ⓘ u/ntsow

Reddit user u/ntsow in r/Nubia has taken phone thermal throttling mitigation to the extreme by mounting a Nubia Z70 Ultra between two full-size desktop CPU coolers inside a custom acrylic case, then using the resulting rig to run a native Linux desktop and stream and emulate Windows PC games.

The donor device is a Nubia Z70 Ultra with 24 GB of RAM and the Snapdragon 8 Elite. The phone sits sandwiched between two PC tower coolers inside a transparent acrylic frame, with the display still mounted and functional, although it is an aftermarket LCD.

The cooling mod serves a broader goal: using the phone as a full desktop replacement. The build runs a Termux + XFCE4 Linux desktop on top of Android, outputs video to an external monitor, and launches apps like Dofus directly from the Linux environment.

ⓘ u/ntsow

The modded Z70 Ultra running the XFCE4 desktop

On the gaming side, the poster said that The Witcher 3 ran at 1920x1080 with the Ultra preset, resulting in 20–30 fps with the GPU pinned near 99% utilization and both the CPU and GPU maxed out.

ⓘ u/ntsow

The Witcher 3 running on the modded Z70 Ultra

It's worth remembering that this is a garage project, not a controlled test. The numbers are all self-reported, and there's no way to know how much of the gain comes from the two coolers versus simply running the board exposed, with better airflow than it would get sandwiched between two sheets of glass. Still, it's a fun reminder of how much thermal headroom stock phone cooling leaves on the table.

Giang Bùi - Tech Writer - 112 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2026

Instead of sports, I spent my school years buried in researching about everything tech, looking into chips and specs instead of doing whatever normal kids did. I am now writing for NotebookCheck, hoping that research finally reaches more people than just me and a text file.