 Portable gaming systems like the Valve Steam Deck offer an unprecedented amount of PC gaming goodness in a handheld form factor. But with great performance comes great heat and great fan noise. Now, Valve has addressed this to a significant degree, pun intended, by altering the fan curves of the Steam Deck to achieve a better balance between noise and thermal management. But there's a limit to how much you can do by simply tuning how quickly your fan is spinning. The laws of physics can't be broken. Well, you know what I say? I say f*** physics. We're gonna do it Hot Rod style with this M.2 cooler, this block of aluminum, about $100,000 worth of SolidWorks licenses, and of course... This is it. This is all we've got. Well, we also have a Tormach. Like, it's a pretty big shop. We're gonna have some fun. Fun telling you about our sponsor. PDQ. Take patch management off your plate by automating it. With PDQ, you can keep your machines patched and up-to-date automatically, giving you time to do more important things, like watching Linus Tech Tips. Start your free trial at pdq.com slash linus. The Genesis of this video was actually a conversation with Aya about the upcoming Neo 2. Because it's much smaller, more compact than the Steam Deck, but it actually has a similar thermal envelope for the SoC. And I expressed concern knowing what I knew about the, okay, better managed, but certainly audible fan on the Steam Deck, that if you gotta remove that heat, you gotta do it somehow. And I was like, dude, you know what would be super cool? If you just had, like, a strap-on cooler. Remember those, you know those little water coolers that you can just dunk ice into a reservoir and then lube onto the back of your phone? Oh, yeah. Well, apparently enough people are buying those that it's an entire freaking product category. So it really doesn't seem that far-fetched to have a strap-on extra cooling module for your handheld gaming PC. And I think that with Alex's skills, we could actually do it in a way that is pretty darn user-friendly. So today I'm making your strap-on? Yes. Yes, let's do it. The idea then is to repurpose another cooler, like this HRO9 M.2 cooler from Thermalright, to add supplemental cooling to the SoC. And we believe the Steam Deck is a perfect candidate for this, because with relative ease, we can jury-rig a mounting mechanism and cut a hole in the back of it that'll let it just kind of hot rod out the back. Should be easy. Of course, to determine whether our modification achieves the desired results, we're going to need to take some baseline readings. Now, we can't rely on performance for this, because I think Alex and I are in agreement that it will probably be identical after the fact. Yeah. These systems are generally power-limited, more so than they are thermally limited. But what we can see is in a demanding game like Horizon Zero Dawn, our CPU and GPU are sitting in the 82 to 84 degree range, and our system fan is noticeably audible. Those are two things we'd like to address. Also, Alex, our fan RPM is around 5700. Oh, that's pretty high. Yeah. I'll be really interested to see if we can lower that. That's a way that we can empirically measure how much quieter we've made it, even though we don't have an acoustic chamber yet. Yeah, the Tormach being on is louder than this, but like it's a CNC mill. If I was sitting gaming, I would definitely notice this. Yeah. Step one, then. Shut down the Steam Deck. Yep. Take it apart. Perhaps for the last time. Well, it's going to survive this. It's going to be fine. You know how mad people are going to be if we ruin a Steam Deck? These things are rarer than hens' teeth. It'll be fine. This explicitly says no thermal testing. That's only because we've disassembled it before. It's fine to thermally test this against itself with a different cooler on it. Just want to point that out. What a nerd. Dan signed the inside of this one from when he opened it up to fix it. Also, really, Dan? Or is this from you? Well, that's from me, but it came with not all the screws in it from Dan. What's next, then? This is about the shape that I'm thinking our thing will be. It kind of interferes with our Wi-Fi grid. That might be a problem. Which thing? Oh, you're going to do a big heat spreader. Well, we need this to attach to something that can attach to the mounting holes. Got it. So we need like a mid-plate. Yeah. Understood. Hey, I couldn't help noticing this EMI shield also seems to be acting as a heat spreader of some sort for the VRMs. Have we accounted for that? Oh, yeah. We're just going to cover this thing in thermal pads. Instead of those thermal pads, you know what we could use? I don't even say it. I don't want to. No. We could just coat this entire thing in K5 Pro. We're not doing that. Do you know how long it took me to clean that graphics card? But think about how great, for one, our thermals would be. And two, it would be so easy to put on and also... So easy to put on. Yeah, enough. Oh, I learned this really cool tip recently. If you want the center to center distance between two holes that are the same size, you can come in, measure the one hole, zero it, and then you can measure to the outside of each hole. Oh, that's cool. And then it's just subtracted. Yeah. Essentially, it cancels out. So we have 1.9. Cool. You turned on the fume extractor. Yeah, just for sanity, we're going to laser cut out a little thing here, make sure everything lines up, doesn't interfere. Got it. And then we can check around the mill if it looks good. Nice. Brandon, be fast, you'll miss it. He's firing my laser. Good job, Alex. Yay. Woo. A lot of people might have used scissors to cut paper. If you use scissors to cut paper, like, what are you even doing? Some kind of caveman. What? Yeah. What's the repeatability of your scissor cutting? My laser is under a thou. So maybe we want to scooch it that way just a tiny bit more, but that seems pretty good. Yeah. That seems freaking awesome. I mean, honestly, I don't even think you need to. We might as well. It's just cheap insurance. It's very easy. We're good. We're good to go. We're ready to go. I'm moving like 0.03 of an inch. We're ready. Give me the aluminum. I'm cutting it. Okay, I need your help. You don't even put that piece of aluminum in there. You need to cut it first. Okay. What do I do then? You can cut a hole in the back of this. Can we just laser that? No, this is, I believe, ABS. It's a thermoplastic. So instead of, you know, cutting, it just melts and then catches on fire and it's a pretty bad time. Routing it? We could, but then I have to program the router and we have to strap this down. Whereas like handing you a Dremel takes very little time. But the results, Alex. Think of the results. Oh, you have a template. How are we going to figure out exactly where the template goes? Yeah, it's going to be kind of hard. One way we can do it is this hole right here lines up with that. So it does. It'll be close. Yeah. It'll be like pretty close. Okay, I can handle that. Oh, and we also have these beautiful new bits. Come over here. Oh, really? You know, we have this Dremel. Screw that thing. Dremel suck. Look. What? Something to Dremel suck. I thought we loved Dremels. Wait, what are these? Oh my God. How much did I pay for this? Oh, like 90 bucks. Huh. They're kind of beautiful. I know. Oh, okay. What do they do? Well, it's like that sound. You can use it with the die grinder. It's like a Dremel, but with balls. Huh. Where would I find two skinny sticks or skinny rods? Dowel pin assortment. Alloy steel. Yeah, this could work. Yeah, this will do. Now this is in place ish. To turn this piece of aluminum into, you know, a functional part, we need to cut it on the Tormach. First thing though, I need to do a bunch of can. If everything goes well, it should look something like this. That should take us about 11 minutes. Fun thing, while you were figuring out if we can, I actually ran a little experiment to determine if we should. Check this out. Are your plugs in yet? No. Okay, keep them out. Watch this. Okay, see the GPU temps? Yeah, around 80, 70 right now, but yeah. Okay. Okay, listen to the fan. Watch this. I'm gonna take this heat pipe and touch it to the thermal pad. Oh, wow. It's totally gonna work. It just completely dropped. Yeah, it's already 10 degrees cooler. Oh my God. This is like actually worth doing. I just assumed it wouldn't be honestly. This is gonna be freaking awesome. How much more exciting is this project now that we know it's gonna totally kick ass? It's honestly a lot more exciting. I thought it was gonna be just stupid. This guy always doubts me. That's not hot? No. Oh, okay, cool. Now it appears that I'm lining this up by hand, but I'm actually not. I have marked this one. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put little scratch marks on for these other two. I'm gonna drill out these holes. Then I can validate that they're all in the right spots before I make the complete cutout because I'm actually gonna cut out this entire shape. Whee. All right. No turning back now. There's officially extra holes in this steam deck. Now we just take this, pop it back on here, and see if we manage to line up all those holes. What would you say if I told you I absolutely frickin' nailed this? I'd be pretty impressed. Holy crap, did I have this on? Oh, wait, no, no, it's fine. I only had the backing over there. Sorry, brain fart, brain fart. Now that I know where the holes are supposed to be, I can know exactly where my template needs to be, and I can mark it and cut it out. This thing's such a beautiful machine. Just biggest shout out to Tormach once again. That is really cool that it just changed to... Oh, yeah, it's so sick. All right. Looks good. Just need to flip her over, chop off the bottom, and ready to test fit. If this works... Oh, it works perfectly good, but it just barely hits our Wi-Fi module. It's like 30 seconds on the belt sander to get rid of that, very easy. The more difficult thing though, you might notice our studs aren't quite long enough. Oh. There's two ways we can go about this. We can either remove a bit of material from here, like 5 hundredths of an inch or so, or we have little chummies. So we could just chop these at a good height, put that on top, and have the whole thing just be higher. Oh, I think we should just shave this down. Yeah, I think so as well. Yeah, let's do that. Now, we've got a lot of thickness here. I think we should take this down to like half of the overall thickness. Okay, easy. That's my vibe. Just make it lower profile, because that's going to take weight off of it too, which would be nice. Also, if we take it off from the bottom here, we might get a tiny bit better performance from the heat sink. Yeah. And then I, in the meantime, I'm going to finally actually cut out the back of this steam deck. One thing that's awesome about the Tormach is that we get conversational programming. So instead of taking all the time to make something in SolidWorks, program it, export the G code, you can just do it right in here and tell it like, I want to face something off, five hundred thousandth of an inch, and boom, it does it. I'm sorry, Alex. I don't like the clamp. You only live once. Hey, Alex. Yeah? You would use those deburring things at this stage now then, right? At that stage, you're so close, I'd probably just use a file. Oh, all right. Okay, this roided out Dremel is amazing. I'm deburring slash taking off a little bit of material that I missed before. Just listen to it. Here it is, my perfect Dremel job. You ready? Well, okay, perfect is a strong word, but here it is. Here it is, my not bad Dremel job. Yeah, not bad at all. Hi there. It should fit now. If we both executed perfectly, this will fit immediately. Yep. What are the odds? High, very high. I believe in us. I'm sorry. Are you taking the piss? Do you think that you did a good job? Yes. Well, this is definitely a good job. It should all fit then. All right, sure. Oh, I go first, right? Yeah. Okay. There it is and hold on. Very close, very close. Hold on. Maybe it just needs a little massaging. Just a little massagenation. Massagony. Wait, no, not that. It's very tight. Whoa. Damn. Whoa. Okay, that's actually pretty good. Yeah. This is awesome. Thermal pads and tested. I think so. This is just like a black acrylic cover. Yep. Cool. These rods are still not long enough though. If we want to put our trim piece on. Also, but we have to take the heat sink off. Right. Because there's going to be, you know, a tower attached to it. Got it. Okay, here we go. Since we don't know the exact Z heights of anything in here, we're taking a bit of a YOLO approach. We're going to just err on the side of making our thermal pads a bit taller. And then we're going to make sure that we mash down the cooler really well. One way we can validate the thickness of our thermal pads is by putting this down with just a trace amount of thermal paste on the top there and seeing if it touches it. It does not. So clearly this is too thick. Let's pull that off. Let's go ahead and try it one more time. Let's see if it's yours that's the problem. Yes, it touched. Barely. To make sure that we have thermal pads everywhere that we need them, we can look at this little shield right here and we can see this one thermal pad we're not able to hit with our plate here. It's for this little IC, which is probably responsible for charging. It potentially gets really hot. I have just the thing. Knew it. A little tiny heatsink. He's so cute. Look at him. He's adorable. Then let's do a quick scan around at our thermal pads. Actually, it looks like everything is making contact. This is not terrible. Yeah. All right. Frickin' rock on. Is this the part where we screw it on? Yeah. We need thermal paste first, but yeah. Get the close up out. Oh my God, Alex, what the hell is going on, man? Well, I didn't mean to put that much on there. Kind of just happened. We'll need to scrape some off. Oh my goodness. I mean, we do want to go a little bit heavier than we normally would. Any extras just going to squeeze out anyway, and we're really not sure how great our contact here is going to be. But that, that was a bit much. You know, I didn't even take off that much, actually. Should we fire it up? Well, let's put it back together. Oh, wow. We never actually turned it off. The game is still running. Oh, wow. OK. Well, this is interesting. Oh, it's running at 42 degrees. Holy crap. Yeah, we just put a big cold thermal mass on it. But still. I wonder if just adding this sink and then a vent hole is enough. Maybe. No, it'll heat up. It'll heat up. It'll heat up. But like, if we want to do this not dumb, we probably could just add a bunch of little fins here. Yeah. Passively dissipate a bunch of heat. A lot. More than you'd probably think. Might as well just leave it running, I guess. I mean. You want big boy or small boy? I want to go practical, believe it or not. I know. Who am I, right? Let's go for the small one. I'm going to let you finish. But there's a couple of things going on here that you should know. One is that this is flipping hot. Thermal transfer definitely taking place. Oh, my God. Two is we already dropped 10 degrees. It's at 71 on the GPU, 72, and it has settled in. We don't even need the fins on the back. That's all Valve had to do. Stick a burning hot hunk of metal on the back of the steam deck. It would make it uncompliant, though. Oh, very. It would burn the users. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Alex. Yeah. How's this going to stay? Well, we're going to use this, test it, and I'll put back on thermal epoxy later. But we need to finish this video. OK, cool. Oh, my God. Please tell me it fits. Alex, does this one not fit? Please tell me it fits. This one fits. Are you sure? Did you fly too close to the sun? I fit it earlier. Thermal expansion, Alex. Oh, that could be it, actually. We have to cool it down. That's cooler. Oh, it's still pretty hot. I don't know, man. Almost. And the more this goes in there, the more it'll cool down faster. Those tolerances. While it heats up here, let's just appreciate the finished handiwork. Alex, full credit, man. This looks awesome. That is hot rod PC cooling, if I have ever seen it. Can we take a moment to appreciate that ThermalRite went and put a flame silhouette on this heat sink? It's beautiful. A match made in absolute heaven right here. Now, do you mind pulling up the numbers from the before numbers? Sure. I believe it was 86 degrees when we were in here. Man, it takes a long time to get up to temps now. That's why I use USB-C. We actually made it up to exactly the same temps. 81, well, not quite. 81 degrees Celsius. Yeah, we're about five degrees cooler now. But we did manage to drop almost 2,000 RPM off the fan. And it's a 2,000 RPM that counts for a lot. It is way quieter. Where do you see that? Down here, 5,300 RPM. Yeah, it was 57 before. Oh, I thought it was 7,000. No. Wait, it didn't work? You know what I bet it is? This thing is flipping hot. V2, this with a fan. Yeah. You know what? I bet we could even do that now. Let's mock it up. I'll be back with a knock to a 40 mil. In addition to adding a fan, there's probably things we could do to more efficiently pull heat off of the SoC. Like right now, we're just thermal paste just like gooped in there and stuff like that. It's not ideal. Wow, this is really in there good. Oh, man, that's freaking hot. No way. I don't know if it's going to get higher like it might, but it turns out that putting a fan on your cooler, it works. People do it for a reason. You don't necessarily want like, you know, all of this to control your fan. No, but I think you could probably wire a fan into the board of the steam deck. It's got to have 5 volts somewhere. Yeah, this is a 5 volt fan. It would be a super easy. Put it in solder, it would be fine. What I worry is that it might cost you some of your overall power budget for the device. 0.035 watts. That's a full bore. Okay, it's probably fine. This is incredible. And without a doubt, this would be my preferred steam deck if given the choice. Well, and with the fan actually wired up internally. Yeah, of course. In our perfect world, the mounting system for the external cooler would be such that you can unscrew it with thumbscrews or something like that. Pop it off and then put your normal plate on and have the whole system operate completely normally. It's just that Alex noticed while we were off camera that there was a bit of a gap between our M.2 cooler and the bottom plate. And he vice gripped them together. And now they do not come apart. Yeah, it's not coming apart ever again. Oh, that's an interesting idea. Yeah, one of the other side effects of putting the fan on is that this plate is a way more reasonable temperature now. What are we looking at? Looks like 49 degrees. Yeah, which is right around you get burned, but it takes a real long time. Whereas before it was you get burned, but very fast. You know who never burns you though? Our sponsor. Manscaped. Manscaped's Ultra Premium Collection is an all-in-one skin and hair care kit designed to keep the everyday man covered from head to toe. There's the two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, their body wash infused with aloe vera, hydrating body spray, deodorant, and a free gift. Moisturizing lip balm. Simplify your man maintenance with Manscaped. And best of all, all their products in the Ultra Premium Collection are cruelty free, paraben free, and vegan. Visit manscaped.com slash tech or click on the link below to get 20% off and free shipping. In this crazy world, I'll take the free shipping. If you guys enjoy this kind of jank, you might also enjoy the wooden PC. It has gears on the front that actually turn. And I think they're actually using it now. They finally started up.