I am currently using my SteamDeck in desktop mode connected to my standard USB-C-dock. The same dock with the same cable is used by me for at least 8h per day with my work laptop (And previously my personal laptop) without any issues.
On the steam deck I get frequent disconnection of my USB devices tho. This is especially bad when the deck is on high load on either the CPU or GPU. I already tried to disable auto suspend for USB (echo -1 > /sys/module/usbcore/parameters/autosuspend), but this didn’t help the situation at all. Looking at dmesg, there are no errors, just “USB disconnected” messages as if I disconnected the devices by unplugging. Forcing a rescan of the USB-Port by unbinding and rebinding it (Or manually removing the cable and reattaching) fixes the issue until the next load spike.
I know that first and second gen ryzen had issues with the USB-controllers (Or more precisely the first and second gen chipsets). Is this issue also present on the steam deck?
I don’t think it is signal integrity issues, as other devices work perfectly fine with the same dock/cable combo and the display signal is steady (Which is normally the first to go before USB). Additionally, the dock seems to only utilize the USB2 connection on the cables and leave the other lanes all to displayport. So it should cut out even less.
Anyone here with any idea on how to fix this? It is making it impossible to use the deck in desktop mode for me. While writing this post, I listened through 3 songs on youtube and every time a new page loaded the USB connection just plain dropped.
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Is it a powered hub? I don’t have a Deck yet, but it sounds like it might hit some power limits and disconnect USB devices as a result.
Have you tried limiting the power the CPU/GPU can use and see if the disconnects still occur?
Yes, the hub has build-in capabilities for 90W USB-C power delivery. To be more precise, it is 2 of these screens: Samsung LS27A600U
I’m using the official dock and i have not had anything like that happen yet, though i’m only driving one display. There was a good article a while back about USB-C docks and funky implementation decisions that cause weird drops, like using DP to hdmi chips that overheat. Let me see if i can find it.
Oh yes, I am aware of usb-c fuckery. I spend the last year on it.
In this case, I put the blame on the steam deck. The dock does not make any problems with any other device and it only happens on high load on the SD side. So while there could be issues with the dock, chances of that seem slim.
