I notice the fan going pretty hard all the way through my gaming sessions. I’m curious if the Steam deck will warn me before I do damage to the machine?
There should be a warning since SteamOS v3.3: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/3401924854795478414
General -Added notification when Steam Deck temperature goes outside the safe operating range
Unless you are blocking the vents on the back or top of the device, it’s very unlikely that you will drive your Steam Deck “too hard”. If you do somehow manage to drive it “too hard”, I don’t think it will warn you (someone correct me if I’m wrong on this) but what it should do instead is something called thermal throttling whereby the device will scale back it’s performance to stay within a certain thermal threshold.
Unless you overclocked you deck the SoC will automaticly slow down if the temps get high preventing damage.
I believe it will throttle the speed to reduce temps and it will do like a normal PC would and shut down in case it goes too high.
As others have said, it’ll throttle when it gets too hot to cool down. There is also a condition past the GPU emergency threshold to instantly shut down the machine (true on Linux desktop as well), but hypothetically it should never hit it because of the throttling.
