Phone Water Cooling is REAL! But does it work?

if you're an avid mobile gamer I can pretty much guarantee that no matter what device you have you've encountered thermal throttling of some sort in the past that is to say that you fire up some game you like and after 10 15 or 20 minutes of gaming you notice a significant performance drop now on a full-size PC we have all kinds of solutions for these sorts of problems big heat sinks or water coolers with giant external radiators but on a phone you're pretty much limited to what you got here where are you so we found this on Aliexpress and it is exactly what it appears to be a water cooler designed for use with a mobile phone so let's take this thing for a test drive and see if it actually solves the problem and this video is brought to you by pulse wave with pulse weight you can remotely monitor manage and control all your Windows Mac and Linux machines from one app create your free account today at the link in the video description [Music] so if we want to know if our solution is going to be effective the first thing we need to do is determine if there's an actual problem that needs to be solved in the first place so I've got a galaxy s 10 plus with a Snapdragon a 55 processor in here and you can see that it's been sitting idle for quite some time our processors running at 30 degrees Celsius which is a nice comfortable temperature for it so we're gonna go ahead and close down CPU monitor and we're gonna fire up GFX bench you've got to be kidding me some tests are now temporarily disabled well that's the kind of day this is gonna be I suppose we're gonna be switching over to 3dmark sling shot extreme so let's go ahead and run our benchmark for the first time okay we got our first results 5569 47 62 we're gonna check our cpu temps real quick here 52 degrees and then we're gonna go ahead and start it again now one of the keys is to make sure that we're doing our subsequent runs as rapidly as possible so we're not giving the device a chance to cool down if you think about it while you're gaming it's not gonna have that opportunity so that makes it a much more realistic test now I'm going to need to run these tests a few more times in order to plot out my throttling curve where I look at the performance decrease over time but in the meantime for your guys's entertainment we can have a look at the various phone water cooling solutions that showed up in the mail so this one seems to be the one that's most optimized for gaming because you can see here it's designed to sit on the back of the phone like this so that you can comfortably hold your phone in landscape mode with the water tubes connected to the bottom of the device like so it includes a thermal pad one that doesn't appear to be adhesive in any way and a bunch of zip ties this one kind of bewildered me now there are certainly things that I could think of to do with the zip ties secure tubing to the fittings strap the cooler to the back of the phone I'm just not sure what their intention was exactly now let's put this one aside and have a look at our next candidate this one really didn't ship with much in the way of accessories and it's a bit of a simpler design overall so they've got a thicker it kind of looks like a heat pipe that isn't sealed but it's hard to tell if the inside is sintered like a heat pipe would be so it could just be a copper tube but it's got a simpler loop so just a you instead of zigzagging back and forth which might interfere with thermal transfer but like this one it appears to be soldered on to a thin copper plate has no protective covering and obviously is not designed to be used as easily in landscape mode because if you were to put it on like this you'd have to be sticking out kind of between your fingers off the back of the phone curiously this one included two thermal pads not because I think they expect you to use both of them at the same time but rather because I think they expect you might lose one and your you might not be the sort of person who just has thermal pad material flying around finally behind door number three is our smallest cooler yet but actually the one with the largest copper tube so this would make this one likely the least restrictive one but it's also the one that's going to make the least amount of actual physical contact with our phone one good thing about this design i guess is that it could be used in either orientation oh it's done okay fifty sixty eight and forty two seventy seven actually it looks like we got a little bit of throttling already let's check our CPU temps we are up at 65 degrees this time bippity Boppity go again please so that's great then we've already lost 10% of our performance after less than 10 minutes of running an intensive application maybe there's something to this after all so I had to go on coolest ins Aliexpress page to figure this out I I'll admit it I had to read the manual but apparently what they expect you to do is take your thermal pad peel off the protective cover put it inside a phone case and then take this thing and put it in here and then like drill out holes in your case or something for the water cooling tubes yeah we're not doing that we're just we're just gonna grab some packing tape and strap this to the back of it for testing purposes but there you go for those of you who are curious that's the answer now that we've got that figured out we can go ahead and take a look at some of the other things that we need the manufacturer of this very clearly points out that this alone is not enough to help with federal throttling now you might actually delay the throttling because just adding some mass to the back of the phone that can absorb heat is going to posit the heat up a little slower but you still have to dissipate it and this hunk of copper doesn't have a ton more surface area than the back of the device itself so we need some kind of way to circulate the water so here's some tubing a pump and a reservoir and we need some way to dissipate the heat so I grabbed this radiator from like an ancient build that I did like 10 years ago and we're gonna hook that bad boy up to it now that is a lot more surface area than the back of the phone so now things are getting really interesting our third OpenGL test didn't drop much compared to our second one but our third Vulcan test is now only 75% of the performance of our original score' that means that we've actually moved beyond the point of differences that you can measure with benchmarks but that don't matter in the real world to the point where the animations are noticeably choppier now than when we first started our investigation now let's talk about how we're configuring our cooling system in a PC you'd be using tubing and fittings that has like great big inner diameters so that you can get tons and tons of water flow but as you can see with our phone coolers we're going to be limited by the most restrictive items in our loop anyway and these are as small as four millimeters in outer diameter so we need really tiny tubing in order to run this thing now the Oh list G 1/4 fittings that I could find here in the studio were these 1/4 inch ones here within this alright these adorable but even that is still way bigger especially than the cooler that we're planning to use so clearly some adapters are going to be in order here [Music] now one way of adapting larger tubing to smaller tubing that I've actually seen done is to just place the smaller tubing inside and use some kind of a sealant but we're gonna go slightly less jank than that today and we're gonna use these handy little couplers that I found on mcmaster-carr so these little puppies are gonna restrict our flow a little bit because of the shape of the flange and how they're a little bit under sized but they're gonna allow us to take our quarter inch tubing go all the way down this little tiny one one pro tip is that if one zip tie is good too must be better now this is hardly the greatest water cooling system that we've ever designed and there's a fairly significant chance that it'll leak because the more points of failure the more chance that yes drip water but we don't care about that today because for one thing our leaks won't be anywhere near our sensitive electronics the worst-case scenario is we get a little bit of water dripping down on our table here and number two is that the purpose of today's video is not to design the best phone water cooling system but rather to determine if this makes sense at all in the first place so I'm gonna go ahead and cut these off and we should be pretty much ready to fill it so our final results are in after seven runs we've lost anywhere from 25 to 35% of our original performance now it's time for us to see if we can fix it so the last step here is to put some kind of an active cooler on our radiator honestly the thermal output of a phone is so small that I wouldn't expect it to make a huge difference but there you go we're doing it for the sake of thoroughness and then plug power into both our fan but through this adapter and our pump after we put some water in it because running a pump dry is a really really bad time ready make sure you get that in the shot alright ltte start conference now this is interesting this is actually quite a powerful pump but it is really struggling to move water around the loop let these tiny little fittings are definitely a classic bottleneck okay there we go we just hit 33 degrees on our phone cpu so that's exactly the same starting point that we had when we were running it by itself without any active cooling so it's time just strap it on plonk this on a little something like ooh we just put a zip tie on it or something now again this is not designed for long-term use obviously you wouldn't want a big ugly zip tie hanging out in the middle of your screen if you're gaming but you don't realize how light a phone is until you strap a big piece of copper to the back of it like it's heavy and our benchmark results are actually well within range for OpenGL but a little bit higher for Vulcan let's go ahead and run it again run number two our score is still exactly the same okay it's jumping around a little bit but wow it looks like our temps haven't increased at all this is now three runs in and our performance hasn't dropped at all by comparison last time around on the third run we were at only 72% of our peak performance in OpenGL and only 75 in Vulcan so we were already at our maximum throttle you haven't even touched it yet okay so the CPU temperature does go up we can see that but it rapidly Falls so our cooler here is doing an excellent job of pulling that heat away and once again our benchmark scores are not affected whatsoever in fact that's our best score yet for OpenGL I mean this is gonna be our last run I'm pretty convinced that this is not gonna throttle just for funsies here's a look at the phone through our thermal camera now this is an imperfect way of measuring it because it's a bit of a glossy surface so that does interfere with our reading but we can at least see relatively speaking where the hotspots are right there is one of the hottest spots of the phone along that edge and even that is well under control it barely feels warm to the touch even while I'm running this game benchmark so there you have it our scores still haven't fallen this entire time and our temperatures start out a little bit on the higher side but quickly fall back down to ambient temperature so is it a bit of a janky solution yeah I think even under the best of circumstances this is going to be bulkier and less convenient than just you know relaxing in bed with just your phone but does it work the answer is a resounding absolutely yes it does water cooling phones who would a freaking thunk it speaking of who would have thunk it who would have thunk that I would transition so seamlessly to our sponsor p.i a private Internet access supports a variety of VPN protocols and types of encryption and authentication allowing you to dial in the exact level of privacy protection that you need they've got apps for Windows Mac OS Android iOS Linux and Google Chrome and they've got over 3,000 bare-metal servers running in 44 locations across 28 countries you can connect up to five devices at the same time with a single account and their apps include DNS leak protection as well as ipv6 leak protection like any VPN worth their salt they've got IP cloaking which masks your IP as well as your geographic location and you can check it out today at el mggg / p ia when I don't know why we're using the win offer code it doesn't matter just go click the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video then you can hit that button I guess but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link down below also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like the and our community forum which you should totally join

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 4,478,571

Rating: 4.8365107 out of 5

Keywords: phone, water, cooling, liquid, gaming, thermal, throttling, performance

Id: F91bGJBQLFc

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/igmrlm]

I have a slightly different method, a little bit easier for the average person.. doesn't require zip ties or.. water https://youtu.be/XenZwkzrLJU