How to Check Which OEM Makes Your Steam Deck Display Panel? | Samsung (SDC) or BOE?
With a quick terminal command in Desktop Mode, we can easily check to see which manufacturer is making your Steam Deck display.
Written Guide
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https://steamdeckexplained.com/check-...
My Steam Deck Accessories (affiliate links below)
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Glass Screen Protector - https://amzn.to/410QlNU
TPU Case - https://amzn.to/3T5kV6R
Carrying Case - https://amzn.to/3Gk3MyZ
Portable Power Bank - https://amzn.to/3GpYe66
Summary
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I have the OLED version of the Steam Deck and today I'm going to show you how to check which company manufacturers the display on your own Steam Deck.
So when the OLED Steam Deck first released, I saw a post over on Reddit talking about how to find out if your new handheld console used a panel from Samsung or. And at first it seemed like this was only being passed around for curiosity sake, but now that we've had a chance to look at these OEM parts, there are some interesting differences between the OLED panels Valve is sourcing from Samsung and BOE.
I'm not going to go into those differences in this video, though, as I would rather focus on how showing you how to check this on your own Steam Deck. But if you would like to learn about them then let me know down in the comments section below.
So to start off, we need to boot our Steam Deck over into Desktop Mode.
Then we're going to click on our App Launcher button.
And you should find the Konsole app within the System category here.
Let's go ahead and launch this program so we have access to a terminal window.
Now there are two different ways we can check to see which company makes the Steam Deck display panel for your device.
There may be some other methods as well, but these two commands are what I've been able to find so far.
And executing both of them can be a great way to double check and make sure it's correct.
And its this second command where you'll begin to notice a difference between the two panels. The ones from Samsung have to work a bit harder to hit that 90Hz refresh rate. Which is causing them to become unstable when they are overclocked.
But if you have a Steam Deck display that was built by BOE, then yours only needs to run at around 102MHz to hit 90Hz, and that means it has the potential to be overclocked to 120Hz.
As you can see in this video, the OLED Steam Deck that I upgraded to has a panel made by Samsung so I can't test out that Steam Deck mod. But I would be happy to make a video about it if there is demand for it.
So again, let me know down in the comments section below if you would like to see a video about how to install that 120FPS mod for the Steam Deck OLED. I can't demonstrate the mod in action, but I can easily show you all of the steps involved in getting it setup on your own device.
Mentioned Commands
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cat /sys/class/drm/card0-eDP-1/edid | hexdump -C
xrandr --verbose | grep MHz