Modern smartphones pack enough computing power to rival budget PCs. However, one of the biggest limitations preventing mobile chips from sustaining peak performance is thermal throttling. To tackle the problem, a hardware enthusiast on Reddit carried out an experiment in the most absurd way possible, sandwiching a smartphone between two desktop CPU air coolers. The result is a miniature desktop PC built around a phone's motherboard that actually works and performs well.
The smartphone chosen for this project is the ZTE Nubia Z70 Ultra, which is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC paired with 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 1TB of UFS 4.0 storage. It is worth noting that this particular chipset made its debut in 2024, with its prime CPU cores rated to reach up to 4.32 GHz. The latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is a more powerful chip and can go as high as 4.6 GHz. Rather than using a newer, higher-clocked chip, the project is essentially testing how much sustained performance can be extracted from an older Snapdragon flagship.
