For Linux Enthusiasts Especially, The Steam Deck Is An Incredible & Fun Device

For those wondering about thermals and other early metrics on the Steam Deck, here is some initial numbers with SteamOS 3.0.

The custom AMD SoC with its Zen 2 4 core / 8 thread design was successfully hitting up to 3.5GHz during testing while most commonly was clocking just shy of 2.0GHz for its peak core frequency.

The PowerCap sysfs interface for the SoC was showing the SoC package consuming up to 27 Watts but on average was about a 12 Watt power draw.

Under gaming workloads the average SoC temperature was 68 degrees with a peak recorded of 82 degrees, but on the outside was not too warm.

The GPU temperature interface was reporting around a 66 degree average during the testing.

The NVMe drive temperature was remaining quite low.

The battery power draw exposed via sysfs meanwhile reported a 19.6 Watt average and a 25.3 Watt peak. However, one of the power numbers isn't adding up with the PowerCap/RAPL interface reporting a 27 Watt peak, which wouldn't make sense with a 25.3 Watt peak power draw when running on battery. So while going off what the respective interfaces are exposing, treat these as rough estimates.