you are looking at coolant flowing through a maze of water channels that
wind their way across the entire back of this phone and even around the camera
don't believe it I don't blame you I assumed that even if this phone was
water cooled this must be just a silly animation or lighting effect but watch I
turned the pump off and you can see the bubbles just floating around in there
how and perhaps more importantly why did
this come to be OnePlus sponsored this video so that we
could take a deep dive into how your phone stays cool and how future Tech
like this could make our phones even cooler
OnePlus and I have had our ups and downs but through it all they've been at the
Forefront of some of my favorite mobile phone Innovations pop-up cameras High
refresh rate displays and the alert slider come to mind along with great
performance in demanding applications like games and fast charging and it's
those last two that bring us to The Innovation we're looking at today OnePlus isn't the first to notice that
phones get hot and to come up with the idea of liquid cooling one in fact we've
done it at least twice actually three times if you count this but OnePlus is
the first to build liquid cooling right into the device itself wait hold on you
might say I've seen tons of phones with liquid cooling even from OnePlus
themselves ah yes well that is what we
in the biz call marketing horse
while it is technically correct to say that those phones are liquid cooled they
do in fact contain some liquid and it is
helping with cooling it's misleading at best because if I was to say your car
was liquid cooled you would probably assume I didn't just slap a heat pipe or
a vapor chamber on it this is different the OnePlus 11 concept
was specifically designed to show off a real liquid cooling solution OnePlus is
calling it active cryoflux and it uses a
series of fluid-filled tubes running all along the back of the phone to move heat
away from the soc but this is a big
difference instead of counting on evaporation and capillary action to move
that fluid around it uses not one but two pumps
two pumps how in the Sam Hill did they fit one
pump in here let alone two piezoelectrics
the pumps that we use for PC water cooling are typically impeller pumps
which push water around with rotating blades not unlike the way that a fan
pushes air around but impeller pumps have two weaknesses
that make them completely unsuitable for phone use size for one and if that
wasn't enough their mechanical nature makes them prone to failure especially
when jostled around like they would be in a phone piezoelectrics though
circumvent both of those issues through the power of crystals not the kind of
crystals that ward off bad vibes man or
introduce aliens to a series that really didn't need a fourth movie let alone a
fifth but the kind of crystals that compress or decompress when a voltage is
applied to them so what they do is they coat a membrane in these piezoelectric
crystals then by rapidly modulating the
applied voltage they can make the membrane Bend
add some Inlet and Outlet valves and some fluid and Presto Chango it's a pump
but because it has no wearing Parts like
a motor would it should be far more reliable and far smaller the micro pumps
in the OnePlus concept take up just 0.2
milliliters of space for reference you could fit about 2500 of these pumps in
this coke bottle or about 2 000 in this
banana for scale lttstore.com all of this means that you can water cool a
phone without a massive increase in thickness or in weight or the attachment
of some unsightly noisy Godless cooler accessory you can
but should you now obviously there are
some practical challenges here I mean I have no doubt that this costs more than
just chucking some copper foil or a small Vapor chamber in your device and I
mean even if you can keep the costs under control just looking at it you'll
notice this is still a completely sealed system with no external heat exchanger
that means that there's no real increase in the total surface area which means
that while the coolant inside of the loop may be able to whisk heat away from
the soc to the rest of the phone the best we can really hope for is
temporarily better performance until we reach the thermal saturation point but
that doesn't mean that there's no merit in delaying the inevitable
or does it OnePlus actually didn't want
us to test this as part of the video no please it's a prototype and it's not
ready you think because you sponsor me you can
control me obviously we tested it anyway because I'm a firecracker like that but
In fairness to them I want to make it very clear to you guys that this is a
prototype it is not ready and the results may not be reflective of the
finished product that is if it ever actually makes it to market the good
news is that all of that aside with all the obvious bubbles in the cooling Loop
and the random low performance blue liquid they put in because it looks cool
it does Act actually work and that's
with all the things that I can see that they could optimize about this like they
could make the channels wider they could increase the rate of coolant flow they
could use more conductive phone materials to get the heat moving faster
there's so much they could do to make it better but even as it is it works the
medium news is that it only lowered our temps by about two degrees however phone
socs are designed to throttle at much lower temperatures compared to your PC
which means that this cooling system could actually have a much higher impact
on Boost performance compared to lowering your computer's temperatures by
two degrees but not all the news is good
or even medium the potential bad news is
that moving the heat faster could also have an impact on discomfort does all
this tubing spread the heat to the rest of the phone making your hand get hot
well from the data we probed within the phone it seems like there isn't a
substantial difference to how hot the back of the device got but we felt it
was probably worth validating with our thermal camera as well we started
torture tests on our two OnePlus devices a regular OnePlus 11 and the concept
phone at the same time so the idea here is to see what the
hottest point is on the back we can't use any of the shiny part it has to be
the part that's covered in tape because that's where the emissivity is going to
be controlled okay so 29
8.1 okay it does actually appear to be a
touch cooler on the regular one
but less than I would have thought it's a fraction of a degree anywhere
where you would actually be touching it along the back what's really noticeable though is how
even it is on the regular one we've got these cool zones and on this one it's
just uniform if you adjust the um temperature
gradient to the right thing you can actually see the um like Lanes in the
concept phone oh I think it's probably too even now
because it's probably already spread like right as you start a load it would
probably work yeah it's just because it's spread out it's the same with the
um with the radiant heating in my floor so there's the one with the hot and cool
spots and then here's the one
I mean I guess it has sort of cool spots it's definitely more even though at this
point then there's no obvious downside but what about the upside does it
improve real world performance in games the answer is unfortunately nope
but with a pretty big asterisk phone games work a bit differently from PC
games for one they pretty much always have an FPS cap to prevent overheating
and intense battery drain and for two they often dynamically adjust image
quality for that same reason making Apples to Apples comparisons basically
impossible so our gaming performance sees no statistically significant change
but what about other things well here the answer is yes
but again with the big asterisk when we drag raced our OnePlus concept with the
standard OnePlus 11 we found that CPU performance in synthetic benchmarks was
better on the 11 proper than compared to the concept but this discrepancy does
not appear to be related to thermals and is more likely due to the lack of
optimization on the concept phone remember this is not in production and
when we try to torture these devices with heavy loads on the CPU and GPU the
active cryoflux cooling system seems to help as it postpones the inevitable heat
death of the phone's performance but still it throttled as I mentioned
before spreading heat throughout the device can only do so much and any
extended load will eventually expose the heat exchange bottleneck that exists
between the shell of your device and the air around it air that is a notoriously
poor conductor of heat so this video and
this concept device then raise as many questions as they answer this may be a
stopgap solution for making our devices more responsive and bursty loads or even
less bursty loads that last for a little while but not too long but then what
happens when our demands as users increase again sadly for phone manufacturers you can't
just keep increasing power draw and size like some manufacturers have overpriced
gpus Kirkland Jean Pockets can only get so big or I don't know maybe you can
just keep increasing the size maybe we'll see a shift where manufacturers
stop trying to make the best phone and start trying to make the best phone for
you I mean we've already seen this to an extent in gaming but like for a creator
for example that might mean a huge slab with a stylus and integrated water
cooling so that you can film edit and upload videos on the Go I mean not every
phone needs to be everything to everyone and hopefully more players can find
their place in this market to deliver to the many different niches of mobile
users who knows what we do know is that
OnePlus is going to be doing their darndest to keep things cool
if you found this video cool why not check out the link to oneplus's
additional information on active cryoflux and if you're looking for
something else to watch why don't you check out some of the wild phone water cooling setups that we have tried in the
past they are not as slick as this
but the results are pretty impressive