With what seems like an imminent release
of the Nintendo Switch two. I've seen a lot of people speculating
online about its specs and performance, and it got me thinking
we don't even know the true limits of the original Nintendo
Switch’s hardware. You guys really seemed to like my Switch
Pro video, but some of you guys in the comments
raised some really interesting points. After doing a little bit of research,
I realized that had I started with a switch OLED,
I could’ve push things even further. So today we are going to find the limits
of the current gen hardware and create the ultimate Nintendo Switch
OLED. Step number
one was disassembling the switch, and here we see the first instance of
what will be a repeated theme throughout this project,
namely that Nintendo doesn't want you doing this
and will try to stop you at every turn. The first roadblock
was just using their own proprietary security
hardware to bolt the switch together. Luckily, my iFixit kit included everything
I needed here to get the job done. If you want to get one for yourself,
I'll include a link to it, along with all the other tools
and materials I've used throughout this project
down in the video description. So why is the switch OLED
so much better than the launch switch? Well, after the security disaster
of the original switch, Nintendo revised their hardware
to beef up security, and at the same time, they also quietly upgraded
the CPU and GPU. Now, Nintendo being Nintendo,
they didn't use this additional horsepower to give us gamers more frames or faster
load times, but rather they detuned these new chips
in order to deliver better battery life. And that means that there is a lot
of hidden potential locked away inside of these newer systems. But before we can unlock it, we have to
defeat that newer, upgraded security. And for that,
we are going to need a mod chip. Now that we have the switch stripped down to just the motherboard,
we are ready to install the mod chip. But I got to warn you guys, this
next part is going to be pretty tricky and not for the faint of heart. And in fact, in order to go any further, we're going to need
a little bit of technological assistance. That's right. It's time for my new favorite tool,
the digital microscope. In order to break into Nintendo's
walled garden, we're going to need
to connect our mod chip to some very small contacts
on the motherboard. But actually, before we can do that,
we have to defeat some rather low tech security measures. Nintendo puts these metal covers
over their most vulnerable chips to try and keep people like us out, but with the head of a pin,
you can very carefully pry them off. And then with some small side cutters, you can make room
for some of the new cable runs. Now, I won't go into too much detail here
as this isn't a mod chip installation tutorial, but what I'm doing is tapping
into data lines so that our new mod chip can deliver a software payload that will then bypass
Nintendo's new security measures. And if everything goes according to plan,
this will allow us to run all sorts of homebrew software. Most of these data lines are available
on the surface, but this one specific line is embedded
inside the PCB, and I had to use the head of a pin
to expose it. That part really freaked me out. And all told, this was probably the hardest
micro soldering job I've ever attempted, and definitely not something
that I would recommend to beginners. To make matters worse,
the only way to test my connections was to reassemble
the switch and try to turn it on while I was reassembling it. I applied some upgraded thermal paste and
a brand new thermal pad to the Ram chips. This will link the switches memory
to the overall cooling system and hopefully
allow for some big performance gains. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself
for now. Let's see if it even boots up. Plus turns on right now.
I won't be very happy. Oh, okay. One light came on. That's a good sign. Hey, no SD card. All right. It actually worked. Wow. That’s kind of nerve racking. Okay, let's, put this thing back together
and do a few cooling upgrades along the way. The biggest risk
when pushing any electronics hardware to its limit
is that you'll end up overheating it. And the Nintendo Switch
is especially challenging in this regard because of its tight packaging. There's just not enough room inside of it
to add more fans or heatsinks, so that means we're going to have to think
outside the box a little bit as I reassemble the switch. I added layer
after layer of thermal interface. The idea here is to create an unbroken
chain between the heat generating components inside the switch
and the outside world, which is fine in theory,
except for the last piece of the chain. So this right here is the original switch
OLED backplate, and while its an improvement over
the original original switches backplate. It's still just made out of cheap plastic. So I went online
and I bought this improved backplate. And well,
it might look remarkably similar. Once you turn it around, you realize that this is milled
out of a solid block of aluminum. And because aluminum
is very thermally conductive, we can link this to all the heat
generating components inside the switch and turn this backplate
into a giant radiator. Oh, and also it has these larger air intakes here
that should help to improve airflow too. After salvaging a few smaller parts
from the OG backplate and then transplanting them onto the new backplate, I installed
one last layer of thermal patterns. I now effectively had a switch
with an extremely overspecced heatsink. All right, now that we got this thing
all buttoned up, I'm immediately realizing that I'm going
to have to take it apart again. But before we do that, let's get the software
set up and see what this mod chip can do. So first thing is first here we have to protect ourselves
against getting banned by Nintendo. Our first layer of defense
is what's known as an Emunand. Basically, this is a copy of the switches
file structure that lives on an SD card. And you can kind of think of it like a playground for experimenting
with homebrew software. On the Emunand we are going to install atmosphere OS,
which looks almost identical to the normal operating system,
except it removes a bunch of Nintendo's constraints and allows us to run
unsigned code. And trust me, we are going to have
a lot of fun with this later. Our second layer of defense against
Nintendo is editing this config file to prevent our switch from communicating
with any of Nintendo's online services. And then finally,
I want to install the switch overclock suite, which will allow us
to unlock the potential of the switch OLED,
or at least eventually it will. When you first get it, the only Overclocks
available to you are very conservative in order to unlock the true
potential of your switch. You have to download this loader.kip
file, upload it to an online configuration tool,
and then dial in your settings. So with a little bit of experimentation
I found the limits of this particular switch. And yeah, they are pretty crazy. We'll do some benchmarking
and testing later. But for now I need to solve a new problem
that I've just created and overclock, which is going to consume
a lot more power. And thus it's going to kill the battery
life of our poor little switch here. So how are we going to fix that? Well, what's a bigger battery of course. Or actually rather, it's
more like two batteries. So this actually ended up being
the hardest part of the whole project, and I almost ended up
writing it off entirely. But in the end, I pushed through
and I actually learned a ton of stuff along the way.
Just like with the cooling upgrades. Packaging is the first of many challenges
that I had to overcome here. Inside the switch, there isn't enough room
for two factory batteries, but there is enough room for two batteries from a defunct Chinese
cell phone manufacturer. And as you can see, I actually got six,
which we'll discuss more a second. These batteries have a slightly smaller capacity,
but they're also physically much thinner. So after a little bit of trimming
of the RF shielding and a tiny bit of the mid-frame, two of them
should just fit inside of the switch. Our next challenge is going to be getting these batteries
to play nicely with their new hardware. First I had to remove the stock
battery management system. This PCB is responsible
for keeping the battery from overheating, overcharging, and over discharging,
but it also expects the battery to be connected
to some very specific hardware. And if it isn't,
the BMS will shut down the party. To get around that, I got these
generic BMS boards to replace them. That way the batteries are still protected
but are much more compliant for modding. And then I hit a new roadblock. My solder wouldn't
stick to the terminals of these batteries. As it turns out, soldering to battery tabs requires
a very specialized type of solder flux. So a couple of days later, this stuff showed up in the mail
and allowed me to make those connections. Now, soldering to battery
tabs is a delicate affair. Even with the right solder and flux, you want to do things
as quickly as possible so you don't transmit
much heat into the battery packs. Having a large soldering
tip with a lot of thermal mass will really help here
eventually with a bit of practice. I got all six cells connected. However,
a bit of testing quickly revealed that my BMS boards
weren't outputting the correct voltage. At first I thought I had damaged them
or maybe done something wrong, but after a bit of research online,
I realized that there may have been a manufacturing defect
with these specific boards. To fix it, I had to short these two pairs
of contacts with some short bits of wire, and after that they actually started
functioning as intended. But the challenges didn't stop there. Next, I had to fully charge each battery,
which sounds simple enough in theory, but how would you do that
without anything to plug them into? Well, what I ended up doing was connecting
them to a benchtop power supply. I configured it to deliver the maximum charging voltage for the cells
and limited it to one amp of current. It started off delivering a constant current,
and slowly the voltage of the cells rose. Eventually, you hit the max charging
voltage and the current starts to drop. Once it hit zero, you know that the battery is fully charged
and ready to go. Now remember how I said
that these batteries came from a defunct Chinese
cell phone manufacturer? Well, a little bit of rubbing
alcohol revealed that these batteries have likely been sitting on a shelf
for the past seven years. So in order to make sure that these cells
were still viable, I wired them up to a simple testing
circuit. This fully discharged each battery
by heating up a resistor, and the screen then reports
the total capacity of each cell. And wouldn’t you know it,
a lot of them performed very poorly. Oh okay. So six batteries
later and I have yet to find one that has anything close to the stated
Amp hour rating. This one is the closest at 2.9. So I actually ordered...
where’d it go?... where’d it go!? Oh there it is So I actually ordered two more batteries from a different company
in hopes of getting better results. So fingers crossed
we get some good ones here. Thankfully, after a bit more testing,
I actually got one decently performing battery
when combined with the best performing battery of the last batch. I should end up with a total capacity
that's about 50% higher than the stock switch battery. And speaking of the factory battery,
the next thing I did was harvest the factory BMS board by carefully
scraping off this protective coating. I revealed these four contacts
where I could then connect my new cells with that last little bit of soldering. Taken care of. I covered everything
in electrically insulating tape, plugged in the battery and prayed
it would work. But before we find out if it did. First let me give you a small preview
of some upcoming builds. Thanks to the sponsor of today's video
Aura frames, they make digital picture frames
that are actually good. I've got their Carver Mat Frame here
and it's loaded up with super top secret photos of stuff that I'm currently
working on for future videos. Transferring photos and videos is as easy
as downloading their app and selecting which content
you want to have the frame display all Aura frames have bright, super high
resolution, low reflectivity displays, which really helps to sell the illusion
that this is a physical photo in a frame. Even looking off axis, there's no
color shift, which means that your photos will always look
the way that they're supposed to. Plus, the whole package is super intuitive
and easy to use. I had my frame set up
and running in less than five minutes. And the more the merrier. You can invite your friends and family
to share photos to your Aura, or you can give one as a gift
and then easily share photos with loved ones
to get your own Aura Frame. Check out the link down in the video
description and use the code Zacbuilds to get $35 off their best selling Carver
Mat Frame. Plus, you even get free shipping. All right, now
let's get back to building this Nintendo. Ah! it boots! Look at this. I'm on the main screen, and, yeah, it says the is the battery's pretty low,
but that's to be expected because I just discharged
both these batteries. Probably not the smartest thing
running it like this. Okay, so now the next thing we need to do
is see if we can reassemble this thing with that bigger battery pack in there,
which should be fun. When I was reassembling the switch here
instead of using the same thermal pads as I did before,
I actually opted for K5 Pro, which is essentially the same thing,
but just in a putty form. It does a much better job of conforming
to the various layers inside the case, and as a result,
should give us much better heat transfer. Now, I think it goes without saying here,
but from a safety point of view, I really can't encourage any of you
to follow my footsteps for all this battery stuff. I did this purely for my own curiosity
and really just to see how far
I could push the limits of switch. Oh man, it all fits together and it feels
just like it did from the factory. Except it's probably a good 10 to 20%
heavier now, so it's probably going to take at least
a few cycles for this new big battery to properly calibrate.
So we'll test it later. But in the meantime, I think we should go get started on a new dock. This factory one is fine,
but it's a bit plain looking, and given all the mods we've done so far, I thought it'd be a good idea
to add some active cooling. So over the past couple of weeks
I have been working on this a 3D model of what
I want my new dock to look like. But a 3D model isn't good for much,
so let's turn this digital fantasy into reality. All of my early prototypes for my dock
were made using my FDM style 3D printers. These are great at creating
quick and cheap functional parts, but they've got a couple of drawbacks. The resolution is limited by the size of
the nozzle used to squirt out the plastic, and you get a lot of layer lines
that require significant post-processing in order to fix,
just like I showed in my Dreamcast video. So I decided to go another route
for my finished parts. For these, I brought my SLA or resin style
3D printer out of retirement. This style of printer uses
an extremely high resolution LCD screen to expose layer
after layer of UV sensitive resin. The result is extremely detailed parts that grow out of the tank
and have very minimal printing artifacts. They're also super strong
because they're printed at 100% infill. But like so many other things in life,
there's a trade off here as well. These prints generally take longer. They require an alcohol bath
to remove any excess resin you have to pry off the supports. And finally, all the parts
have to take a trip through the disco box to make sure they're 100% cured. But I think the results
speak for themselves when you compare an SLA
print to an FDM print. Well, smooth features are actually smooth. There's a lot more detail, and overall
they just look and feel a lot more high quality. Now we will still have to do a little bit
of post-processing on these prints, but before we do that,
I think we should head to the shop and make
the other two parts of this stock. Classic walnut. You guys know I can't live without it. For this project,
I wanted to do something new. In my last couple of videos,
I've definitely incorporated wood, but more so as accent panels
and ornamentation. This time around, I wanted to create
entire components milled from solid pieces of wood to create a more integrated
and cohesive design. Looks good.
I think we got on the first try. The first round of milling left me
with perfectly functional parts, but I also wanted
to do a little bit of branding, so I fed one of the pieces
back into the CNC. Given all the changes
that we've made so far, I thought the moniker of Old Pro
was fitting here. Obviously, Nintendo is very protective
of their trademarks, so I made sure to use a font
that was not the same as the original, and I also inverted the switches logo
to make it even more clear that this is just parody. To really make the letters pop,
I filled them in with a black stain, sanded off the excess spillover, and then
sealed the walnut with an oil rub finish. Then it was time to do that. Minimal post-processing. All the 3D printed parts
that I promised you earlier. First, I removed all the little goosebumps
leftover from the supports, and then I sprayed on a few coats
of what was labeled as flat black paint,
but is very clearly satin or gloss black. Come on Krylon and get your s*** together. All right,
so now that we have all of our pieces finished, we are almost ready to start
putting everything together. But first, we have to harvest
a couple of pieces out of the original. Switched off. The first one we need is the PCB. Now this handles charging and video output
when the switch is plugged into the dock. The other thing we're going to need
is what I like to call the springboard. But it's basically just a little PCB
with a usb-C port on it that allows the switch
to connect to the PCB. Oh, and then, and also we need this ribbon cable
that will connect between them and, yeah,
we don't really need this anymore. I feel like
this is probably a good time to point out that if any of you guys at home
want to make your own turbo charged dock there will be a link to the 3D print files
down in the video description. And don't worry, I'll even include an alternate design
so that you can 3D print the whole thing and then not have to worry
about making any of the parts out of wood. Assembly at first
was pretty straightforward, but this the parts bought right in reusing
the hardware from the original dock. But then it was time to add that active
cooling that I talked about earlier. But the original dock didn't have a fan. So how exactly are we going
to power these new ones? Well, these are special five volt fans
and the docks PCB just so happens to have two USB ports
on it. A little trick that I've learned
is that USB ports almost always have a five volt
pin exposed on their back side. So by soldering the fans wires to that pin
and a ground, we can bring them to life. But then that creates an entirely new problem,
because those USB ports are always powered when the dock is plugged in, which means
the fans would spend 24 over seven. So my solution was to integrate
a momentary switch into the bottom of the dock. That way,
whenever the console is in the dock, the switch will be depressed, the circuit
is complete, and the fans will spin. Pretty simple right? In order to prevent the switch
from rubbing against the dock, I included these channels that are just wide enough
to accommodate some adhesive felt strips, and then I screwed
the front plate in place. I didn't like the idea of having two big screw heads
right in the front of the dock. So I use these special washers
that allow you to screw a gold cap right over the exposed hardware,
and everything looks nice and clean. Oh man, that looks so good. So now that we have our new dock
assembled, what do you say we finally test out the
limits of our new Switch Pro? Oh, yeah. So I didn't mention this earlier,
but one of the cool things about hacking your switch
is that you can run custom themes on it. So I actually created
my own custom switch oled pro theme Anyways, first let's start with the overclock
because like I said before, it's pretty crazy. On the switch you have three key
clock speeds that you need to worry about, and they actually change
depending on how you're using it. So here are the stock clock
speeds in both handheld and docked mode. And now on to the overclock. My Switch Pro here can do
just shy of 2.4GHz on the CPU, 1.1GHz on the GPU, and 2.4GHz on the Ram. And as a fun point of comparison,
here are the maximum clock speeds that I was able to achieve
on my hacked launch switch. Also, I think I should point out that
with a hack switch, you can run whatever clock speed you like,
regardless of whether it's in handheld mode or in a dock. That being said, a word of caution
pushing these higher clock speeds can really stress
the power delivery system of the switch, and you may end up
decreasing its lifespan. So I probably wouldn't max everything out
all at once. Moving right along. Well, I was in there
tinkering with the clock speeds. I also took the opportunity to under volt
the system as well. This is a bit in the weeds,
but long story short, by ever so slightly decreasing the voltage
that's supplied to the CPU and the GPU, you can actually get those components
to run cooler and to consume less energy, which at least partially offsets
the added stress on my new overclock. So all of that is great, but what kind of difference does
it actually make in games? Well, it's a great question. So why don't we boot up tears
the Kingdom and find out this game is notoriously hard
to run for the switch, and it's not uncommon to see frame rates
that drop down into the low 20s. With our new overclock
profile, though, it's running at a locked 30 frames per second,
which isn't really that impressive, is it? Why go to all of that effort
for just a small increase in frame rates? Well, the problem is a lot of switch
games are locked at 30 fps. So no matter how much horsepower you have,
you can't exceed that limit. Or at least that's what I would be saying
if this wasn't a hacked switch. It turns out we can use a program
called locker to remove that 30 fps cap. And as you can see, it's now pretty close to pulling off a locked 60 FPS,
which is honestly insane. You're basically doubling
the factory performance, and you also get a significant boost
to load times. That being said, running 60 FPS in tears
of the Kingdom kind of breaks the game. You're basically
doing everything at double speed. But the nice thing about the switch
OC suite is that you can configure
different overclocks for different games. So for tears of the Kingdom,
I keep it locked at 30 fps and then use a more conservative overclock
profile to ensure that I don't get any performance drops while
still maintaining decent battery life. And speaking of battery life, let's talk
about how our new big battery fares. If I were to run the switch at its stock
volts and clock speeds, I'd get about 50% more battery life
out of it. So in the range of 6 to 8 hours
playing, here's the kingdom with my balls. The wall 60 fps overclock profile. It's probably more like 2 to 3 hours,
which is admittedly a big hit, but again, you can configure your own
power profiles anywhere in between. So with that more conservative overclock,
it'll do six hours all day long. We'll still making the game
a lot more playable. I could even configure my own
Super Battery saver mode if I wanted to, and maybe eke nine hours with a little bit
of voltage magic and in case you are worried about my crazy overclock
damaging the switch to excess heat, well, I wouldn’t, it’s honestly
just fine. In the dock, we are sitting at a comfortable 40 degrees
and even in handheld the temps don't really get much
higher than 50. Some other bonus features of having a hack switch are the ability
to whip your games right on to the system. That way,
you don't have to physically switch cartridges
in order to play different games. You can also run emulators
for a huge array of retro consoles, and then this last one
might just be my favorite. With the help of a little program
called moonlight, I can actually stream games from my PC so as long as I'm at home or somewhere
with really good WiFi, I can play high end Triple-A
PC games on my switch, which basically makes this thing a better version
of the PlayStation portal. So that's all the good stuff. Now let's talk about how we could have made it
even better in the postmortem analysis. This is an esthetic thing,
but I probably should have ordered a black rear cover to go with my whole
black and white color scheme. I think I probably thought this was white
when I ordered it. Next up, the fans in the dock will run any time that the switch is plugged
in, even if it's just for charging. Ideally, they'd be connected
to a temperature sensor, and then they'd only kick on
when they're actually needed. And then lastly,
the fans are a tiny bit loud, and I think that's due to the relatively
restricted airflow of the dock. I bet if I spent just a bit more time
really dialing in these air ducts, I could get the airflow to be a bit less
turbulent and thus a little bit quieter. That's it for this one. Check out the 3D print files
for this project. If you want to make your own custom dock at home,
I will see you guys in the next video. Peace.
