Boot issues and CPU/GPU frequency lock at 400/200MHz

[Lhindir]

recently got my deck. installed a bunch of games, already played through firewatch, titanfall 2, and ori and the blind forest on it no problem. quite satisfied overall. but i recently installed doom 2016, which brought me under 15GiB free space on the boot drive (i doubt this is relevant but figured i’d just include it). ran poorly at first but i discovered it was on opengl and ran beautifully after switching to vulkan (i figured the “this game’s graphics settings are optimized” bit in the deck verified listing meant this would be taken care of, but apparently not).

anyway, i played for maybe half an hour and then got the little yellow low battery alert. i’m assuming this is done with gamescope somehow. this immediately tanked my performance to unplayable, which has not happened in other games, so i don’t think it was throttling but rather some kind of gamescope issue. after i exited doom, the lag remained at the main menu. so i shut down, and when i rebooted, the deck logo showed up for like 30 seconds (longer than usual), then it went to a blank, backlit screen and stayed like that for minutes, until i forced shutting down by holding the power button.

i rebooted a second time, and again it took a very long time (couple minutes at least), but it finally booted. the performance issues on the main menu remained, so i pulled up mangohud and it looked like the cpu was been pinned to 400MHz somehow so it was constantly at like 80-90% load. tried rebooting a third time and got a solid five minutes of the black screen like the first reboot. i was able to get in again after booting into the bios and continuing without changing anything. still had the 400MHz lag issue. i was able to switch to the beta channel, but after restarting, i’m once again getting the black screen.

does any of this seem familiar to anyone? i have no idea what’s going on. i installed the firefox and spotify flatpaks; other than that i haven’t made any tweaks whatsoever. as a linux user, i bought a deck so i wouldn’t have to investigate this stuff anymore 😢.

[Lhindir]

update: it escaped the black screen when i connected power, although it might’ve been a coincidence. CPU still locked at 400MHz. also, the GPU is locked at 200MHz.

[Lhindir]

OK, I found two other people on the Steam Deck Discord with the same frequency lock issue. One had it persist after a reimage and had to RMA. The other just posted the problem and never followed up.

Seeing as there seem to be multiple cases in the wild, I’m wondering if Valve is aware of this and whether it does require an RMA.

[DuckSoup]

I literally just had this issue. I received my steam deck Wednesday of last week and after playing for half a day I started to have the same problem.

if I leave it off for a long time the issue goes away but only for a little bit. It eventually comes back.

I tried all kinds of solutions but nothing seemed to fix it. I don't know if you have a similar problem but my fan speeds are also running at a full 8000 RPM when this was happening.

I just sent mine back in for an RMA yesterday.

[DuckSoup]

Lastly, I also think it's a hardware issue because I was having the same high speed fan issue and performance problems while in the bios.

The second the device powers on the fans are spoiling up.

[Lhindir]

Resolved

Steam support got back to me promptly and requested I enable battery saver mode in the BIOS and then boot with power connected (which disables battery saver mode).

This resolved the issue. I’ve asked if it is likely to happen again and if they’ve identified a permanent fix.

The full instructions from support follow. Try this at your own risk; I recommend just submitting your own ticket until Valve themselves publicly address this issue.

Originally posted by Steam Support:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention and for attempting to troubleshoot. No worries, we can definitely explore some options to have this sorted out.

For now, we have something else for you to try to attempt to address the issue remotely and rule out a problem with the unit itself.

Disconnect all external devices/connectors from the device and make sure you can still produce the issue. If so, please try putting the unit into shipping mode:

1. Power the Steam Deck down normally (choose Shut Down from the Power menu).
   
2. Hold down the Volume+ button and press the power button. The Steam Deck should boot into the BIOS menu.
   
3. Using the D-Pad and A to select, navigate to "Setup Utility".
   
4. Navigate to the Power Menu.
   
5. Choose Battery storage mode, and confirm.

You should see the Steam Deck power off, and the power LED will blink three times to confirm battery storage mode.

Wait a few minutes, then plug the Steam Deck in to the provided power supply and turn on the Steam Deck.

Let us know the result.

[DuckSoup]

Oh yeah I had tried that many times. If anything it would let me boot into the OS again, but the issues would come right back.

[lasagna]

Thanks for the info. I had this happen yesterday on a plane ride. Intermittent slowdowns during game play, and then slowness in the main steam menu. Rebooting the device left it in a black screen forever.

Battery storage mode seems to fix the boot issue. I’ll follow up if the problem keeps coming back. I’ve had almost no issues so far, other than a thermal throttle once.

[FlinggTV]

I have this too, just opened a support ticket

[lasagna]

Things have been working good mostly since the bios settings trick. I was playing death stranding on the plane again and experienced similar throttling right before the low battery warning tripped. Still trying to tell if it’s correlated to low battery or not. This time around the main menu was not slow, and was able to reboot.

In peoples experience, is this something that gets worse and worth opening a support ticket over?

[Marlock]

@lasagnye west
One commonly reported issue (derived from wifi driver instabilities that Valve is trying to fix) is the Deck incorrectly thinking it has low battery then powering down.

You should try the usual collection of wifi workarounds, and maybe one helps:
1) enable developer mode, then go to the new "developer" tab in steam settings and disable wifi power savings

2) unhide your wifi ssid if hidden (hiding it is well know to not really be useful for privacy nor for security, by the way)

3) if 2,4GHz and 5GHz bands are joined in a single ssid, split them in the router configs and use only one of them

4) choose a fixed wifi channel instead of leaving it in auto (configure the same channel in both the router and the deck)

5) try a different router brand/model or a smartphone wifi hotspot... some people have issues only with certains devices but not with others

6) try an ethernet dongle instead of the deck's wifi

7) try a wifi dongle with well-known good linux support instead of using the built-in wifi chip

[Watermelon Daiquiri]

I just had this happen as well. I had originally thought the slow down was due to updates that were happening at the same time when I was sshed in with the wifi power savings off, then it happened when there were no updates. The first time i had to exit a game to get it to reset the clocks, the second i just exited to the main menu and the third persisted across games. Then I got the black screen after rebooting

[Watermelon Daiquiri]

I did the battery saver trick, but it happened again today. The game I was playing suddenly dropped to like 15fps and the steam menu was similarly laggy. trying to get to desktop mode it restarted and is now doing the black screen thing again.

[Marlock]

From another thread about boot issues:

Originally posted by Healer:

Same problem. It's weird but it was solved by putting battery in power storage mode:
Enter bios on power on (power + Vol+) with power supplier disconnected.
Within the BIOS, use the D-Pad to navigate and the A button to select.
Navigate to Setup Utility.
Navigate to the Power menu.
Select Battery storage mode.
Select Yes to confirm.
Your Steam Deck should now power down into storage mode.

After this, connect power supplier and power on the deck.

In my case it booted up correctly.

I know it's weird, bur actually worked.

Good luck!

Others reported this to have helped them with unbootable decks, maybe it helps here as well

[CoffeeCup]

It sounds very similar to the issue I'm having. Like others, I'm having a constant black screen and the only way to get around that is to thoroughly drain the battery, then fully fill the battery, then do a fresh re-imaging of the system.

And then the problem comes right back almost immediately, with a 75% charge battery immediately going down to 5%, then preventing me from going into sleep mode, then when I turn it off it won't turn back on, unless I deplete the entire battery for like eight hours, then charge it again. And yes, I tried the Battery Storage mode numerous times.

I can't imagine it's anything other than shoddy hardware. I've never had anything like this happen on any other device I have ever owned.

That said I don't know about it clocking the CPU/GPU on my end. I don't know how to test it, since my screen won't even turn on when the problem occurs.

[lasagna]

Originally posted by CoffeeCup:

And yes, I tried the Battery Storage mode numerous times.

Sounds different than the issue I was seeing, which the battery storage trick fixed the boot issue immediately. Please update us if you contact valve with any info they send you.

I have not seen the issue again, but I have also not been playing on battery lately.