 The mobile processors that we use in our smartphones are super efficient, which helps them run cool enough to build into these amazingly portable devices that we carry in our hands and store in our pockets. Or are they? What if I told you that the only reason you don't burn your fingers when you're playing a game on your smartphone or rendering a video for your Twins2SnapTalk account is that your phone's processor is constantly throttling down its performance to limit its thermal output and its power consumption? Well, you likely wouldn't be surprised. We have explored this topic before, and we did find that it was possible to unlock a significant amount of extra performance by water cooling the back of a smartphone. But, as so many of you pointed out, that solution isn't very practical for a wide variety of reasons. So let's take a look at a couple of ways of cooling the Snapdragon A55 that don't involve liquid. One is the Red Magic 3, a gaming phone which has a fan inside it like a computer would, and the other is this. A thermoelectric cooler that you can clip onto your phone. ModMic's new lineup features the new ModMic USB, the new ModMic Uni, a complete revamp of their original 3.5mm mic, and the ModMic Wireless. Check them all out now at the links in the video description. First things first though, I need to get a heavy application running on my phone, and I need to establish a baseline. So conveniently, this is the exact same phone that I used last time, it's a Galaxy S10+, and we're going to be using 3DMark Fire Strike just like last time, which saves me an awful lot of time. Alright, so let's take a look at this thing. Tech coolers leverage the Peltier effect to convert a difference in electric voltage to a difference in temperature. In simpler terms, it means that if you hook a battery up to one, one side gets cold, while the other side gets really hot. So let's open this thing up. Now, the usefulness of the cold side, I should think, would be pretty obvious. You want to hook it up to whatever you want to cool. And techs actually get used for everything from beverage cooling pads to large-scale industrial heat pumps. Unlike a phase change or HVAC system, a tech is compact, has no moving parts, and is capable of running completely silently. That is, until you get to the part where you have to deal with the hot side. All the heat from your processor or whatever else it is you're trying to keep cool doesn't magically get sucked into another dimension. It still has to be dealt with. And on top of that, you've got to dissipate the waste heat from the tech. Because techs have another dirty secret. They are extremely inefficient, which means that they consume a ton of power compared to just throwing a heat sink and a fan on whatever it is you're trying to keep cool. And that is where, ah yes, contestant number two comes in. This Red Magic 3 gaming phone was sent to me months ago by Nubia, and I had actually intended to do a full review of it, but just never got around to it, life got in the way, etc. I'm still really interested, though, in one of its key gimmicks. As we've discussed before, calling a heat pipe liquid cooling is pretty misleading, even if it is technically true. But this is one of the only smartphones in existence that actually has a cooling fan and ventilation holes. So we're gonna clear some space here, and we are gonna put both of these head-to-head. Now, for the Red Magic 3, I am expecting pretty good results. This is the same Snapdragon 855 SoC as the Samsung, but it's got a cooling fan. I mean, bear in mind, there could still be some big differences. I mean, the firmware that these devices ship with are very different from each other. This one has a 90 Hz display. Unfortunately, I don't have a convenient way to put a fan in an S10+, or take a fan out of this one. So from a head-to-hand standpoint, this is kind of the best we can do. As for the Galaxy S10+, I've never actually used one of these, and I didn't watch or read any reviews of it, so... I have no idea what to expect from this, but I will tell you, it looks kind of goofy. In terms of positioning, I ran a quick run of 3DMark Slingshot Extreme, and just kind of felt the back of the phone for which parts were heating up the most, and it was right around the logo here. You can actually see that the thermal pad is not making great contact with the part of the phone that was heating up the most. It's a little bit off to the left-hand side there. I would have rather had it more in the middle, but... Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way that I can reposition it, because that right there is actually the tech. That's it. So putting it here wouldn't be good. That is not metal, that is just chrome-finished plastic, and would not result in good cooling performance. Oh, right. Compared to water-cooling a phone, I guess this is a mild inconvenience. You have to plug it in? Well, yeah. I mean, how else would you power it, right? You convert electricity to cooling. You should be able to just plug it into the phone. Yeah, I mean, on some devices you probably could, but I don't know what kind of current it draws, and that would suck your battery life even faster than gaming sucks up all your battery life, so... Um... Like, I can see why. It's just like, I don't know, where's my battery bank when you need one, right? Wow. That sounds like the cheapest bearing that I have heard in a good long while. Can you hear that? Yes. It's awful. Okay, and then there's the light toggle. It's just one LED down at the bottom there. Head-to-head time, boys and girls. One, two, three... go! Right out of the gate, our Red Magic 3 is scoring significantly higher than our S10+. Let's go ahead and do a second run here. This is fascinating. So we're on test number two, and there's a couple of takeaways here. One is that the results of our S10+, perfectly match up with our control test, so with the Pelche cooler, it's definitely not getting any worse. And our Red Magic 3 absolutely creamed the S10+, even before any thermal throttling sets in, thanks to, presumably, the higher clock speeds it can run at, thanks to that integrated fan cooler. Now, it's definitely quieter than the fan on the Tech Cooler. Pretty sure I can feel the heat coming out of it. We do have a way to check, though. Wow. The casing of this thing is toasty. Even with the cooling fan, the back is quite warm. No drop in performance after two runs, but that's exactly what we were expecting, based on our previous experience with the S10+. Now we're gonna see if this cooler makes a difference on the third, fourth, and fifth runs. And we'll also see how the Red Magic 3 keeps up. Interesting. So we still didn't fall much, but maybe a little less? This next run, this is gonna be where we know for sure. We've got a drop, guys. So, wait, why am I excited about this? That's terrible. We were hoping to not have a drop on the S10+. The good news is the Red Magic 3 is actually doing really well. Time for run number five. With a pretty good idea already of which approach is gonna result in the best performance, now I'm kind of curious about the user experience. So I'm gonna put a piece of tape across the back of the phone, which is gonna help with the reflectivity issues that you can get using a thermal camera to try to measure the temperature of something shiny. As for the Samsung, the surface temperature is quite a bit lower, which might seem to suggest that our cooler is working, except that the performance of the phone isn't getting any better. We're also getting a really good look at the heat coming off of the cooler itself. So you can see the hot side here. See all this is heated up. And then this cooling fan is drawing room temperature air in and then dissipating it around here. Okay, we've got our next result in. The Red Magic 3 is still holding up and we are down to 4,800 on the S10+. Something that surprised me when I was working on a video about foam thermals a while ago was how much of the heat that the device generates is expected to be dissipated from the screen. I made the assumption that because the housing is metal in many cases, that that's where they would want to dissipate heat from. But in fact, because you make less contact with the screen, some phone designs actually strive to utilize the screen as a heat dissipation surface as much as they possibly can. Samsung is sitting right around 35 and a half degrees. The Red Magic, even with the cooling fan, this thing is paying a price for having that amped up processor in there. So you can really see the hottest spots too. I'm actually going to have to put new pieces of tape to measure the hottest points. It's cool. It's like being able to do like a thermal, you know, X-ray of where the heat generating components are inside the device. So on the Samsung, you can see that we actually nailed the location for the thermal pad on our tech. It's right there on the back. And what's really cool is check that out. You can actually see that cold spot. That's at 18. I got as low as 18, 17 degrees on that point right there. Unfortunately, it just doesn't have enough power to draw away enough heat or it's not covering a big enough area to really make a difference according to the numbers we've recorded so far. Meanwhile, over on the Red Magic, 44 and a half degrees. Wow! That is really toasty. You can really feel it too. Quite similar on the back. 42, somewhere in that neighborhood. The phones are all cooled down now. The final result is in and I got to admit, I am actually impressed. As I went through, I was watching that the thermal throttling was kicking in at around the same time as when we ran the S10 Plus Bareback. But what I didn't realize was that while our original scores for OpenGL were 4,000, something, they were in the neighborhood of around 4,100. So we're actually looking at just about a 10% increase in gaming performance for having this stupid cooler clipped to the back of the thing. So does it work as well as our water cooling solution? Or does it work as well as just having proper cooling built into the phone in the first place? No. No, it doesn't. But it does yield a difference and it costs so little that as long as you don't mind looking like a bit of an idiot, if you have a game that's on the threshold of like running smoothly or being playable, it might actually work. Go figure, right? And you don't have to deal with, you know, this bulky, like super hot, you know, gaming, gaming phone type approach to things. Although there is something to be said for that as well with how much raw performance this thing pulled out of its back pocket and then sustained even across six runs. This video is brought to you by Drop.com. The Drop Control keyboard is one of the top selling keyboards on Drop.com. They've got over 11,000 of them sold. It features a solid CNC aluminum frame. It's got a built-in switch plate. It's got RGB lighting. It's got QMK firmware for customizability. It's got hot swappable key switches so you can go with Cherry MX, Kaiwa, or Halo switches. It's got a floating key design, dual USB-C connectors, and it weighs a hefty 964 grams. That is over two pounds for my American friends out there. So go check it out at Drop.com. We're going to have them linked in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you enjoyed this video, maybe go check out the water-cooled phone video that we did a little while ago if you haven't already. It contains some learnings that we did not investigate today. Pretty impressed by this thing overall, though. Who'd have thunk it, you know? Putting a fan in a heat sink on something keeps it cool, right, Brendan? What concept?