the mobile processors that we use in our smartphones are super efficient which
helps them run cool enough to build into these amazingly portable devices that we
carry in our hands and store in our pockets
or are they what if i told you that the only reason
you don't burn your fingers when you're playing a game on your smartphone or
rendering a video for your twins to snap talk account is that your phone's
processor is constantly throttling down its performance to limit its thermal
output and its power consumption well you likely wouldn't be surprised we have
explored this topic before and we did find that it was possible to unlock a
significant amount of extra performance by water cooling the back of a
smartphone but as so many of you pointed out that solution isn't very practical
for a wide variety of reasons so let's
take a look at a couple of ways of cooling the snapdragon 855 that don't
involve liquid one is the red magic 3 a gaming phone
which has a fan inside it like a computer would and the other is
this a thermoelectric cooler that you can
clip onto your phone
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all out now at the links in the video description first things first though i
need to get a heavy application running on my phone and i need to establish a
baseline so conveniently this is the exact same phone that i used last time
it's a galaxy s10 plus and we're going to be using 3dmark firestrike just like
last time which saves me an awful lot of time all right so let's take a look at
this thing tech coolers leverage the peltier effect to convert a difference
in electric voltage to a difference in temperature
in simpler terms it means that if you hook a battery up to one one side gets
cold while the other side gets really hot so let's open this thing up now
the usefulness of the cold side i should think would be pretty obvious you want
to hook it up to whatever you want to cool and techs actually get used for
everything from beverage cooling pads to large scale industrial heat pumps unlike
a phase change or hvac system attack is
compact has no moving parts and is
capable of running completely silently that is
until you get to the part where you have to deal with the hot side all the heat
from your processor or whatever else it is you're trying to keep cool doesn't
magically get sucked into another dimension it still has to be dealt with
and on top of that you've got to dissipate
the waste heat from the tech because techs have another dirty secret they are
extremely inefficient which means that they consume a ton of power compared to
just throwing a heat sink and a fan on whatever it is you're trying to keep
cool and that is where hi yes
contestant number two comes in this red magic 3 gaming phone was sent
to me months ago by nubia and i had actually intended to do a full review of
it but just never got around to it life got in the
way etc i'm still really interested though in one of its key gimmicks as
we've discussed before calling a heat pipe liquid cooling is pretty misleading
even if it is technically true but this is one of the only smartphones
in existence that actually has a cooling
fan and ventilation holes so we're going
to clear some space here and we are going to put both of these
head-to-head now for the red magic 3 i am expecting
pretty good results this is the same snapdragon 855 soc as this samsung but
it's got a cooling fan i mean bear in mind there could still be
some big differences i mean the firmware that these devices ship with are very
different from each other this one has a 90hz display unfortunately i don't have
a convenient way to put a fan in an s10 plus or take a fan out of this one so
from a head-to-head standpoint this is kind of the best we can do
as for the galaxy s10 plus i've never actually used one of these and i didn't
watch or read any reviews of it so
i have no idea what to expect from this but i will tell you it looks kind of
goofy in terms of positioning i ran a quick
run of 3dmark slingshot extreme and just kind of felt the back of the phone for
which parts were heating up the most and it was right around the logo here you
can actually see that the thermal pad is not making great contact with the part
of the phone that was heating up the most it's a little bit off to the left-hand side there i would have rather
had it more in the middle but unfortunately there doesn't appear to be
any way that i can reposition it because that right there
is actually the tech that's it so putting it here wouldn't be
good that is not metal that is just chrome finished plastic and would not
result in good cooling performance oh right um compared to water cooling a
phone i guess this is a mild inconvenience you have to plug it in
well yeah i mean how else would you power it right you convert electricity
to cooling you should be able to just plug it into
the phone yeah i mean on some devices you probably
could but i don't know what kind of current it draws and that would suck
your battery life even faster than gaming sucks up all your battery life so
um like i can see why it's just like oh
where's my battery bank when you need one right wow
that sounds like the cheapest bearing that i have heard in a good long while
can you hear that yes
it's awful okay and then there's the light toggle
it's just one led down at the bottom there head to head time boys and girls
one two three go
right out of the gate our red magic three is scoring significantly higher
than our s10 plus let's go ahead and do a second run here
this is fascinating so we're on test number two and there's a couple of
takeaways here one is that the results of our s10 plus perfectly match up with
our control test so with the pelje cooler it's definitely
not getting any worse and our red magic 3
absolutely creamed the s10 plus even
before any thermal throttling sets in thanks to presumably the higher clock
speeds it can run at thanks to that integrated fan cooler now it's
definitely quieter than the fan on the tech cooler pretty sure i can feel the
heat coming out of it we do have a way to check though wow the casing of this thing is toasty
even with the cooling fan the back is quite warm no drop in performance after
two runs but that's exactly what we were expecting based on our previous
experience with the s10 plus now we're gonna see if this cooler makes
a difference on the third fourth and fifth runs
and we'll also see how the red magic three keeps up interesting so
we still didn't fall much but
maybe a little less
this next run this is going to be where we know for sure
we've got a drop guys so wait why am i excited about this that
that's terrible uh we were hoping to not have a drop on
the s10 plus the good news is the red magic three is actually doing really
well time for run number five
with a pretty good idea already of which approach is going to result in the best
performance now i'm kind of curious about the user
experience so i'm going to put a piece of tape across the back of the phone
which is going to help with the reflectivity issues that you can get
using a thermal camera to try to measure the temperature of something
shiny as for the samsung the surface temperature is quite a bit lower which
might seem to suggest that our cooler is working
except that the performance of the phone isn't getting any better we're also getting a
really good look at the heat coming off of the cooler itself so you can see the
hot side here see all this is heated up and then this
cooling fan is drawing room temperature air in and then dissipating it around
here okay we've got our next result in the red magic 3 is still holding up and
we are down to 4 800 on the s10 plus
something that surprised me when i was working on a video about phone thermals a while ago was how much of the heat
that the device generates is expected to be dissipated from the screen i made the
assumption that because the housing is metal in many cases that that's where
they would want to dissipate heat from but in fact because you make less
contact with the screen some phone designs actually strive to utilize the
screen as a heat dissipation surface as much as they possibly can
samsung is sitting right around 35 and a
half degrees the red magic
even with the cooling fan this thing is paying a price
for having that amped up processor in
there so you can really see the hottest spots too i'm actually gonna have to put new
pieces of tape to measure the hottest points it's cool it's like being able to do
like a thermal you know x-ray of where the heat
generating components are inside the device so on the samsung you can see
that we actually nailed the location for the thermal pad on our tech
it's right there on the back and what's really cool is check that out you can
actually see that cold spot that's at 18 i got as low as 18 17 degrees
on that point right there unfortunately it just doesn't have enough power to
draw away enough heat or it's not covering a big enough area to really
make a difference according to the numbers we've recorded so far
meanwhile over on the red magic 44 and a half degrees
wow that is really toasty you can really
feel it too quite similar on the back 42
somewhere in that neighborhood the phones are all cooled down now the final result is in and i gotta admit i am
actually impressed as i went through i was watching that
the thermal throttling was kicking in at around the same time as when we ran the
s10 plus bareback but what i didn't realize was that while our original
scores for opengl were 4 000 something
they were in the neighborhood of around 4100 so we are actually looking
at just about a 10 increase in gaming performance for
having this stupid cooler clip to the back of the thing
so does it work as well as our water
cooling solution or does it work as well as just
having proper cooling built into the phone in the first place
no no it doesn't but it does yield a
difference and it costs so little that as long as you don't mind
looking like a bit of an idiot if you have a game that's on the threshold of
like running smoothly or being playable
but it might actually work go figure right
and you don't have to deal with you know this bulky like super hot you know
gaming gaming phone type approach to things although there is something to be
said for that as well with how much raw performance this thing pulled out of its
back pocket and then sustained even across six runs this video is brought to
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linked in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video maybe go check out the water
cooled phone video that we did a little while ago if you haven't already it
contains some learnings that we did not investigate today
pretty impressed by this thing overall though who to thunk it you know putting a fan
in a heatsink on something keeps it cool right brandon what concept