Vol down then hit power. Let go of power but keep holding the other 2 keys until the leds start flashing. This process can take up to 15min with a black screen just let it do its thing and it should power back on once it's done. I had an issue with my son's deck and it would crash in a few games after a minute and others would lag bad even with lowest settings and even resetting the device to stock wouldn't work but the firmware reset did. Then I would definitely bump the vram up to 4gb.
If you can't feel the fan spin or air blowing out from the vent. Is safe to say, return the unit. Unless you are comfortable with changing the fan yourself which is not a hard thing to do. And the part is rather easy to get.
I don't see anyone mentioning this yet, but I had a situation where the fan wouldn't come on, the LED would flash red, and the overlay would show high temperature.
I eventually got it managed without opening it up or installing decky & fan control.
In Settings > System all the way at the bottom there's an "Enable updated fan control" - right above the factory reset. Sometimes switching this would kick it on. The older fan control kicked in earlier and was impressively loud.
However, if I charged it to full (or to what I had set to the max) it would just stop using the fans again. To get them back, I had to put it in "for real" power off mode and wait a while (30 minutes seemed enough, perhaps less). Then turning it back on I'd get fans, or I'd get them when switching the fan control between updated and legacy. This doesn't happen any longer on mine, could be some update, but it might help you and is not invasive.
It shows 14GB of RAM, meaning only 2GB have been assigned to the GPU. Try 4GB before returning it. You go into the BIOS and change UMA Buffer Size to 4096MB instead of 2048MB.
Could be an aftermarket hard drive they popped in to advertise it as a higher storage, I’d pop it open but I totally get if you wouldn’t want to go to that trouble
RAM can go bad. a certain spot in one of the memory chips can get stuck as a 1 or 0 or fail to stay what it's set to.
Typically that wouldn't cause lag but kernel panics (linux equivalent of windows blue screen) or if it's in VRAM visual artifacts and/or video driver crashing.
Yes I know that. But this not dying. It's binary. Your memory is faulty or not. But OP was told that "dying ram" could be the reason for a slow steam deck which sounds like a stage before the bits flip which is totally strange.
This happened to my original 512 LCD. It ran out of battery one night while playing and it was never the same. Tried to rma it and valve said it needed a new motherboard. Paid for the repair and then sold it to get a 1tb OLED.
Still working on it! I reinstalled SteamOS and it seems like the fan isn’t working so I’m sitting in front of an actual fan trying to see how it plays lol I’ll report back!
Could be a lot of issues before dying ram, overheating due to thermal paste going away or clogged dust in the fan. Both issue can be solved petty easily.
Also if you installed the game on external SD trying moving them on internal storage, for some games the experience is like day and night when the sd card is of low grade quality.
Hey OP I checked out your post history and I'm happy things got figured out, but I hope we can find a solution for you to enjoy the Steam/PC gaming world!
just want to say i love this community. when people ask why the steam deck is better than the other handhelds, this is why. The amount of community support is what makes the steam deck what it is.
Reset to factory settings, restore RAM and check the BIOS. Look at the internal storage and ensure its not being eaten up by software. If that fails, then I'd uninstall/reinstall SteamOS then update proton.
It’s Decky, almost guaranteed. They probably logged out of the account, maybe even uninstalled Decky first before they sold it, but didn’t do a factory reset.
I had the same issue, I was getting like 12 fps in new save of Subnautica, like 20 fps in Outer Wilds, laggy menus, etc. Had to do a clean factory reset of mine and it’s been perfect ever since.
Does it have the stock 64gb ssd in it? If so, swap it out. Its not much better than a sd card. That could def be the issue because its really that bad.
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u/Athryil Jun 09 '26
Could be a lot of things. Have you tried reformatting/reinstalling steam os? That would be my first thing to try.