this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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Steam Deck
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My partner bought me one a few months ago from Kogan for my birthday. But it does have a problem which needs to be RMA’d and I knew there was no hope of that.
I thought we could try our luck with Kogan returns, but they only have the OLED model now so don’t know how that would go. Especially as it appears to work fine ( until you get 5 - 10 minutes in-game then it hard crashes).
I found on the github issue tracker for steamOS someone from Brazil (who also had to resort to grey imports) found a way to flashback to an older BIOS and adjust memory power settings. That fixed it, but it’s a bit bodgy and introduces other issues.
This is a known issue that the Steam rep on the issue tracker said only follow that process if you absolutely can’t RMA it. They closed the issue in the basis that you just RMA it if it happens.
What was the issue?
I tried to find the github issue, but it’s eluding me, so I’m going to go into detail since I spent about 3 weeks troubleshooting this.
Hard crash when playing a game. Restarts steam deck with a “verifying installation” message.
This happens anywhere from 2-15 minutes of playtime. Game didn’t matter, Terraria, Skyrim, Borderlands 1, Dave the Diver, Shredders Revenge, Doom 2016 … It was also reported by users with both LCD and OLED decks, so hardware revision didn’t matter either.
Anecdotally you find people saying that some of these steps work:
Memory retraining, re-imaging steam deck, Flashing different bios versions, Messing around with gpu clocks
But almost all of those threads loop back to the OP saying something like “nope, still crashing”. Any reprieve they did have seemed to be coincidental.
Valve themselves recommend those first two steps and then an RMA if it doesn’t fix it.
A Brazilian user in the issue tracker worked out you can flash BIOS 0116, and disable two specific memory power management flags. I believe the settings are hidden in other versions of the BIOS.
A Valve rep on the tracker confirmed that would work, but suggested not to do it as the deck is not functioning properly and needs to be replaced. They then closed the issue and advised to only use that fix if you can’t RMA.
Worth noting, 0116 is a pre-OLED BIOS, and can only be flashed to the LCD models. There is no way to reveal these BIOS flags on the OLED model, so you can only RMA in that case.
This has absolutely solved the problem. But I think I’m having a few dodgy side effects that weren’t happening before, like updates failing, and USB connection has become iffy and needing a few restarts to recognise devices are plugged in.
At least I can play games again, which work flawlessly now.
This one https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/1257
Had it as well. I'm actually not sure if I still have it. Crashes became less frequent after the RMA but they still happen. And if they do start happening again they get more frequent until I do a cold reboot.