Valve: Don't Play Your Steam Deck Outside During a Heat Wave
The UK heat wave has prompted Valve to warn people not to play the Steam Deck in toasty temperatures or else the device will automatically shut down.
The company issued the warning on Tuesday, the same day temperatures in the UK broke records and reached(Opens in a new window) 40.2 degrees Celsius (104.4 Fahrenheit).
“Steam Deck performs at its best in ambient temperatures between 0° and 35° C (95 degrees Fahrenheit),” Valve 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 that the AMD chip inside the Steam Deck can run at temperatures up to 100 degrees Celsius, which is similar to other CPUs. The hardware’s built-in fan and heatsink is designed to keep the AMD chip under the limit. But if the ambient temperatures surrounding the console start reaching 35 degrees Celsius, you can expect trouble.
“At 100°C, [the AMD chip] will start to throttle performance, and at 105°C it will shut down. Again, this is to protect itself (and you) from damage,” Valve added. In other words, excessive heat could result in the console exploding if the chip runs at over 100 degrees Celsius continuously.
The warning arrives a week after Nintendo also told users on Twitter about the dangers of playing the Nintendo Switch in high temperatures. Like the Steam Deck, the Switch should only run in temperatures between 5 to 35 degrees Celsius. “If the temperature of the main unit becomes too high, it may sleep automatically to protect the main unit,” the company added.
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