portable gaming systems like the valve steam deck offer an unprecedented amount
of pc gaming goodness in a handheld form factor but with great performance comes
great heat and great fan noise now valve
has addressed this to a significant degree pun intended by altering the fan
curves of the steam deck to achieve a better balance between noise and thermal
management but there's a limit to how much you can do by simply tuning how
quickly your fan is spinning the laws of physics can't be broken well you know
what i say i say physics we're gonna do it hot rod
style with this m.2 cooler this block of
aluminum about a hundred thousand dollars worth of solid works licenses
and of course this is this is it this is all we've got
well we also have a tormach like a pretty big shop we're gonna have some
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Linus
the genesis of this video was actually a conversation with aya about the upcoming
neo2 because it's much smaller more
compact than the steam deck but it actually has a similar thermal envelope
for the soc and i expressed concern knowing what i knew about the okay
better managed but certainly audible fan on the steam deck
that if you got to remove that heat you got to do it somehow and i was like dude you
know would be super cool if you just had like a strap-on cooler remember those
you know those little water coolers that you can just dunk ice into a reservoir
and then lube onto the back of your phone oh yeah well apparently enough
people are buying those that it's an entire freaking product category so it
really doesn't seem that far-fetched to have a strap-on extra cooling module for
your handheld gaming pc and
i think that with alex's skills we could actually do it in a way that is
pretty darn user friendly so today i'm making your strap-on
yes yes let's do it the idea then is to
repurpose another cooler like this hr09
m.2 cooler from thermal right to add supplemental cooling to the soc and we
believe the steam deck is a perfect candidate for this because with relative
ease we can jury rig a mounting mechanism and cut a hole in the back of
it that'll let it just kind of hot rod out the back
should be easy of course to determine whether our modification achieves the
desired results we're going to need to take some baseline readings now we can't
rely on performance for this because i think alex and i are in agreement that
it will probably be identical after the fact yeah these systems are generally
power limited more so than they are thermally limited but what we can see is
in a demanding game like horizon zero dawn our CPU and GPU are sitting in the
82 to 84 degree range and our system fan
is noticeably audible those are two things
we'd like to address also alex our fan RPM is around 5700 oh that's pretty high
yeah i'll be really interested to see if we can lower that that's a way that we
can empirically measure how much quieter we've made it even
though we don't have an acoustic chamber yet yeah the tormach being on is louder than
this but like it's a cnc mill if i was sitting gaming i would definitely notice
this yeah step one then shut down the steam deck
yep take it apart perhaps for the last time well it's gonna survive this this can be
fine you know how mad people are gonna be if we ruin a steam deck these things
are rarer than hens teeth it'll be fine this explicitly says no thermal testing
that's only because we've disassembled it before it's fine to thermally test this
against itself with a different cooler on it just want to point that out
what a nerd Dan signed the inside of this one from
when he opened it up to fix it also really Dan
or is this from you well that's from me but it came with not all
the screws in it from Dan what's next then this is about the shape that i'm
thinking our thing will be it kind of interferes with our Wi-Fi card that might be a
problem which thing oh you're gonna do a big heat spreader
well we need this to attach to something that can attach to the mounting holes
got it so we need a like a mid plate yeah
understood hey i couldn't help noticing this emi shield also seems to be acting
as a heat spreader of some sort for the vrms
have we accounted for that oh yeah we're just gonna cover this
thing in thermal pads instead of those thermal pads you know we could use say
it i don't want no we could just coat this entire thing in k5 pro
we are not doing that you know how long it took me to clean that graphics card
but think about how great for one our thermals would be and two it would be so
easy to put on and also uh so easy to put on okay yeah enough
oh i learned this really cool tip recently if you want the center to
center distance between two holes that are the same size
come in measure the one hole
zero it and then you can measure to the outside of each
hole oh that's cool and then it's just subtracted yeah essentially it cancels
out so we have 1.9
cool you turn on the fume extractor yeah just for sanity we're going to
laser cut out a little thing here make sure everything lines up doesn't
interfere now we can check around the middle if it looks good nice ah brandon be fast
you'll miss it he fight he's firing my laser
good job alex
a lot of people might have used scissors to cut paper
if you use scissors to cut paper like what are you even doing
some kind of caveman what yeah what's the repeatability of your scissor
cutting my laser is under a thou so maybe i want to scooch it that way
just a tiny bit more but that seems pretty good yeah
that seems freaking awesome i mean honestly i don't even think you need to
we might as well it's just cheap insurance it's very easy good we're good
we're good to go we're ready to go i'm moving we're ready 0.03 of an inch
we're ready give me the aluminum i'm cutting it
okay i need your help you don't even put that piece of
aluminum in there you need to cut it first okay
what do i do then uh you can cut a hole in the back of
this can we just laser that no this is i believe abs it's a
thermoplastic so instead of you know cutting it just melts and then catches
on fire and it's a pretty bad time routing it
we could but then i have to program the router and we have to strap this down
whereas like handing you a dremel takes very little time but the results alex
think of the results oh we have a template how are we going to figure out
exactly where the temperature is gonna be kind of hard uh one way we can do it
is this hole right here
lines up with that so it does
it'll be close yeah it'll be like pretty
close okay i can handle that oh and we also have these beautiful new bits come
over here oh really you know we have this dremel screw that thing dremel stuff
look what since when do dremel suck i thought we love dremels wait what are these what's
this how much did i pay for this oh like 90 bucks
huh they're kind of beautiful i know
oh okay what do they do
well it's like that sound you can use it with the dye
grinder it's like a dremel but with balls huh
where would i find two skinny
sticks or skinny rods dowel pin assortment alloy steel
uh yeah this could work yeah this will do
now this is in place ish to turn this piece of aluminum into you know a
functional part we need to cut it on the tormach first thing though i need to do
a bunch of can if everything goes well it should look
something like this
that should take us about 11 minutes fun thing while you were figuring out if we
can i actually ran a little experiment to determine if we should check this out
uh are your plugs in yet no okay keep them out watch this okay see the GPU
temps yeah around 80 uh 70 right now but yeah okay okay
listen to the fan watch this i'm gonna take this heat pipe and touch it to this
thermal pad
oh wow it's totally gonna work it just
completely dropped yeah it's already 10 degrees cooler
oh my god this is like actually worth doing
i just assumed it wouldn't be honestly
this is gonna be freaking awesome how much more exciting is this project
now that we know it's gonna totally kick ass it's honestly a lot more exciting i
thought it was gonna be just stupid this guy always doubts me
that's not hot no oh okay cool now it appears that i'm
lining this up by hand but i'm actually not i have marked this one
and then what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna put little scratch marks on for these
other two i'm gonna drill out these holes then i
can validate that they're all in the right spots before i make the complete
cutout because i'm actually going to cut out this entire shape
all right no turning back now
there's officially extra holes in this steam deck now we just take this
pop it back on here and see if we manage to line up all
those holes what would you say if i told you i absolutely freaking nailed this
i'll be burning fast holy crap did i have this on
oh wait no no it's fine i only have the backing over there
sorry i just brain part brain part moment now that i
know where the holes are supposed to be ah
i can know exactly where my template needs to be and i can mark it and cut it
out oh this thing's such a beautiful machine just it's biggest out to tormach
once again
that is really cool oh yeah it's so sick
all right
looks good just need to flip her over chop off the bottom and ready to test
fit if this works oh
it works perfectly good but it just barely hits our wi-fi module it's like
30 seconds on the belt sander too yeah very easy the more difficult thing
though you might notice our studs aren't quite long enough
oh there's two ways we can go about this we
can either remove a bit of material from here like a five hundredth of an inch or
so or we have little
chummies so we could just chop these at a good
height put that on top and have the whole thing just be
higher oh i think we should just shave this down yeah i think so
yeah let's let's do that man we've got a we've got a lot of thickness here i think we should take
this down to like half of the overall thickness
okay that's my vibe just make it lower profile because that's going to take
weight off of it too which would be nice and also if we take it off from the
bottom here we might get a tiny bit better performance for your pizza
yeah then i in the meantime i'm gonna finally actually cut out the back of
this steam deck one thing that's awesome about the
tormach is that we get conversational programming so instead of taking all the
time to make something in solidworks program it
export the g-code you can just do it right in here and tell it like i want to
face something off uh 500 thousands of an inch and
boom it does it
i'm sorry alex i don't like the clamp you only live once
uh hey alex yeah you would use those
deburring things at this stage now then right at that stage you're so close i'd
probably just use a file oh all right
okay this voided out dremel is amazing i'm deburring slash taking off a little
bit of material that i missed before just listen to it
here it is my perfect dremel job you ready well okay perfect is a strong word but
here it is good though here it is my not bad dermal job yeah not bad at all
hi there
it should fit now if we both executed perfectly this will fit immediately yep
what are the odds high very high i believe in us
i'm sorry are you are you taking the piss
do you think that you did a good job yes well this is definitely a good job it'll
fit then all right sure uh oh i go first right yep okay
there it is and
um yeah okay hold on very close very close hold
on maybe it just needs a little massaging
just a little little misogynation
misogyny wait no not that it's very tight
whoa damn okay that's actually pretty good yeah
this is awesome thermal pads and tested
i think so this is just like a black acrylic cover
yep cool uh these rods are still not long enough
though if we want to put our trim piece on also no but we have to take the
heatsink off right because there's going to be you know a
tower attached to it got it okay here we
go since we don't know the exact z heights of anything in here we're taking
a bit of a yolo approach we're gonna just err on
the side of making our thermal pads a bit taller and then we're gonna make
sure that we mash down the cooler really well one way
we can validate the thickness of our thermal pads is by putting this down
with just a trace amount of thermal paste on the top there and seeing if it
touches it it does not so clearly this
is too thick let's pull that off let's go ahead and try it one more time
let's see if it's yours that's the problem yes it touched
barely to make sure that we have thermal pads everywhere we need them we can look
at this little shield right here and we can see this one thermal pad
we're not able to hit with our plate here it's for this
little ic which is probably responsible
for charging and potentially gets really hot i have just the thing
knew it a little tiny heatsink
he's so cute look at him he's adorable
then let's do a quick scan around at our thermal pads actually
it looks like everything is making contact this is not
terrible yeah all right freaking
rock on is this the part where we screw it on
yeah we'll make that one face first but yeah get the close-up out oops oh my god alex
what the hell is going on man well i didn't mean to put that much on there
kind of just happened we'll need to scrape some off oh my goodness i mean we
do want to go a little bit heavier than we normally would
any extras just going to squeeze out anyway and we're really not sure how
great our contact here is going to be
but that yeah
you know i didn't even take off that much actually should we fire it up well
let's put it back together oh wow we never actually turned it off
the game is um still running oh wow okay
well this is interesting oh it's running at 42
degrees holy crap yeah we just put a big cold thermal mass on it
but still i wonder if just adding this
sink and then a vent hole is enough
maybe no it'll heat up it'll heat up it'll heat up
but like if we wanted to do this not dumb we probably could just add a bunch of
little fins here yeah it would passively dissipate a bunch of heat a lot
more than you'd probably think might as well just leave it running i
guess i mean you want big boy or small boy
i want to go practical believe it or not i know who am i right let's go for the
small one i'ma let you finish but
there's a couple things going on here that you should know one is that this is flipping hot
thermal transfer definitely taking place oh my god
two is we already dropped 10 degrees
it's at 71 on the GPU 72 and it has
settled in we don't even need the fins on the back
that's all valve had to do stick a burning hot hunk of metal on the back of
the steam deck it would make it uncompliant though oh
it would burn the users yeah yeah uh oh
alex yeah how's this gonna stay well we're going to use this test it and
i'll put back on thermal epoxy later but we need to finish this video
okay cool oh my god please tell me it fits
alex wait does this one not fit please tell me it fits this one fits are you
sure
did you fly too close to the sun i fit it earlier
thermal expansion alex oh that could be it actually we have to cool it down
that's cooler oh it's still pretty hot i don't know
man almost and the more this goes in there
the more it'll cool down faster
those tolerances while it heats up here
let's just appreciate the finished handiwork
alex full credit man
this looks awesome
that is hot rod pc cooling if i have ever
seen it can we take a moment to appreciate that thermal thermalright
went and put a flame silhouette on this heatsink
it's beautiful match made in absolute heaven right here
now do you mind pulling up the the numbers
from the before numbers sure i believe it was 86 degrees when we were
in here man it takes a long time to get up to
temps now that's why you use usbc
we actually made it up to exactly the same temps
81 well not quite 81 degrees celsius
yeah we're about five degrees cooler now but
we did manage to drop almost 2000 RPM
off the fan and it's a 2000 RPM that counts for
a lot it is way quieter
where do you see that down here 5300 RPM
yeah it was 57 before oh i thought it was 7000. no wait it didn't work
you know what i bet it is this thing is
flipping hot v2 this with a fan
yeah i bet we could even do that now let's mock it up
i'll be back with an octo 40 mil in addition to adding a fan there's
probably things we could do to more efficiently pull heat off of the soc
like right now we're just thermal paste just like gooped in there and stuff like
that it's not ideal
wow that's really in there good though oh man that's freaking hot
no way i don't know if it's gonna get higher
like it might but it turns out that putting a fan on your cooler uh
it works people do it for a reason
yeah you don't necessarily want like you know all of this to control your fan no
but i think you could probably wire a fan into the board of the steam deck
it's got to have five volts somewhere yeah this is a five volt fan it would be
a super easy put it in solder it would be fine what i worry is that it might
cost you some of your overall power budget for the device
.035 watts that's a full bore
okay it's probably fine yeah this is incredible and without a doubt this
would be my preferred steam deck if given the choice well and with the
fan actually wired up internally yeah of course in our perfect world the mounting
system for the external cooler would be such that you can unscrew it with
thumbscrews or something like that pop it off and then put your normal plate on
and have the whole system operate completely normally it's just that
alex noticed while we were off camera that there was a bit of a gap between
our m.2 cooler and the bottom plate and he vice gripped them together
and now they do not come apart yeah it's not coming apart ever again no oh that's
an interesting idea yeah one of the other side effects of putting the fan on
is that this plate is a way more reasonable temperature now what are we
looking at looks like 49 degrees
yeah which is right around you get burned but it takes a real long time
whereas before it was you get burned but very fast
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kind of jank you might also enjoy the wooden pc it has gears on the front that
actually turn and i think they're actually using it now they finally started up