A Redditor on the Nubia subreddit transformed their Snapdragon 8 Elite smartphone into a “gaming PC” by slapping two CPU coolers on it. According to them, it all began with a “stupidly simple question”: How far could they push a smartphone if they stop treating it like a smartphone?
The phone in Redditor ntsow’s experiment was a Nubia Z70 Ultra, which comes packed with 24GB RAM and a Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC. Now, to ensure that the phone has maximum cooling, they sandwiched the phone between the two CPU coolers and enclosed within a custom acrylic case.
I turned my Nubia Z70 Ultra into a desktop PC with TWO CPU coolers — 99% stability, Linux desktop & 1080p Ultra Windows gaming 😂
byu/ntsow inNubia
It should be noted that the display you see glued to one side of the clear acrylic casing is actually the phone’s display, and yes: it has been removed. while they don’t actually explain it, it’s clear that they detached it in order to ensure that one of the coolers comes into full contact with the exposed Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC of the phone.
So, how did it perform? Surprisingly well, according to ntsow. On 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress test, the modified Z70 Ultra and its Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC scored 6,980 points at best, and 6,910 points on the lowest loops. That’s actually pretty impressive.
Of course, it is inevitable that ntsow would try to game on the modified Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, and game they did. For this portion of their experiment, they managed to run The Witcher 3 at Full HD resolution and, more impressively, on the game’s Ultra graphics preset.
On a full load, ntsow says that the phone gave between 20 and 30 fps on average, with the GPU sitting at 99% utilisation. Oh, and if you’re wondering how they ran it, they were using a native Termux and XFCE4 Linux desktop running directly on Android. However, they say that the game was running on the Windows OS, which is likely through a translation layer that is similar to the ARM-based Windows systems on the market right now.
(Source: Reddit, Tom’s Hardware)
