Did you buy a used or refurbished Steam Deck and want to check its battery health? Perhaps you've had your Deck for a while and want to see how the battery is holding up. Let's take a look at how to check your Deck’s battery health, and a couple more battery-related tips to keep things in good condition.
The following advice is valid for both the Steam Deck OLED and Steam Deck LCD.
How to Check Battery Health on Your Steam Deck
All batteries degrade over time, including the one in your Steam Deck. With each charging cycle, the battery capacity lowers, if only by a tiny fraction of a percent. After enough charge cycles, the battery's health can degrade considerably. This is why it's good to check your Steam Deck's battery health from time to time, especially if you bought a used or a refurbished unit.
Checking your Steam Deck’s battery health is fairly straightforward, but you have to do it in Desktop mode. First, switch to Desktop mode by pressing the Steam button, entering the "Power" menu, and hitting the “Switch to Desktop” option.
Once you’re in Desktop mode, there are a couple of ways to check the battery's health. The first one requires you to hover over the battery icon in the notification area of the taskbar and click on it with the right trackpad (or tap it with your finger). The following menu shows your battery health, just below the charge level, as seen below.
Another way to check battery health, as well as other helpful battery-related info, is to right-click the battery icon with the left trigger and then click on the “Show Energy Information” option.
The following menu includes the battery health data but also shows the model and serial number of the battery, remaining charge in watt-hours (Wh), voltage, current power consumption in watts, and so on.
How to Check Battery Level In-Game
You can pull up the notification header which shows the battery level and other info while you're playing a game by pressing the Steam button. There's also another way to have your battery level and other handy data shown at all times in-game by activating the in-game performance overlay.
To activate this overlay, use the "Quick Access" button under the right trackpad (the ellipsis "..." button located on the right side of your Deck). Scroll down to the "Performance" menu represented by the battery icon, and turn the performance overlay on. Make sure to choose performance overlay level 2 or higher because level 1 doesn’t show the battery percentage.
While the performance overlay is visible in-game, it turns off by default once you return to the home screen. The good news is that you can enable the overlay to show everywhere in Game mode if you wish.
To do this, open the Quick Access menu and go to the
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