Today I pulled my steam deck out of my backpack to find that it ate 15% of the battery sitting in the bag. I swear I heard the fan running in the bag.
Now, the fan is just running all the time whether I’m doing anything or not. This is incredibly suspicious battery eating behavior that I don’t recall experiencing before. I’ve checked what’s running with top and the Steam instance and two web helpers seem to constantly be eating up 30% of the CPU.
Has anyone experienced this before? Any tips or ideas on how to debug? I don’t think the fan should be running all the time, just sitting on the main menu doing absolutely nothing.
The Deck has been sitting here on, doing nothing on the home screen for about an hour, and 20% of the battery has been used. This thing would never last 48 hours doing absolutely nothing.
Done several reboots. If I go to desktop mode and kill the steam process, the fans stop.
How do I go about getting the thermal readings?
Open the performance overlay to the highest level, you can also set it to show on steam menus as well.
Since it sounds like the fans are specifically being controlled by steam though, try swapping your fan curve. There’s an option in steam OS to use old fan curve, I think it’s under system. You could also install the decky plugin fantastic and try adjusting the fan curve there.
The problem is the insane CPU usage by the steam process and it’s associated web helpers as shown in the other comments. The fans are doing what they’re supposed to.