This happened to me. To be fair I did some fairly full-on modding on hardware and software. You can find a lot of people on this sub referring to this as ‘The Black Screen of Death’. I tried everything I could find in 100 different orders and had no success. I sent it back for paid repairs and they did fix it. It has been working fine since.

I know it’s a pain but a $550 functional deck is better than a $400 brick.

It’s a computer. Next.

Hardware:

SSD upgrade. Totally worth it for the $20 to go from 64 to 256.

JSaux V1 Backplate: Fitment is not perfect but pretty good, it’s a pretty cool novelty to have the see through view. Definitely drops the fan noise with otherwise identical settings. Alu plate definitely opens up the possibilities to pull MUCH more heat out of the system if you want to take it to the next level. Kind of a pain in the ass to have a 50°c metal plate right there to melt your fingertips or thigh.

Extra drilled holes above fan in Backplate. Easy way to increase airflow over the fan. Some people feel very strongly that you shouldn’t do this and I haven’t done enough testing to say that it isn’t going to blow my shit one day but it definitely drops the temps a few degrees.

External Alu heatsink and external powered fan. The fan was a pain to set up but if you’re a nerd with a 3D printer then any reason to waste a day on a project is a good one. Helps the temps a lot but is stupidly loud and distracting. It means that you can’t fit it in the case or travel with it anymore. It’s actually really dumb just to drop the temps unless you’re going insane with overclocking.

eBay Honeywell thermal pad. Almost definitely got fake brand stuff. Only do this upgrade if you’re 100% confident that you’re getting the real stuff because my experience has been nothing but horseshit. I’m going to switch over to a standard high quality thermal paste soon.

K5 pro thermal Putty. Only worth doing if you’re also going with the Jsaux backplate and pulling more heat out with external heatsinks. It probably doesn’t make a tonne of difference but it also doesn’t hurt anything.

Software:

Undervolts and overclocks: managed to get a solid and stable -30mV undervolt allround. If you can then you should. It’s free and helps temps and fan noise. I couldn’t overclock higher than 3700/1900 before running into problems. I feel like I noticed the difference in 1% lows when pushing the system hard.

Increased TDP. I decided in the end that it’s pretty pointless going higher than 18W because you’re way past the sweet spot of the APU. You’ll have to see what your own milage is here. Some people claim to push 30W to the APU through their modded steamdecks and claim insane performance but I call bullshit.

Cyrobytes utilities. He’s basically our steamdeck lord and Savior. I trust his testing and software tweaks implicitly and have no interest in hearing deathblades opinions against him. Don’t even bother bro.