 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. Or 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 Pulseway. With Pulseway, 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. 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 S10 Plus with a Snapdragon 855 processor in here, and you can see that it's been sitting idle for quite some time. Our processor is running at 30 degrees Celsius, which is a nice, comfortable temperature for it. So we're going to go ahead and close down CPU monitor, and we're going to 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 going to be, I suppose. We're going to be switching over to 3DMark Slingshot Extreme. So let's go ahead and run our benchmark for the first time. Okay, we got our first results, 5569, 4762. We're going to check our CPU temps real quick here, 52 degrees, and then we're going to 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 going to 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' 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 centered like a heat pipe would be, so it could just be a copper tube. But it's got a simpler loop, so just a U instead of zigzagging back and forth, which might interfere with thermal transfer. But like this one, it appears to be soldered onto 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 tubing 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 you're... You might not be the sort of person who just has thermal pad material lying 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. Uh, 5068 and 4277, actually. It looks like we got a little bit of throttling already. Let's check our CPU temps. We're 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 Coulson's 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 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 thermal 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 cause it to 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 dad 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 gonna 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 smallest G1 quarter fittings that I could find here in the studio were these 1 quarter inch ones here. Look at this. Aren't these adorable? But even that is still way bigger, especially than the cooler that we're planning to use. So clearly some adapters are gonna be in order here. 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 McMasterCar. 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 undersized, but they're gonna allow us to take our quarter inch tubing and go all the way down to this little tiny one. One pro tip is that if one zip tie is good, two 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 you 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, through this adapter, and our pump after we put some water in it because running a pump dry is a really, really bad time. I need to make sure you get that in the shot. All right, lttstore.com, friends. Now this is interesting. This is actually quite a powerful pump, but it is really struggling to move water around the loop. But these tiny little fittings are definitely a classic bottleneck. Okay, there we go. We just hit 33 degrees on our phone's 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 to strap it on. Plonk this on a little something like... Ooh, if 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 Vulkan. 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 Vulkan. So we were already at our maximum throttle. We 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 think this is going to be our last run. I'm pretty convinced that this is not going to 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 hot spots 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 have freaking thunk it? Speaking of who would have thunk it, who would have thunk that I would transition so seamlessly to our sponsor PIA? 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, macOS, 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 lmg.gg slash PIA WAN. I don't know why we're using the WAN 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 one I'm wearing and our community forum, which you should totally join.