it's no secret that pretty much every phone on the market is gonna thermal
throttle eventually if you run something intensive on it for long enough so
whether it's a video editing program or a graphically intensive game your
performance is gonna start right around here and it's going to end up
somewhere right around here but
what we don't know is how does that difference in performance
between a peak and a sustained state get
impacted by installing a phone case because here's the thing
most cases on the market are designed for
ruggedness or looks or cost-effectiveness and i haven't seen
any that i can think of that appear to be designed for thermal conduction so
are we all just taking our mobile devices and installing a great big
insulator on it and how much of an impact does that have
we're gonna find out
before we can determine how much a case affects thermal throttling we need to
set a baseline for how our devices thermal throttle without any case
installed at all now in the interest of fairness we're going to be testing both
camps so representing Android we've got the galaxy s10 plus and representing the
iphone we've got the iphone 10s max
which side do you want to play for today
team iphone team Android team iphone i'm doing it so we're going to use geekbench
and we're going to do subsequent runs just like i did in my phone water
cooling video a couple years ago to see how our performance tracks over time
three two one go yeah you have a percentage bar no i just
have a timer yeah all right
i've got my first score much lower than mine fifth run for the iphone is 11 318.
uh what was the galaxy and the samsung is 10935 so that's it 10 runs and we've
got kind of some bad news like my phone's definitely hot yeah so is this
one all along the back is really warm to the hand but i'm getting the exact same
scores that i was at the beginning almost to the point same with the iphone so
obviously they're not thermal throttling i messaged my buddy ian from anontech he
said one of the ways that they get phones to thermal throttle is they run a
battery test for an extended period of time like 10 15 20 minutes okay and then
they run the test instead of just running the test manually over and over
again we did 10 tests do you think that was enough or should we have done 20 or
25 i don't know let's try his way okay and see what happens so let's start the
geekbench battery benchmark i'm going to crank up my screen brightness because
that affects your thermals as well and go okay so it's been over 20 minutes now
they're already super hot so now let's run the CPU test for 10 iterations we've
got a problem even after preheating it
and then running our 10 benchmarks in a row again we're still ending up with all
of our scores within margin of error
okay so one of the things i've heard is that Android handset manufacturers will
purposely tune their devices to check what software is being run and if it's a
benchmark program it'll actually allow the phone to heat up more than it
normally would before thermal throttling the processor
so one of the ways that you can mitigate that is to use a program called an apk
extractor grab the apk the install file for the
app off the phone rename it to something else then put it back on so if you
change the name of the program it won't be on their white list anymore some of
them will will behave that way the problem though is that that doesn't help
us with the iphone no because we can't sideload stuff on an iphone and there's
not that many tests for this kind of stuff in the app store like they have
antutu but i've run it six times now there's no change fortunately there's
still 3d mark last chance this has to work so how are we going to run this one
on the iphone it's a little different than Android i'm going to use slingshot
extreme unlimited which pretends that there's no such thing as vsync and lets
it just run as fast as it can off screen and then i'm gonna use slingshot extreme
unlimited open gles 3.1 as my option
here and then i'm going to go ahead and run okay so what do we want to do 10
runs here better make it 12. odd choice
you just never know what's going to happen
i don't trust it okay so i got my first baseline score
four five two three uh second test is about to finish four
three zero zero wow that's lower yep
dropped again 34.79 oh this time it went
higher back to being lower 33.50 dropping even more 31.48 slightly higher
3210 lower again 3115. final round
lowest score yet 30-78 a clear trend so
we had that one outlier where it kind of spiked back up but then other than that
this is going to be really easy to map against yeah 6006 i'm down a little bit
this one's actually back up again 60 53 59 44. wait what
44.95 that's it baby we just dropped 25
we're throttling it now i think it's not gonna go back up like
feel that that's hot like it's really hot i just don't know if it's going to
keep going down further so it could either be like up here and then crash
and like just kind of two tears or it could crash and then
keep going down like sloping yeah 45 29
44 73 45 38 final test 44.97 we know what
we're looking for with the iphone we're looking for either a faster decay so a
steeper curve yeah or a slower decay if maybe the case aids in cooling or it
falls farther if it gets hotter than it ever did and performs worse than it ever
did and then with the s10 plus we're looking for whether it will hold for as
many runs or fewer runs or more runs before it throttles down and maybe drops
farther than ever or maybe drops further okay so uh do the shopping mall
charge it
i do not belong in here should we try one of these leather
wallet ones that looks like that traps heat big time
10s max leather case oops
got the leather case this thing is 70 canadian dollars after tax that's crazy
hey buddy i'm looking for cases for samsung galaxy s10 plus and iphone 10s
max normal
silicone little beefier
galaxy iphone kind of comparable
what do you got okay so i got a selection for you i tried to go from the
most basic case you could have wow that's a really basic case yeah you paid
more for that than you'd like to know so that's for the iphone and then that's
for the samsung so we're seeing if that maybe insulates it more yeah so then one
level up from that is semi-rugged sure like that one oh my god look at that
what is up with that did they just put it on a little stand to spray paint it
and then i got you some wallet cases okay and then i got you the actual
official leather case from the apple store you don't want to know
70 us dollars not u.s they're canadian
appalling can we return this so let's start with the most basic cases
oh this thing sucks look at it it's like jiggly in there this is basic by like
every definition and go so we're finished our 12 runs for
our Android device we ended up with basically exactly the same behavior we
throttled at the same run and down to the same amount so as far as we can tell
putting a really sort of basic plastic case on your phone is not
going to have any noticeable impact pretty much the same story with the
iphone as well except there's a bit of problems with 3dmark on
this one it crashed around test two so
we couldn't just pretend that test three counted as test
two right because it's actually run for more time now it is getting it hotter so
we did an extra test test 13 but even with all that it's pretty much the same
results as no case the trend line is still very similar so i it's hard to
draw a conclusion yet shall we move on to the rugged case yes all right let's
do it yeah this is exactly the same that
surprises me actually i me too i would have thought as we go into thicker cases
i mean they're made out of things that are not known to be excellent heat
conductors i guess these aren't the most rugged cases this isn't an otterbox or
anything but it's like a lot more substantial than this but i guess it doesn't make a difference all right
wallet case time and it's the same okay
do you want to try running them with the cases closed
yes now that's interesting
so on the iphone we not only throttle
immediately and harder we actually end up at a significantly
lower steady state so it looks like the iphone 10s max
actually relies in a very significant way
on its screen for cooling which makes me wonder then why didn't covering the back
matter okay so i'm done
there's still the apple branded leather case the 70
leather case all right all right do you have any theories like you're a motorcyclist you wear leather so there's
no wind going through i wouldn't say that my experience with leather is that
it feels more insulated than plastic though so okay so
we're done with the leather case that's it actually kind of beat the base better than a bare phone i mean barely
it's probably just margin of error i guess but it's definitely not worse it's
not worse definitely not worse so unfortunately this video didn't end up
being the make your phone run faster with this easy trick conclusion that we
had maybe hoped for so what we found from all of our testing
is that phone's thermal throttle absolutely it's dependent on the
workload and unless you're going out of your way to do something particularly
stupid like and close your phone in a
non-breathable insulating material
it's probably not going to have a huge impact on the performance of your device
this is a good answer Linus that means we can have our performance and
protection too this is the world we want to live in so this is like the ultra
thin animal skin condom i only use recycled condoms inside joke from the
roast go watch it
so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking
out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description to be clear we're not recommending that
mall kiosk but uh you know if this is really hard to get
this out it's a tight fit maybe we recommend the apple genuine
leather case i'm not sure about that one either also down there is our merch
store which has cool shirts like that one and our community forum which you
guys should totally join we have shirts kind of like this one but we don't have
a long sleeve yet we're working on that i want that oh there it is