Water Cooling the iPhone 6S! And other flagship phones
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,897 words · ~9 min read
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the iphone 6s the entire internet seems
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to agree this is one fast little mother
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and in fact when the first performance results started to surface we found
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articles like this cropping up all over the place saying that in geekbench in
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particular the iphone 6s outperforms in
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some cases the 2015 macbook certainly an
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impressive feat but as we demonstrated in this video here
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where we water cooled the 2015 macbook a
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part of the problem with the performance of that particular device is that it
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drastically thermal throttles so you're not getting all the performance that you
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should have out of it which led my inquisitive mind to go well hold on a
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second is there potentially then even more
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performance under the hood of the iphone 6s what would happen if we were to water
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cool it stay tuned
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the logitech g303 features a lightweight design and advanced optical sensor with
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delta zero technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting to match your
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setup check out the link in the video description to learn more
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okay so first order of business then is to establish
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a baseline while it's being air cooled so what i'm going to do is i'm going to
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run geekbench continuously for 10 minutes recording the scores each time
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it finishes and then tracking how the scores change over time as the
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device heats up from being put under a continuous load so we've got our first
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number 4446 boom let's run it again and record that
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so this is going to be kind of boring to watch um
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you guys can tune out for a bit 44-24
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run it again so this is interesting at a
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controlled room temperature of 24 degrees celsius the iphone 6s
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does not throttle appreciably at all
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over a course of about 10 minutes so
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um yeah this kind of makes the water
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cooling experiment a foregone conclusion but
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what the hey i'm gonna give it a shot anyway so here goes
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now while the rumor mill does indicate that the iphone 6s is indeed quite
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waterproof i do not intend to submerge
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it directly in the liquid because i still need this iphone 6s to work for
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my review of aforementioned device so
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i'm just going to be using an ice water bath
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to maintain it at the coolest possible temperatures and then i will be
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putting the iphone inside a bag
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and sealing it up i'll be using my patented vacu seal
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technique where does your videos suck today they do
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wow can the touch sensor work through the plastic what do you think ah look at
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that it did cool so now we're gonna have to do another 10 minutes of runs here
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and uh we will be back
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four four four three four four four three holy this is
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really consistent four more runs and then we are through
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our 10 minutes of testing and the only real takeaway here is that
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water cooling the iphone 6s
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makes it run ever so slightly like like
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part of a percent more consistently from
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run to run impressive so the iphone 6s basically
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when running CPU intensive benchmarks anyway doesn't thermal throttle
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at all which brings up a couple more questions
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is our testing methodology then even
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relevant so in order to validate that
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we've brought in some other devices we've got
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the htc one m9 featuring the infamous
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snapdragon 810 we've got the samsung
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galaxy s6 edge featuring the exynos 7420
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and we've got the lg g4 featuring the snapdragon 808 this should give us a
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good cross-section of other devices to
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compare the thermal throttling performance of the iphone 6s against i'm
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going to run these phones for 10 minutes and observe how their scores track over
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that period of time this is going to take some pretty rapid data entry in
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order to achieve but i think the galaxy s6 edge is going to come up first here
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52 24.
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okay so uh as expected
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the s6 edge with the exynos 7420
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fell about 10 to 12 percent over time
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okay we saw that coming the g4 didn't thermal throttle at all and kept its
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performance extremely consistent across the board
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but the 1m9 was all over the map
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like all over the place like our first score was higher than any score i can
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find online anywhere for the 1m9 in
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geekbench um and then our later scores
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were way lower so we're going to do two things
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here we're going to rerun the 1m9 i'm going to i'm letting it get back to room
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temperature now i'm not running anything and we're going to throw the zte axon
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into the mix also a snapdragon 810 powered device so that'll give us two
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different data points for this and two separate devices for snapdragon 810
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let's see how that goes all right so
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it's clear as mud now um
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the 1m9 didn't go as high
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and didn't fall as low on the second run
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and the axon started out much lower and
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fell as low as the 1m9 did on our first
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run showing us if nothing else that the snapdragon 810
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is all over the map as far as performances concerned which i guess
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isn't telling you guys anything you didn't already know if you've been keeping up with the fiasco that is the
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snapdragon 810 now let's find out how everything fares
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in the ice water so brandon asked a great question off
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camera about our testing methodology here
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does having the phones next to each other affect the results of the
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benchmark because of the temperature of the water potentially changing
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to which i replied no we should actually be fine
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because as long as there's still ice in the water it will be
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give or take a little bit zero degrees so
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we're just gonna load it up with the four phones here and go ham
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oh come on now
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everything just stop auto-rotating for like oh i guess i could turn it off okay
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i think that one already what
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all our phones are in the ice water
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so i'm going to let them all cool down be running nice and
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optimally cold and then we will do another 10 minutes
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of benchmarks on all the phones in ice water
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all right the time is now 116 we have four
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water cooled foams and we are ready
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to go
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try not to get too excited okay essex edge up first
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55-22 wowza who's going to be next looks
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like it's going to be the m9 wow that's surprising
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3901 all right 35 10 for the g4
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38 61 61 all right well we'll keep doing this
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for 10 minutes 54 13.
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so it took a little kind of staring at it
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waiting for numbers to pop out of the screen to me but i think we've got some
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pretty interesting conclusions so number one the iphone 6s
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is freaking awesome running just CPU intensive tasks the CPU does throttle if
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you load up the GPU um it basically
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doesn't throttle at all under air cooling and what's cool and i can't say
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this about every snapdragon 808 device but i can say it about the g4
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is that it also gives zero
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craps about whether it is air cooled or whether it is in a bag surrounded by ice
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water this puppy performs exactly the same under all scenarios for us
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everything else was a little bit different it looks like the exynos
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processor and the s6 edge performs about 10 percent better under ice water and
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the snapdragon 810 enabled devices both
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the axon and the 1m9 were a little bit
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all over the place but if we consider our first 1m9 run
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a bit of it wow the 1m9 is actually still a little bit
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warm even though it's in water that is definitely cold that's amazing um so
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right so if we throw out that first run with the 1m9 it looks like it actually
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stays at about peak performance when it's in ice water and the axon destroys
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its air-cooled performance underwater across the board showing that the
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snapdragon 810 has a lot of potential but that it has to be
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unlocked by some kind of a design that can cool it whether that's a heat pipe
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or water cooling or whatever the case may
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thank you guys for coming along with this exciting i hope a little ride as
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watching and i have my calendar in front of me so i'm just totally gonna cheat
11:56
here if you're looking for something cool to watch we actually just did the
12:00
manly guide to cable management which now you
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can see the results for here actually this is uh
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well this fell off but whatever
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there you guys get my point very manly very much cable tidy
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bye