Back in the day I had a laptop with an Nvidia 7800GTX Mobile graphics card that I had over clocked to match the specs of a desktop 7800GTX. It ran at 117 Celsius under load and never had an issue. The system would shut down if I pushed the clocks and got to 120C, but 117 was fine. That system ran great for many years, and I’m guessing still works today.
These chips are designed to run at high temps. I never understood people trying to keep their GPUs at 45C with insane cooling when you could comfortably run at 90.
To be clear, not every chip is designed to handle temps above 70C, but TSMC manufactured ones generally do.
The other complication is the turbo/boost modes, which often are temperature based and throttle back after around 70C or so. Not sure to what extent that applies to steam deck, but Linus Tech Tips didn’t see a performance benefit of having a beefier cooler in the deck, just less temps and noise.
Back in the day I had a laptop with an Nvidia 7800GTX Mobile graphics card that I had over clocked to match the specs of a desktop 7800GTX. It ran at 117 Celsius under load and never had an issue. The system would shut down if I pushed the clocks and got to 120C, but 117 was fine. That system ran great for many years, and I’m guessing still works today.
These chips are designed to run at high temps. I never understood people trying to keep their GPUs at 45C with insane cooling when you could comfortably run at 90.
To be clear, not every chip is designed to handle temps above 70C, but TSMC manufactured ones generally do.
The other complication is the turbo/boost modes, which often are temperature based and throttle back after around 70C or so. Not sure to what extent that applies to steam deck, but Linus Tech Tips didn’t see a performance benefit of having a beefier cooler in the deck, just less temps and noise.