I am both surprised and not surprised to see this, but it is impressive nonetheless! A Vietnamesse TikToker named vurathayho has taken on the monumental task and created a liquid cooling mod for the Steam Deck, which is able to low temperatures by a whopping average of 32%!
Reported by Tom's Hardware, the TikToker was able to achieve these results by building a custom backplate to make room for the AIO:
To start, he created a custom heat spreader from metal designed to be sandwiched between the Decks' metal cooling solution and the AIO pump itself to allow effective heat transfer between the two components.
Next, he dremeled a square out of the Steam Decks' rear clamshell, exposing the outer part of the APUs cooling solution, and securely mounted the metal heat spreader to the Deck's back cutout, securing it with four screws as well. Then two thermal pads were placed on the top and bottom of the makeshift heat spreader before the modified outer shell was put back onto the Steam Deck. Finally, the pump was connected to the makeshift heat spreader with the same four screws.
Aaron Klotz (Tom's Hardware)
While this is a ridiculously hard modification, and definitely overkill, it is really cool to see something like this exist. It brought down average 85c temperatures to 60c ones, which is really fantastic, but definitely unnecessary. Regardless, this is super cool to see!
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