TL;DR
- A Reddit user attached M.2 SSD heatsinks to their iPhone 17 Pro Max for extreme cooling.
- The mod, although bulky and aesthetically unappealing, significantly improves the phone’s sustained performance beyond what Apple has already achieved with the move to vapor chambers.
- The setup helps dissipate heat from the phone’s frame, reducing heat buildup and thermal throttling.
Alongside the move back to aluminum on the iPhone 17 Pro, Apple also began using vapor chamber cooling on its flagships to help users achieve even better sustained performance from the powerful Apple A19 Pro SoC. Vapor chamber cooling isn’t new by any means, and Android flagships have long utilized it to maximize the performance of their SoCs. But what if you wanted even better performance with even more heat dissipation and cooling? We’ve seen a few crazy cooling mods for phones, and this latest one attaches a bunch of SSD heatsinks onto the back of the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
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Reddit user T-K-Tronix added several M.2 SSD heatsinks to the back of their iPhone 17 Pro Max. Why? Just because they could.
The result is a bulky Frankenstein of a phone, which performs exceptionally well in the 3D Mark Stress Test, maintaining over 90% stability across 20 consecutive loops of the benchmark.
Vapor chambers help with heat dissipation inside the phone, transferring heat from heat-generating areas like the SoC to cooler areas like the frame of the phone. However, the frame and other heat-reception bits still need time to dissipate this heat back into the environment. So while a vapor chamber does help improve sustained performance by a decent margin, there are still practical limits to how far you can push before the phone eventually thermally throttles.
A setup like this improves heat dissipation at the phone’s frame, thereby reducing overall heat buildup during sustained loads. Yes, in a way, this unaesthetic contraption does help your phone run at its optimal performance for longer by lending a big hand with heat management.
You can achieve similar results with Android flagships as well, although the best results are typically achieved with phones that feature a vapor chamber and a metallic unibody. Most smartphones these days are glass-sandwiches, so while it would help benchmark results, you won’t see the biggest gains unless you target more of the metallic surface areas closest to the heat source, i.e., the SoC. Even in the setup above, I bet the user could get some more mileage if they added a heatsink to the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s camera plateau. Either way, it’s a very cool phone mod.
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