A Vietnamese TikToker has gone through the arduous effort of strapping a full-blown 240mm AIO liquid cooler onto a Steam Deck handheld gaming console. The video shows the entire creation process, which involved building a custom baseplate for the Deck and drilling out part of the rear clamshell to make room for the AIO. However, after all that hard work, thermals dropped by 32%, giving the Steam Deck's little Van Gough APU more than enough thermal headroom to hit peak boost clocks.
Despite its success, this mod is not for the faint of heart and required drilling and damaging the Steam Deck outer shell. If you value your Steam Deck's longevity, this is something you probably should not attempt to try.
The Tiktoker created this mod with only a couple of parts, making this mod pretty simple. To start, he created a custom heat spreader from metal designed to be sandwiched between the Decks' metal cooling solution and the AIO pump itself to allow effective heat transfer between the two components.
@vurathayho ♬ original sound - Bác học điên - Vũ rất Hay Ho
Next, he dremeled a square out of the Steam Decks' rear clamshell, exposing the outer part of the APUs cooling solution, and securely mounted the metal heat spreader to the Deck's back cutout, securing it with four screws as well. Then two thermal pads were placed on the top and bottom of the makeshift heat spreader before the modified outer shell was put back onto the Steam Deck. Finally, the pump was connected to the makeshift heat spreader with the same four screws.
To no one's surprise, the mod worked very well, dropping the CPU and GPU temps from around 85C on average to roughly 60C. At this temperature, the Steam Deck's CPU and GPU should be able to hit peak boost clocks without any problems as long as enough power is available for both components.
Using a liquid cooler is about as extreme as you can get for the Steam Deck, providing more than 15 times the amount of cooling Deck's SoC requires (assuming the AIO is rated at 250W of heat dissipation). This mod proves how ridiculously easy it is to cool the Deck with desktop CPU cooling. I'm sure we'll see far more optimized custom coolers for the Deck, featuring something like a low-profile air cooler, which would offer substantially better portability and still offer very good thermals, especially if thermal paste is used.
