You are correct, i thought of it later but it’s the most probable reason.
Just a few weeks ago I saw some streamer discover that his $6000 pc had been slower than expected for months because he had energy savings enabled in the windows power options.
So many wrong answers in this thread.
People calling your cpu old when the steam deck is also running a 4 years old (and lower end) cpu. The design is just 1 year newer.
Guys, his 5 years old i7 should not be 2-3 times slower than a Zen 2 CPU lol
Check the frequency and temperatures of your laptop cpu using tools like afterburner or hwinfo64.
Also try a CPU benchmarking tool like Cinebench to check if the score is normal for your hardware.
It could be that your laptop is running other pc games well because you are playing GPU bound games but Emulators are a lot more heavy on the CPU.
While your laptop is indeed 5 years old I don’t think it should be that slow compared to the steam deck cpu. At least that’s not what the data online suggest.
Maybe you are having a dust buildup or other cooling/throttling problem
Not possible, that title belong to either Zelda TOTK/BOTW, Elden Ring or Witcher 3.
I have one of the first LCD models to come out. It is pretty loud too even on the steam library. It seems some games are less demanding than having steam on the foreground.
I think valve improved more recent lcd models a bit and the oled model a lot more. I plan to keep my deck for a few years though, at least till they release a deck 2.
if you toe is broken, you could get an OLED foot or order a replacement from ifixit