Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “REAL Phone Water Cooling”.
You are looking at coolant flowing through a maze of water channels that wind their way across the entire back of this phone and even around the camera, don’t believe it. I don’t blame you. I assumed that, even if this phone was water cooled, this must be just a silly animation or lighting effect, but watch I turned the pump off and you can see the bubbles just floating around in there. How and perhaps more importantly, why did this come to be OnePlus sponsored this video so that we could take a deep dive into how your phone stays cool and how future Tech like this could make our phones even cooler, OnePlus, and I have had our ups and Downs but through it all they’ve been at the Forefront of some of my favorite mobile phone Innovations, pop-up cameras, High refresh rate displays and the alert slider come to mind along with great performance in demanding applications like games and fast charging, and it’s those last two that Bring us to The Innovation we’re looking at today: OnePlus isn’t the first to notice that phones get hot and to come up with the idea of liquid cooling one.
In fact, we’ve done it at least twice actually three times. If you count this, but OnePlus is the first to build liquid cooling right into the device itself wait hold on. You might say, I’ve seen tons of phones with liquid cooling even from OnePlus themselves. Ah, yes! Well, that is what we in the biz call marketing horse. While it is technically correct to say that those phones are liquid cooled, they do in fact contain some liquid and it is helping with cooling it’s misleading at best, because if I was to say your car was liquid cooled, you would probably assume I didn’t just slap A heat pipe or a vapor chamber on it.
This is different. The OnePlus 11 concept was specifically designed to show off a real liquid cooling solution. Oneplus is calling it active cryoflux and it uses a series of fluid-filled tubes running all along the back of the phone to move heat away from the soc. But this is a big difference. Instead of counting on evaporation and capillary action to move that fluid around it uses not one but two pumps, two pumps: how in the Sam Hill did they fit? One pump in here, let alone two piezoelectrics. The pumps that we use for PC water cooling are typically impeller pumps which push water around with rotating blades, not unlike the way that a fan pushes air around, but impeller pumps have two weaknesses that make them completely unsuitable for phone use size for one, and if That wasn’t enough.
Their mechanical nature makes them prone to failure, especially when jostled around like they would be in a phone. Piezoelectrics, though, circumvent both of those issues through the power of crystals, not the kind of crystals that ward off bad vibes man or introduce aliens to a series that really didn’t need a fourth movie, let alone a fifth but the kind of crystals that compress or decompress. When a voltage is applied to them, so what they do is they coat a membrane in these piezoelectric crystals, then, by rapidly modulating the applied voltage, they can make the membrane Bend, add some Inlet and Outlet valves and some fluid and Presto Chango it’s a pump, but Because it has no wearing Parts like a motor would it should be far more reliable and far smaller. The micro pumps in the OnePlus concept take up just 0.2 milliliters of space for reference. You could fit about 2500 of these pumps in this coke bottle or about 2 000 in this banana for scale lttstore.com. All of this means that you can water cool a phone without a massive increase in thickness or in weight, or the attachment of some unsightly noisy Godless cooler accessory.
You can, but should you now? Obviously, there are some practical challenges here I mean I have no doubt that this costs more than just chucking some copper, foil or a small Vapor chamber in your device, and I mean, even if you can keep the costs under control just looking at it. You’Ll notice. This is still a completely sealed system, with no external heat exchanger. That means that there’s no real increase in the total surface area, which means that, while the coolant inside of the loop may be able to whisk heat away from the soc to the rest of the phone, the best we can really hope for is temporarily better performance.
Until we reach the thermal saturation point, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no merit in delaying the inevitable or does it OnePlus actually didn’t want us to test this as part of the video? No, please it’s a prototype and it’s not ready. You think, because you sponsor me, you can control me. Obviously we tested it anyway, because I’m a firecracker like that, but In fairness to them I want to make it very clear to you guys that this is a prototype. It is not ready and the results may not be reflective of the finished product that is, if it ever actually makes it to market. The good news is that all of that, aside with all the obvious bubbles in the cooling Loop and the random low performance blue liquid, they put in because it looks cool, it does Act, actually work. And that’s with all the things that I can see that they could optimize about this like they could make the channels wider.
They could increase the rate of coolant flow. They could use more conductive phone materials to get the heat moving faster, there’s so much they could do to make it better, but even as it is, it works. The medium news is that it only lowered our temps by about two degrees. However, phone socs are designed to throttle at much lower temperatures compared to your PC, which means that this cooling system could actually have a much higher impact on Boost performance compared to lowering your computer’s temperatures by two degrees.
But not all the news is good or even medium. The potential bad news is that moving the heat faster could also have an impact on discomfort. Does all this tubing spread the heat to the rest of the phone, making your hand get hot well from the data? We probed within the phone. It seems like there isn’t a substantial difference to how hot the back of the device got, but we felt it was probably worth validating with our thermal camera as well. We started torture tests on our two OnePlus devices, a regular OnePlus 11 and the concept phone at the same time. So the idea here is to see what the hottest point is on the back.
We can’t use any of the shiny part. It has to be the part, that’s covered in tape, because that’s where the emissivity is going to be controlled, okay, so 29, 8.1. Okay, it does actually appear to be a touch cooler on the regular one, but less than I would have thought it’s a fraction of a degree anywhere where you would actually be touching it along the back. What’S really noticeable, though, is how even it is on the regular one.
We’Ve got these cool zones and on this one it’s just uniform. If you adjust the um temperature gradient to the right thing, you can actually see the um like Lanes in the concept phone. Oh, I think it’s probably too even now, because it’s probably already spread like right. As you start a load, it would probably work yeah, it’s just because it’s spread out.
It’S the same with the um with the radiant heating in my floor. So there’s the one with the hot and cool spots and then here’s the one I mean I guess it has sort of cool spots. It’S definitely more, even though at this point then there’s no obvious downside, but what about the upside? Does it improve real world performance? In games, the answer is unfortunately, nope, but with a pretty big asterisk phone games work a bit differently from PC games for one they pretty much always have an FPS cap to prevent overheating and intense battery drain and for two they often dynamically adjust image quality.
For that same reason, making Apples to Apples comparisons basically impossible, so our gaming performance sees no statistically significant change, but what about other things? Well, here the answer is yes, but again with the big asterisk, when we drag raced our OnePlus concept with the standard OnePlus 11, we found that CPU performance in synthetic benchmarks was better on the 11 proper than compared to the concept, but this discrepancy does not appear To be related to thermals and is more likely due to the lack of optimization on the concept phone remember, this is not in production and when we try to torture these devices with heavy loads on the CPU and GPU, the active cryoflux cooling system seems to help As it postpones the inevitable heat death of the phone’s performance, but still it throttled, as I mentioned before, spreading heat throughout the device can only do so much and any extended load will eventually expose the heat exchange, bottleneck that exists between the shell of your device and The air around it air that is a notoriously poor conductor of heat, so this video and this concept device then raise as many questions as they answer. This may be a stopgap solution for making our devices more responsive and bursty loads or even less bursty loads. That last for a little while, but not too long, but then what happens when our demands as users increase again.
Sadly, for phone manufacturers, you can’t just keep increasing power draw and size, like some manufacturers have overpriced gpus Kirkland Jean Pockets can only get so big or I don’t know. Maybe you can just keep increasing the size. Maybe we’ll see a shift where manufacturers stop trying to make the best phone and start trying to make the best phone for you. I mean we’ve already seen this to an extent in gaming, but like for a creator.
For example, that might mean a huge slab with a stylus and integrated water cooling so that you can film edit and upload videos on the Go. I mean not every phone needs to be everything to everyone, and hopefully more players can find their place in this market. To deliver to the many different niches of mobile users, who knows what we do know is that OnePlus is going to be doing their darndest to keep things cool. If you found this video cool, why not check out the link to oneplus’s additional information on active cryoflux and, if you’re, looking for something else to watch? Why don’t you check out some of the wild phone water, cooling setups that we have tried in the past? They are not as slick as this, but the results are pretty impressive.
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