I’m mostly playing BG3 those days and the battery lasts max 1,5-2 hours until I have to plug it again. So if I have a long playing session (like today, slow Sunday) I will have to charge it pretty frequently. Is it bad for the battery? I wish it lasted longer, but oh well (don’t see myself upgrading to oled at this time).
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The device is meant to be used and abused. Play and charge on it as you want without regard to how often you do it. The battery replacement you might need years down the road is probably about $20 bucks.
No it isn’t. In fact, it’s better for lithium battery to be charged all the time.
if you are draining and charging all the time yes it will eat through the limited battery cycles. if you just leave it charging constantly no its actually the best way to keep the battery healthy.
I regularly keep mine on charge in the dock. Play docked and handheld regularly and haven’t seen a degradation in battery since I bought mine at launch.
If only there was a search function in Reddit…
I don’t understand the downvotes this has to be one of the most reposted questions on this sub. I remember answering this exact same question at least 5 times.
A lot of devices like smartphones will run off the battery even when plugged in, degrading the lifespan and risking pillowing the battery, but as I understand it the Steam Deck is designed to run off the power supply once the battery is charged, so it’s not endlessly charging/depleting the battery like a smartphone does.
I don’t see how this is even possible. Do you have a source for this? Genuinely curious
A depleted battery usually acts as a second load on the circuit but it can also be a second power source if the three are in parallel with one another (as opposed to being isolated and switched). In the case of an inadequate power supply, a high current draw will pull from both sources at once. This is not necessarily common or desirable but you do see it in things like a vehicle alternator+battery, for instance.
It also runs off of the power supply while charging.
It’s impossible to charge and discharge a battery at the same time.
Mine’s been plugged in for like a year and a half, and it’s still got 100% battery health.
While there is no harm to the battery at all, I am in a similar boat to you and if you can take a £10 hit a month you can get GeForce Now on your deck fairly easily and I get better performance with BG3 and handheld lasts a good 4/5 hours.
It’s arguably better to leave it plugged in all the time, because what kills batteries the fastest is charge-discharge cycles and with the Deck’s passthrough charging, the battery disengages when it’s plugged in to a powerful enough charger so there’s less cycles on it.
I charge mine all the time and after a year my battery health is 100%
No. You don’t have to worry about it. Won’t make a difference how you treat it.
It’s just a laptop in small form factor ;)
I keep my work DELL laptop (with Ubuntu) plugged in almost all the time yet still when I need to work on battery it works fine … i have it like 4 years now.
SD has the same passthrough feature, so it should be fine as well.
Modern batteries are smart enough to handle being plugged in all the time
The Steam Deck doesn’t automatically limit charge to 80% as a lot of devices seem to lately, but the impact this has is honestly negligible
What really matters in the end is how many cycles your battery goes through, which is to say how many times the energy transfer equivalent of going from 0 to 100% isThe tl;dr of it however is don’t worry about how you use your device, while it might be true that it’s optimal to always keep batteries between 20 and 80% it’s honestly not even worth worrying about that.
Just download PowerTools and set the charge limit to 80%. BAM you just got the best of both worlds.
I have been afraid to constantly plug/unplug my Steam Deck & wear out the USB-C port, so I got a magnetic charging adapter (i.e., an adapter stays plugged into the Steam Deck at all times so the port doesn’t wear out & I connect a charger to the other end magnetically).
Unfortunately this essentially ruined my first two Steam Decks so now I just plug & unplug the device constantly because that’s better than yet another hardware system break since launch I guess.
I’m using smart outlet with countdown timer to charge it it only to 80%. Not sure how much it helps though