Valve says you shouldn’t fix the Steam Deck’s noisy fan this way
The Steam Deck started shipping two months ago today, and it’s gotten quite a bit better since, but this week might be the best yet — because we’re finally addressing the single biggest issue with the $400 portable PC. Yes, I’m talking about the fan.
When the Deck launched, it shipped with an extremely noisy fan to cool its AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2 silicon, and owners like me have been dealing with its volume and constant whine from day one. It ran constantly, even when I wasn’t doing anything with the system, and was always ramping up even in relatively lightweight games like Vampire Survivors.
Worse, it whines. Or at least some Steam Decks have that issue — the Reddit community discovered that Valve actually ships the Deck with one of two different fans, one from Delta and another from Huaying. I’ve got the Delta one, and so do most others complaining about the whine from what I’ve seen. Valve won’t comment on the fan selection, and iFixit can’t say whether you’ll be able to swap out for a better one when replacement parts are available.
We're aware of the noise issue, and we're trying to source the ones without the noise, but it will depend on what's available to us.
But this week, Valve did take a big step towards improving it with a beta software update — and I can confirm it’s a whole new experience. No longer does the fan kick on when the system’s just sitting there — it’s now dead silent when idle, until or unless you warm up the chip by downloading some content or opening up big folders of games at a minimum.
It no longer ramps up as quickly, either, with mine generally waiting until the system crosses 65 degrees Celsius before raising fan speed to a new tier — though I did notice it getting pretty toasty before
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