Steam Deck Gets Temperature Notification To Tell You If It's Too Hot
Amid the ongoing summer heat waves, Valve is adding a new temperature notification in the Steam Deck to tell you if the PC gaming handheld is getting too hot to play.
The company is testing the new notification in the latest beta and preview builds(Opens in a new window) for the Steam Deck client, which was announced on Wednesday. The feature promises to tell you “when Steam Deck temperature goes outside the safe operating range.”
The same notification will also tell you if it’s “too cold” to play the device, according(Opens in a new window) to Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang.
The new feature arrives a week after Valve began warning Steam Deck owners to avoid playing the PC gaming handheld in hot weather. “Steam Deck performs at its best in ambient temperatures between 0° and 35° C (32 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit),” the company wrote in a tweet(Opens in a new window).
“If the temperature gets higher than this, Steam Deck may start to throttle performance to protect itself,” the company added. Specifically, the AMD Ryzen CPU on board will throttle its performance if it reaches 100 degrees celsius, and then automatically shut down if the temperatures go past 105 degrees.
The Steam Deck’s built-in fans and heat sink are normally enough to keep the CPU well under 100 degrees. But if the ambient temperatures around the device get toasty, expect to encounter problems.
The problem is that Steam Deck owners didn’t have an easy way to see if the hardware was getting too hot to play. The newly-added notification in the test builds promises to solve this, so customers won’t have to guess. To install the latest beta or preview build, Steam Deck owners can go to Settings > System > Steam Update Channel for access.
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