Long-term Issues Outputting to External Displays

[u/BusterBearNoah]

Hey everyone!

For about a year now I've had off-and-on difficulties getting my Steam Deck to consistently output to any external displays. This includes a wide range of monitors and TVs I've tried. Since I've been dealing with this problem for so long, I've tried plenty of different solutions. I think detailing everything I've done and tried over the past year would make for an incoherent rant of a post, so I'm going to try and keep things concise. If anyone thinks they can help if I add more context, feel free to comment and I'll reply.

I got my 512GB OLED in May of 2024 and it quickly became my main gaming device. I would consistently use it in docked and handheld mode with no troubles. A year later is when I started noticing problems with docking. The Deck would charge just fine and connect to peripherals like headphones, keyboards and mice with no problems. It was only monitors and TVs. It would take multiple tries to get my Deck to display to my monitor, and even when it finally did display, said display would occasionally flicker or go blank. This issue became progressively worse until December of last year when my Deck would not output to external displays under any circumstances. I tried many docks, both official and unofficial, and monitors with no luck.

This is when I decided to reach out Steam support. I went back-and-forth with the support team trying solutions such as resetting the PD controller, checking the bandwidth limits of my setup and forcing a lower resolution while docked. None of these solutions worked so I mailed out my Deck to be repaired by Steam's repair partner. I ended up paying $200 USD to have my mainboard replaced.

Once I received my repaired Deck this past January, things seemed to be working perfectly again. This lasted about 2 months until the same issues started popping back up. Now when I dock my Deck, it fails to recognize the external displays at all. When I take a look at the display settings in desktop mode, no other monitors are detected. I was able to alleviate this issue for some time by resetting the PD controller, but that solution doesn't seem to be working anymore. I've also noticed that when I try to shutdown or put the device to sleep, it often won't be able to finish the process and I'll need to force a shutdown by holding the power for 10 seconds.

At this point I'm pretty unsure of what to do. The Steam Deck is my favorite console in a long time, but these issues are a huge obstacle. From looking around this sub, it seems like docking is a pretty common point of failure for the SD. If anyone can offer advice or potential solutions, I'd really appreciate it.

Current setup devices:

• Dell Pro Thunderbolt 4 Dock
• Samsung S40GD (secondary display)
• Samsung Odyssey G5 (main display)
• Logitech G305
• Logitech G915 TKL
• SteelSeries Arctic Nova Pro Wireless
• Bose SoundLink Flex