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.
Steam Deck
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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
TIL - thank you for sharing this!
Yup, I got to see it once running Horizon Zero Dawn. It looks a bit like the "low battery" warning but in more scary colors if I remember correctly.
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.
I think it will continue to throttle itself so the temps stay in spec. I would just make sure that you don't have any obstructions on the intake and the output.
I've had mine suddenly shut off a few times with Cyberpunk around launch. With new firmware and a probably unnecessary repaste this no longer happens. Give your deck room to breathe and you'll be fine.
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.