Key Takeaways
1. The iPhone 17 Pro Max runs demanding games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Resident Evil 4 at 60 FPS without thermal throttling, thanks to its powerful A19 chip and improved cooling system.
2. A Reddit user created a DIY cooling solution using M.2 SSD coolers, achieving nearly 90% stability in the 3DMark Steel Nomad Stress Test.
3. The DIY setup utilizes the phone’s metal casing as a heat spreader, with thermal paste, copper heat pipes, and aluminum fins to enhance heat dissipation.
4. Community reactions on Reddit varied from humorous comments to technical suggestions for further cooling improvements.
5. The experiment demonstrated success in maintaining thermal stability during stress tests, highlighting the potential for better cooling solutions in mobile devices.
We recently examined how the cooling system operates in the Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max while playing demanding games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Resident Evil 4. The iPhone 17 Pro Max not only manages to run these games at 60 FPS but does so without any thermal throttling issues. In GPU performance tests, such as the 3DMark Solar Bay stress test, the iPhone 17 Pro Max showed impressive results, especially with its new powerful A19 chip. For a mobile device that lacks active cooling like a fan, the iPhone 17 series seems to be a true improvement over the previous iPhone 16 series.
Unique DIY Cooling Solution
However, one Reddit user was apparently not happy with the cooling abilities provided, so they took action themselves. User u/T-K-Tronix took the initiative to install several M.2 SSD coolers, managing to achieve nearly 90% stability in the 3DMark Steel Nomad Stress Test. For reference, my Lenovo LOQ, which runs on the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, scored around 98% stability in the same evaluation.
The images shared in the Reddit post titled “17 Pro Max Cooling with M2 SSD Cooler 90% Stability in 3D Mark Stress Test” display a DIY cooling arrangement where desktop-level heatsinks and heat pipe coolers, typically used for SSDs, are attached to the iPhone 17 Pro Max to lessen thermal throttling during intense gaming or benchmarking sessions.
How the Setup Works
It is believed that the phone’s metal casing serves as a heat spreader. By applying thermal paste along with large copper heat pipes and aluminum fins (some even having small fans), heat is drawn away and dissipated much more effectively than the built-in passive system can manage. This setup seems to keep the A19 chip cooler for extended periods, leading to improved performance and stability, achieving around 90% in the 3DMark Stress Test as depicted in the images.
The responses to this creative iPhone cooling setup have been as intriguing as the experiment itself.
On Reddit, u/shyamg94 remarked, “This is almost as thin as the Air.” In a playful retort, the original poster T-K-Tronix replied, “It’s the True Air Version because of the Fans.”
Community Reactions
u/DrTurb0, who owns an iPhone 17 Pro, raised a more technical point: “You need three times more of the coolers and plaster them on the whole screen. The vapor chamber is under the screen and the screen gets pretty warm, and with more coolers you can wick heat away from the display!”
Others took the conversation to more extreme ideas. u/DarthBories joked, “I’m slapping a water block on my Air and gonna see if I can get Pro numbers!” to which T-K-Tronix humorously replied, “Next in the list.”
u/opnupstrathclydpolis quipped, “It’s still somehow thinner than the Air with the ‘optional’ MagSafe battery.” On the other hand, u/infernion pointed out: “Battery cooling is complete, but CPU cooling was missed.”
And this is indeed accurate, as the logic board housing the A19 Pro CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine is located slightly above the battery, under the new Camera Plateau. Regardless, the experiment is clearly a success regarding thermal stability during stress tests.
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