Oh good, bullshit PC Master Race rubbish in the mouth of an FPS bore.

What are these all important tweaks?

You want to get the 1tb version to support Valve? Valve don’t need your support. They have more money than god and a magical loom that prints them more every day!

Get the Deck that suits your needs and budget, if one does at all. I’ve been having an amazing time with the 64gb version for over a year. I’ve got a trip back and forth across the Atlantic coming up for Thanksgiving and I’m as excited for a bit aerial gaming as I am to see my partner. All the Steam Deck models are good, this will be a big success for Valve, don’t stress about it.

Also, use the search function. These questions have been answered over and over

It’s not a magic performance boost for everything - there are some scenarios it seems like it improves or stabilises performance for certain games, to a greater or lesser extent. In some cases gains are quite marginal.

The only real deep dives into how CryoUtilities affect performance are by Cryo himself. I don’t think he’s lying or misleading anyone, but it is a small pool of analysis.

There’s also one poster here whose whole personality seems to be “CryoUtilities are bad, it’s a placebo, people who use it are dumb”. They’re not very good at putting an argument in any way other than assertion and abuse and I’m not sure they have a lot of insight to offer.

It did appear to help me with the performance and stability of Midnight Suns early this year. Since then I’ve been playing less demanding games and I reverted the changes as they weren’t necessary for me. But there certainly doesn’t seem to be any harm in trying it out.

Start your games while connected to the internet to make sure they’re updated. Exit them. Turn off internet/activate airplane mode. You can now play offline with no problems, fully shut down the deck and turn it back on if you want, and should be good to go in every way.

That’s airplane mode, not offline mode. I don’t really know what Valve’s offline mode and it seems weird and inconsistent. Simply turning off the device’s internet connection is where it’s at.