I have seen a lot of people argue you must use a 45W output power bank, probably because it’s the charger output Valve recommends for continuous play.
I have yet to pass 30W during play (admittedly I play with 100℅ brightness, not 120%). It will charge at a miserably slow rate, but if I start a session at full battery, I also end the session with a full battery.
If you own a 30W power bank already, it is not some strict requirement to upgrade it for the frame, just make sure to use the right output port.
The discussions around the Steam Frame’s battery/charging have really highlighted how little people know about power delivery, even in tech enthusiast spaces.
Like, of course you don’t need 45W. The Frame draws 27W at its peak. However 45W is capable of charging it even as you play, which may or may not be important to you.
Saw some guy on YouTube claim the Frame draws 90W too based on it draining the battery in an hour, so it was obviously DOA because no battery bank could keep up and you’d never get good playtimes. Been a while since I’ve encountered someone so confident and yet so wrong over basic technical details.
I’ve never seen it draw anything close to 45W even in play+charging scenarios. It does momentarily go over 30W at times, but you really don’t need much to keep it going, and charge at the same time.
With a 65W 20 000mAh bank in my pocket 4-5 hours seems to be about what I get.
I’m very happy with the small internal battery, as I how light the HMD itself is, is a key feature for me.
There are efficiency losses when taking power out of a battery and when putting charge into the battery so I think a 30W charger would be insufficient for a 27W power consumption.
That 27W is only transient though. I think the fastest battery drain I’ve seen from any online source would put sustained consumption at about 24W average. That doesn’t seem to be the norm in most cases though, typical usage seems to be more like 18-20W on average. So cases where a 30W charger can’t keep up should be few and far between.
Oh, 27W transient. I thought that was 27W sustained peak like running furmark on a gpu type of load