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you are looking at coolant flowing through a maze of water channels that

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wind their way across the entire back of this phone and even around the camera

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don't believe it I don't blame you I assumed that even if this phone was

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water cooled this must be just a silly animation or lighting effect but watch I

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turned the pump off and you can see the bubbles just floating around in there

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how and perhaps more importantly why did

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this come to be OnePlus sponsored this video so that we

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could take a deep dive into how your phone stays cool and how future Tech

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like this could make our phones even cooler

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OnePlus and I have had our ups and downs but through it all they've been at the

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Forefront of some of my favorite mobile phone Innovations pop-up cameras High

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refresh rate displays and the alert slider come to mind along with great

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performance in demanding applications like games and fast charging and it's

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those last two that bring us to The Innovation we're looking at today OnePlus isn't the first to notice that

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phones get hot and to come up with the idea of liquid cooling one in fact we've

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done it at least twice actually three times if you count this but OnePlus is

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the first to build liquid cooling right into the device itself wait hold on you

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might say I've seen tons of phones with liquid cooling even from OnePlus

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themselves ah yes well that is what we

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in the biz call marketing horse

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while it is technically correct to say that those phones are liquid cooled they

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do in fact contain some liquid and it is

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helping with cooling it's misleading at best because if I was to say your car

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was liquid cooled you would probably assume I didn't just slap a heat pipe or

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a vapor chamber on it this is different the OnePlus 11 concept

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was specifically designed to show off a real liquid cooling solution OnePlus is

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calling it active cryoflux and it uses a

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series of fluid-filled tubes running all along the back of the phone to move heat

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away from the soc but this is a big

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difference instead of counting on evaporation and capillary action to move

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that fluid around it uses not one but two pumps

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two pumps how in the Sam Hill did they fit one

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pump in here let alone two piezoelectrics

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the pumps that we use for PC water cooling are typically impeller pumps

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which push water around with rotating blades not unlike the way that a fan

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pushes air around but impeller pumps have two weaknesses

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that make them completely unsuitable for phone use size for one and if that

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wasn't enough their mechanical nature makes them prone to failure especially

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when jostled around like they would be in a phone piezoelectrics though

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circumvent both of those issues through the power of crystals not the kind of

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crystals that ward off bad vibes man or

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introduce aliens to a series that really didn't need a fourth movie let alone a

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fifth but the kind of crystals that compress or decompress when a voltage is

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applied to them so what they do is they coat a membrane in these piezoelectric

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crystals then by rapidly modulating the

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applied voltage they can make the membrane Bend

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add some Inlet and Outlet valves and some fluid and Presto Chango it's a pump

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but because it has no wearing Parts like

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a motor would it should be far more reliable and far smaller the micro pumps

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in the OnePlus concept take up just 0.2

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milliliters of space for reference you could fit about 2500 of these pumps in

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this coke bottle or about 2 000 in this

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banana for scale lttstore.com all of this means that you can water cool a

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phone without a massive increase in thickness or in weight or the attachment

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of some unsightly noisy Godless cooler accessory you can

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but should you now obviously there are

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some practical challenges here I mean I have no doubt that this costs more than

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just chucking some copper foil or a small Vapor chamber in your device and I

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mean even if you can keep the costs under control just looking at it you'll

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notice this is still a completely sealed system with no external heat exchanger

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that means that there's no real increase in the total surface area which means

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that while the coolant inside of the loop may be able to whisk heat away from

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the soc to the rest of the phone the best we can really hope for is

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temporarily better performance until we reach the thermal saturation point but

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that doesn't mean that there's no merit in delaying the inevitable

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or does it OnePlus actually didn't want

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us to test this as part of the video no please it's a prototype and it's not

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ready you think because you sponsor me you can

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control me obviously we tested it anyway because I'm a firecracker like that but

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In fairness to them I want to make it very clear to you guys that this is a

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prototype it is not ready and the results may not be reflective of the

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finished product that is if it ever actually makes it to market the good

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news is that all of that aside with all the obvious bubbles in the cooling Loop

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and the random low performance blue liquid they put in because it looks cool

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it does Act actually work and that's

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with all the things that I can see that they could optimize about this like they

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could make the channels wider they could increase the rate of coolant flow they

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could use more conductive phone materials to get the heat moving faster

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there's so much they could do to make it better but even as it is it works the

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medium news is that it only lowered our temps by about two degrees however phone

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socs are designed to throttle at much lower temperatures compared to your PC

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which means that this cooling system could actually have a much higher impact

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on Boost performance compared to lowering your computer's temperatures by

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two degrees but not all the news is good

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or even medium the potential bad news is

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that moving the heat faster could also have an impact on discomfort does all

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this tubing spread the heat to the rest of the phone making your hand get hot

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well from the data we probed within the phone it seems like there isn't a

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substantial difference to how hot the back of the device got but we felt it

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was probably worth validating with our thermal camera as well we started

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torture tests on our two OnePlus devices a regular OnePlus 11 and the concept

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phone at the same time so the idea here is to see what the

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hottest point is on the back we can't use any of the shiny part it has to be

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the part that's covered in tape because that's where the emissivity is going to

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be controlled okay so 29

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8.1 okay it does actually appear to be a

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touch cooler on the regular one

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but less than I would have thought it's a fraction of a degree anywhere

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where you would actually be touching it along the back what's really noticeable though is how

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even it is on the regular one we've got these cool zones and on this one it's

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just uniform if you adjust the um temperature

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gradient to the right thing you can actually see the um like Lanes in the

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concept phone oh I think it's probably too even now

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because it's probably already spread like right as you start a load it would

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probably work yeah it's just because it's spread out it's the same with the

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um with the radiant heating in my floor so there's the one with the hot and cool

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spots and then here's the one

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I mean I guess it has sort of cool spots it's definitely more even though at this

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point then there's no obvious downside but what about the upside does it

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improve real world performance in games the answer is unfortunately nope

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but with a pretty big asterisk phone games work a bit differently from PC

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games for one they pretty much always have an FPS cap to prevent overheating

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and intense battery drain and for two they often dynamically adjust image

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quality for that same reason making Apples to Apples comparisons basically

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impossible so our gaming performance sees no statistically significant change

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but what about other things well here the answer is yes

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but again with the big asterisk when we drag raced our OnePlus concept with the

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standard OnePlus 11 we found that CPU performance in synthetic benchmarks was

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better on the 11 proper than compared to the concept but this discrepancy does

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not appear to be related to thermals and is more likely due to the lack of

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optimization on the concept phone remember this is not in production and

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when we try to torture these devices with heavy loads on the CPU and GPU the

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active cryoflux cooling system seems to help as it postpones the inevitable heat

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death of the phone's performance but still it throttled as I mentioned

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before spreading heat throughout the device can only do so much and any

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extended load will eventually expose the heat exchange bottleneck that exists

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between the shell of your device and the air around it air that is a notoriously

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poor conductor of heat so this video and

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this concept device then raise as many questions as they answer this may be a

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stopgap solution for making our devices more responsive and bursty loads or even

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less bursty loads that last for a little while but not too long but then what

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happens when our demands as users increase again sadly for phone manufacturers you can't

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just keep increasing power draw and size like some manufacturers have overpriced

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gpus Kirkland Jean Pockets can only get so big or I don't know maybe you can

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just keep increasing the size maybe we'll see a shift where manufacturers

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stop trying to make the best phone and start trying to make the best phone for

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you I mean we've already seen this to an extent in gaming but like for a creator

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for example that might mean a huge slab with a stylus and integrated water

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cooling so that you can film edit and upload videos on the Go I mean not every

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phone needs to be everything to everyone and hopefully more players can find

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their place in this market to deliver to the many different niches of mobile

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users who knows what we do know is that

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OnePlus is going to be doing their darndest to keep things cool

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if you found this video cool why not check out the link to oneplus's

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additional information on active cryoflux and if you're looking for

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something else to watch why don't you check out some of the wild phone water cooling setups that we have tried in the

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past they are not as slick as this

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but the results are pretty impressive