I just got my steam deck RMAed after 1.5 years. Guess what was the first thing I did when It turned on.
I had some performance problems. Suddenly, steam deck lost about 60% of its performance in games. My troubleshooting didn't help. After that, I contacted steam support. We were talking for about a week, but nothing helped, so they agreed to send me a replacement.
I have to say… The fresh vent smells even better than I remember.
I had to RMA mine at the beginning of the year for pretty much the same issue. It would throttle the CPU to like 400MHz in any sort of gaming workload no matter how light. I reinstalled the OS, reset the BIOS, battery storage mode, even unplugged the battery and plugged it back in but nothing fixed it. Valve sent me a brand new unit in its place. Valve's RMA is top notch. Mine was only around 6 months old at the time so 1.5 years is awesome that they're still doing it.
At least we know all the returns aren't just being scrapped now that they're selling official refurbished units. That's where all of the RMA units are going I suppose.
Yep, the same thing, but I think it was something with the GPU.
It was always at 100% and ±230 MHz.
When I turned on “Manual GPU Clock Control”, but let the slider at 1600 MHz, GPU clock went up, but GPU utilization went down.
Yeah, that looks like the same issue mine had. I read that it was an APU firmware/BIOS bug. Hopefully the newer units have patched firmware to fix this. In my case it started happening after I let the battery completely die and didn't charge it up for a month, so I've been more careful about keeping mine charged up now.
I actually had that problem a couple of days ago and was able to fix it myself by using the steam OS "main" channel instead of stable. The main channel is probably close to alpha. After that I could go back and it stayed fixed. So it seems that the new software indeed solved this problem.
Definitely not a thermal issue, the temps barely climbed and the fan never ramped up. It seemed like a TDP lock of 1W or so but only on the CPU as the GPU core would happily boost up still.