I love my Steam Deck, as any regular reader will know. It's my favourite gaming device but it could always be better right? And with competition hot (hi Nintendo), I hope Valve have more plans.

No, no it can’t. Plenty of videos of people putting absolutely stupid powerful fans on tiny heatsinks with big overclocked cpu and it’s unable to keep up until they swap to a bigger heatsink.

There is a limit to how much heat a given amount of heatsink can disperse and there is a limit to how quickly that can transfer to air. If the heatsink is too small no amount of extra airflow will fix it.

You’re not reaching those limits on such a tiny and weak processor.

The ratios are the same, you just can’t find videos of people doing it with small things because that’s not as interesting. There is still ultimately a limit to how much a given amount of heat sink can transfer heat to air even with a small processor.

20w TDP would be possible with some extra forced air from a dock. Mainly because some handhelds can be put to 20 tdp, and they technically work although they hit thermal throttling at 90c almost immediately. With a little bit of forced air from a dock you should be able to bring that down to a much more reasonable 80c

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