 It's no secret that pretty much every phone on the market is gonna thermal throttle eventually if you run something intensive on it for long enough. So whether it's a video editing program or a graphically intensive game, your performance is gonna start right around here, and it's gonna end up somewhere right around here. But what we don't know is how does that difference in performance between a peak and a sustained state get impacted by installing a phone case. Because here's the thing. Most cases on the market are designed for ruggedness or looks or cost-effectiveness, and I haven't seen any that I can think of that appear to be designed for thermal conduction. So are we all just taking our mobile devices and installing a great big insulator on it? And how much of an impact does that have? We're gonna find out. Before we can determine how much a case affects thermal throttling, we need to set a baseline for how our devices thermal throttle without any case installed at all. Now in the interest of fairness, we're going to be testing both camps. So representing Android, we've got the Galaxy S10 Plus, and representing the iPhone, we've got the iPhone XS Max. Which side do you want to play for today? Team iPhone, team Android, team iPhone. I'm doing it. So we're gonna use Geekbench, and we're going to do subsequent runs just like I did in my phone water cooling video a couple years ago to see how our performance tracks over time. Three, two, one, go. Yeah. You have a percentage bar. No. I just have a timer. Yeah. All right. I've got my first score. Much lower than mine. Fifth run for the iPhone is 11,318. What was the Galaxy? And the Samsung is 10,935. So that's it. Ten runs. And we've got kind of some bad news. Like my phone's definitely hot. Yeah, so is this one. All along the back is really warm to the hand. But I'm getting the exact same scores that I was at the beginning, almost to the point. Same with the iPhone. So obviously they're not thermal throttling. I messaged my buddy in from an on tech. He said one of the ways that they get phones to thermal throttle is they run a battery test for an extended period of time, like 10, 15, 20 minutes. OK. And then they run the test instead of just running the test manually over and over again. We did 10 tests. Do you think that was enough or should we have done 20 or 25? I don't know. Let's try his way. OK. And see what happens. So let's start the Geekbench battery benchmark. I'm going to crank up my screen brightness because that affects your thermals as well. And go. OK, so it's been over 20 minutes now. They're already super hot. So now let's run the CPU test for 10 iterations. We've got a problem. Even after preheating it and then running our 10 benchmarks in a row again, we're still ending up with all of our scores within margin of error. OK, so one of the things I've heard is that Android handset manufacturers will purposely tune their devices to check what software is being run. And if it's a benchmark program, it'll actually allow the phone to heat up more than it normally would before thermal throttling the processor. So one of the ways that you can mitigate that is to use a program called an APK extractor, grab the APK, the install file for the app off the phone, rename it to something else, then put it back on. So if you change the name of the program, it won't be on their white list anymore. Some of them will behave that way. The problem, though, is that that doesn't help us with the iPhone. No, because we can't sideload stuff on an iPhone. And there's not that many tests for this kind of stuff in the app store. Like they have AnTuTu, but I've run it six times now. There's no change. Fortunately, there's still 3DMark. Last chance. This has to work. So how are we going to run this one? On the iPhone, it's a little different than Android. I'm going to use Slingshot Extreme Unlimited, which pretends that there's no such thing as VSync and lets it just run as fast as it can off screen. And then I'm going to use Slingshot Extreme Unlimited OpenGL ES 3.1 as my option here. And then I'm going to go ahead and run. OK, so what do we want to do? Ten runs here? Better make it 12. Odd choice. You just never know what's going to happen. I don't trust it. OK, so I got my first baseline score. 4523. Second test is about to finish. 4300. Wow. That's lower. Yeah, dropped again. 3479. Oh, this time it went higher. Back to being lower, 3350. Dropping even more, 3148. Slightly higher, 3210. Lower again, 3115. Final round, lowest score yet, 3078. A clear trend. So we had that one outlier where it kind of spiked back up. But then other than that, this is going to be really easy to map against. Yeah. 6006. I'm down a little bit. This one's actually back up again. 6053. 5944. Wait, what? 4495. That's it, baby. We just dropped 25... We're throttling now. I think it's not going to go back up. Like, feel that. That's hot. Like, it's really hot. I just don't know if it's going to keep going down further. So it could either be like up here and then crash and like just kind of two tiers, or it could crash and then keep going down like sloping. Yeah. 4529. 4473. 4538. Final test, 4497. We know what we're looking for. With the iPhone, we're looking for either a faster decay... So a steeper curve. Yeah, or a slower decay if maybe the case aids in cooling. Or it falls farther. If it gets hotter than it ever did and performs worse than it ever did. And then with the S10+, we're looking for whether it will hold for as many runs or fewer runs or more runs before it throttles down. And maybe drops farther than ever? Or maybe drops further. OK, so... To the shopping mall! Charge it! I do not belong in here. Should we try one of these leather wallet ones? That looks like that traps heat big time. 10S Max leather case. Oops. Got the leather case. This thing is 70 Canadian dollars after tax. That's crazy. Hey buddy, I'm looking for cases for Samsung Galaxy S10+, and iPhone 10S Max. Normal silicone. Little beefier Galaxy iPhone. Kinda comfortable. What do you got? OK, so I got a selection for you. I tried to go from the most basic case you could have. Wow, that's a really basic case. Yeah, you paid more for that than you'd like to know. So that's for the iPhone and then that's for the Samsung. So we're seeing if that maybe insulates it more. Yeah, so then one level up from that is semi-rugged. Sure. Like that one. Oh my God, look at that. What is up with that? Did they just put it on a little stand to spray paint it? And then I got you some wallet cases. OK. And then I got you the actual official leather case from the Apple store. You don't want to know. 70 US dollars? Not US. Or Canadian. Appalling. Can we return this? So let's start with the most basic cases. Oh, this thing sucks. Look at it. It's like jiggly in there. This is basic by like every definition. And go. So we're finished our 12 runs. For our Android device, we ended up with basically exactly the same behavior. We throttled at the same run and down to the same amount. So as far as we can tell, putting a really sort of basic plastic case on your phone is not going to have any noticeable impact. Pretty much the same story with the iPhone as well, except there's a bit of problems with 3DMark on this one. It crashed around test two. So we couldn't just pretend that test three counted as test two. Right, because it's actually run for more time now. It is getting hotter. So we did an extra test, test 13. But even with all that, it's pretty much the same results as no case. The trend line is still very similar. So it's hard to draw a conclusion yet. Shall we move on to the rugged case? Yes. All right, let's do it. Yeah, this is exactly the same. That surprises me, actually. Me too. I would have thought as we go into thicker cases, I mean, they're made out of things that are not known to be excellent heat conductors. I guess these aren't the most rugged cases. This isn't an Otterbox or anything, but it's a lot more substantial than this. But I guess it doesn't make a difference. All right, wallet case time. And it's the same. OK. Do you want to try running them with the cases closed? Yes. Now that's interesting. So on the iPhone, we not only throttle immediately and harder, we actually end up at a significantly lower steady state. So it looks like the iPhone XS Max actually relies in a very significant way on its screen for cooling, which makes me wonder then, why didn't covering the back matter? OK, so I'm done. There's still the Apple branded leather case. The $70 leather case. All right, all right. Do you have any theories? Like you're a motorcyclist, you wear leather, so there's no wind going through. I wouldn't say that my experience with leather is that it feels more insulated than plastic, though. So OK, so we're done with the leather case. It actually kind of beat the base. Better than a bare phone. I mean, barely. It's probably just marginaire, I guess. But it's definitely not worse. It's not worse. Definitely not worse. So unfortunately, this video didn't end up being the make your phone run faster with this easy trick conclusion that we had maybe hoped for. So what we found from all of our testing is that phones thermal throttle. Absolutely. It's dependent on the workload. And unless you're going out of your way to do something particularly stupid, like enclose your phone in a non-breatheable insulating material, it's probably not going to have a huge impact on the performance of your device. This is a good answer, Linus. That means we can have our performance and protection too. This is the world we want to live in. So this is like the ultra thin animal skin condom. I only use recycled condoms. Inside joke from the roast. Go watch it. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. To be clear, we're not recommending that mall kiosk, but you know, if- It's really hard to get this off. That's a tight fit. Maybe we recommend the Apple genuine leather case. I'm not sure about that one either. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like that one and our community forum, which you guys should totally join. We have shirts kind of like this one, but we don't have a long sleeve yet. We're working on that. I want that. Oh, there it is.