As cool as the Steam Deck looks with RGB lighting, you might not want to try to mod your device just yet. A Reddit user who tested the mod found that while adding the RGB LEDs doesn’t consume a significant amount of battery power, it can cause some pretty significant issues with the Steam Deck’s motherboard.
The “RGBDeck” mod began circulating on Reddit earlier this month, with u/WUBBSY documenting the process to put a small microcontroller and LED strips in the device. They finished it off with a transparent backing of JSAUX, allowing lights to shine through the case while the Steam Deck is on. The end result gives the Steam Deck a nice pop of color (in a very gamer PC way).
Adam Honse (u/CalcProgrammer1), the developer behind the open source lighting platform OpenRGBalso tried the mod and even came up with an integration that allows users to adjust the Steam Deck lighting through the app. However, since then Honse posted an update on Saturday night that he advises against trying it, noting that “it appears to be significant damage to the motherboard.”
According to Honse, the source of the problem is a tiny component “that didn’t like the extra power draw on the internal USB connection between the motherboard and the controller PCB,” where it got the 5V needed to power the RGB lights. That part ended up failing after a few days, causing the lights and controller to exhibit strange behavior before they stopped working entirely.
It also damaged a component on the Steam Deck motherboard, which is supposed to cut off 5V power to the controller board when the device is in sleep mode. As Honse explained, that piece no longer turns off the controller when the Steam Deck is on standby, causing the device to lose power. “We’ll have to find a new 5V power source that can handle a higher current,” Honse explains.
In other words, the mod isn’t there yet, and that’s fine; Glad Honse showed up before other modders ripped up their Steam Decks. Hopefully, it won’t be long until we see a possible solution (at least until Valve decides to incorporate RGB into the Steam Deck by default).
