Well you maybe wonder what the heck is STAPM?

STAPM is a short abbreviation for "Skin Tempature Aware Power Management"

What does this do exactly?

It is a performance enhancement feature that's boosts the APU clock speed as long as the skin temperatures remain below the system-specified ergonomic limits. It can also help lower temperature for devices such as laptops and mobile handhelds from getting hot to the touch.

How can this improve my APU Speed and keep temps low?

This will boost your clock speed to what the system ergonomicaly configured by the manufacture.

I have tried this with Fallout 76 and I have seen fps improvement with the game even though I'm running the graphics on low I used to get around 45fps and fluctuating fps too but when I enabled i saw a boost and was getting 59fps to 60fps stable.

This can be very useful but can also use more power when it needs to basically acts like a additional layer of power management without human interaction.

This setting is confirmed to be safe to use and should not harm your deck in anyway, however with any modifications to your deck you must know what your doing to do such things otherwise you can end up with a ☠️ deck so treat this mod as any other mod and use it at your own risk I am not responsible if you end up messing up your deck just in case I had to say it!

How to enable you will need either https://github.com/Alia5/SteamDeck_BIOS_UNLOCK/releases/tag/SD_UNLOCK (Not Recommended, but optional)

Or

https://github.com/DavidS95/Smokeless_UMAF (Recommended)

These tools you will need to enable STAPM because you cannot traditionally enable this via stock bios.

We recommend using Smokeless_UMAF as it can modify these values without flashing the bios, but requires a USB flash drive formatted to fat32 to work and a USB keyboard to save your changes.

You can use sd unlocked but that flashes to the bios and cannot be removed even if you replaced the SSD or reinstall the BIOS or OS. It's there until your deck dies forever.

HOW TO ENABLE:

in the setting go to "AMD CBS" and find a setting called "SMU Common Options"

Then find a option called "STAPM Control" and switch it from auto to Manual.

You will see 3 new settings appear these options are:

• System Tempature Tracking

• STAPM Boost Override

• STAPM Boost

To enable them remember "Enable=1 & Disable=0"

You can keep STT (System Tempature Tracking) on Auto but I keep it on 1 this helps keeps temps under 80°C while retaining performance.

We do recommend to enable both STAPM Boost Override & STAPM Boost and set them both to 1

Now there is an extra setting I highly recommend to enable to ensure the system respects your changes to do this go to "AMD CBS" then go to "SMU Features" and then scroll down to the bottom of the page till you see "STAPM" and change that to Enabled.

Once you do that you can now save and exit your bios to reboot and it will boot into steam OS.

You may notice the UI is much smoother and faster upon boot this is because STAPM is doing it's magic.

You can always change these back to default anytime if you feel it's not for you!

Note: This took a lot of my time and research to understand what this does and risked my personal deck to provide this guide and assurance that there is no harm in enabling this setting and works perfectly. Hope this helps!

This may vary game to game on performance as I didn't test a whole lot of games so you may need to see what works for you