hotrob
New member
Hey all,
So I've been messing around with RiftCat VRidge (basically, it uses an android phone to emulate an HTC vive or Oculus Rift, though I've not been able to get the Rift emulation to work right).
It works pretty well - the latency isn't as bad as you'd think unless you go above 792p (no idea why that particular resolution but w/e). It's obviously not as good as an actual Vive, but hey, this was like, 50 bucks including the program and the headset. And it's good enough for me to enjoy playing a few different games like project cars.
For about 20 minutes, and then it overheats.
So I says to myself "tch, I can fix this". I ripped open an old laptop and took out the heat pipe and fin array - it won't have the fan, but if it can cool a 35 watt CPU (an Intel t4400 if anyone cares), it should be able to cool the phone (if it has an 11.6 Wh battery that lasts about say at minimum 4 hours of heavy use, it's only putting out a tenth of what the heatsink is rated to cool). Granted, the phone will overheat at a lower temp than the CPU, and a larger temperature difference yields better cooling effiency and yadda yadda yadda lets do this!
Didn't do squat.
Of course it didn't, the phone is made of plastic.
So I threw on some 3mm thermal pads I had kicking around, and BINGO we have results! an extra 24 whole seconds of average time before overheating. I think this is down to the pads soaking up a few extra milliwatts of heat, I don't think much of it was transferred to the fin array.
I tried shavings the pads thinner, and I tried putting some pads on the inside of the backplate to help it conduct heat better and didn't get any measurably better results.
I think the biggest issue is the phone itself, according to this iFixit teardown, most of the heat generating components are behind the camera and power button/volume rocker. Also, the phone's back is curved, so good contact is hard,
I've got some MX4, but I'm reticent to goop up my phone for nothing. It's not my daily driver, but I still want to be able to use it in case I drop my other one. If I had a third phone, I'd be tempted just to seal it up and fill the entire thing with MX4 and thermal epoxy the heatsink on, but at that point, I'm basically dedicating ~$300 of good hardware at the problem, and if we're doing that then I might as well just buy a bunch of components and build one from the ground up.
Long and verbose story short, anyone got any ideas?
So I've been messing around with RiftCat VRidge (basically, it uses an android phone to emulate an HTC vive or Oculus Rift, though I've not been able to get the Rift emulation to work right).
It works pretty well - the latency isn't as bad as you'd think unless you go above 792p (no idea why that particular resolution but w/e). It's obviously not as good as an actual Vive, but hey, this was like, 50 bucks including the program and the headset. And it's good enough for me to enjoy playing a few different games like project cars.
For about 20 minutes, and then it overheats.
So I says to myself "tch, I can fix this". I ripped open an old laptop and took out the heat pipe and fin array - it won't have the fan, but if it can cool a 35 watt CPU (an Intel t4400 if anyone cares), it should be able to cool the phone (if it has an 11.6 Wh battery that lasts about say at minimum 4 hours of heavy use, it's only putting out a tenth of what the heatsink is rated to cool). Granted, the phone will overheat at a lower temp than the CPU, and a larger temperature difference yields better cooling effiency and yadda yadda yadda lets do this!
Didn't do squat.
Of course it didn't, the phone is made of plastic.
So I threw on some 3mm thermal pads I had kicking around, and BINGO we have results! an extra 24 whole seconds of average time before overheating. I think this is down to the pads soaking up a few extra milliwatts of heat, I don't think much of it was transferred to the fin array.
I tried shavings the pads thinner, and I tried putting some pads on the inside of the backplate to help it conduct heat better and didn't get any measurably better results.
I think the biggest issue is the phone itself, according to this iFixit teardown, most of the heat generating components are behind the camera and power button/volume rocker. Also, the phone's back is curved, so good contact is hard,
I've got some MX4, but I'm reticent to goop up my phone for nothing. It's not my daily driver, but I still want to be able to use it in case I drop my other one. If I had a third phone, I'd be tempted just to seal it up and fill the entire thing with MX4 and thermal epoxy the heatsink on, but at that point, I'm basically dedicating ~$300 of good hardware at the problem, and if we're doing that then I might as well just buy a bunch of components and build one from the ground up.
Long and verbose story short, anyone got any ideas?
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