Building the ULTIMATE DIY gaming phone 

That's a DIY Perks level build. Awesome job

Geekerwan laughing in the corner

The SoC is on the other side of the motherboard. It touches the frame, screen and probably a heatsink to exhaust heat. You've added thermal mass but not in the most optimal place.

This kinda content made me started to “hangout” in youtube 14 years ago. amazing work!! You just got yourself a +1 subs

To me I think if you made the sled out of aluminum and merge it with the heatsink you can reduce the weight, improve durability, and improve heat transfer. This change would go really well if you manage to overclock it.

The handheld looks great! I think the wood does add in a nice bit of design to it. Although I guess you could always just glue on a wood veneer to get the same look.

Cool build but if we speak about value wise and performance Geekerwan's $150 DIY build is criminally underrated

did you edit the system to read the new bathery data?

something about gluing a kishi to a phone feels wrong but dam, the end result speaks for itself, having it feeling like one solid unit at the end is gold, and yeah when you went from 3D printed prototypes to wood it made me tilt my head but it does look really nice. top-notch video!

I love your channel bro. As a man that is constantly tinkering i really appreciate how clean you keep the projects as well as the work area

bro the stuff ive seen from you so far are on another level, i wish i had the patience to learn it myself, someday ill surely do some of these and you'll be a gold mine for me

This is fantastic work and craftsmanship, a big well done to that man!!. I would love a piece of your work!!.

This is awesome work. Almost the video I'm looking for. I hope to see you fully convert a smartphone into a console. Like a full shell with the controls and phone in one piece. But yet again, i believe this is a first that ive seen a youtuber made something like this

you can use universal android debloater to remove all google and meta services, and boost battery life for 20-40% (this does not need rooted phone, just enable usb debuging and thats it)

Hey there. The first issue I wanted to note is the use of the copper in the heatsink replacement. Without a heat pipe, You're looking at the quick thermal saturation of any interface or its materials without a meaningful transfer of energy to the actual heatsink added to the copper. This is because based on Thermal Conductivity alone Copper does a good job of absorbing heat, but it doesn't do a great job of transferring it. Copper sits around 400W/Mk of thermal conductivity, while a heat pipe can be in excess of 5000-100,000W/Mk. This means that the heatsink would be slow to heat and hard to cool effectively. If you were to place a heat pipe across the length of the heatsink, it would work much better, to the point where you would near instantly see a difference in temperature from the SOC to the end of your heatsink. Secondly, The issue with the Double battery is apparent almost instantly- due to the fact that you double capacity, you double charging times quite readily, and without the BMS to consider the second battery's health, It will assume that one battery provides the charge for both. Since the BMS only controls voltage and wear leveling, and doesn't have a way to monitor each cell individually, you can very quickly end up with a situation where you see your battery jumping around levels depending on which battery's voltage reads the highest- since they are separate cells, there is the very real possibility of the internal resistance of one cell not matching the other, causing step voltage matching. This means that the batteries face the very real possibility of mis-matched wearing and eventually diminished capacity and failure of one or more of the batteries. Usually this is corrected in BMS monitoring of multi-celled devices through what amounts to a circuit that separates the cells from one another, but ties the output together allowing them to charge individually. The K5 Pro works but currently you have an issue with the setup of the heatsink- right now it goes (assuming the Mfrs used a thermal pad) SOC>Thermal pad>Graphite pad>Aluminum>K5 Pro>Copper>Solder>Copper>Solder>Copper>Solder>Copper>Solder>M.2 Heatsink. All those layers cause a loss in heat transfer, reducing the effective area of the copper and essentially pocketing areas of the copper that didn't fully get brazed (if you ever shear the heatsink apart, consider looking at the shims and you'll see pockets where the solder didn't reach fully, it's simply because of the change of Flux to a gaseous state causing solder to have voids." Ideally, the removal of the aluminum and thermal pads would mitigate this entirely, if in addition you swapped to a heat-pipe design. In this case you'd see SOC>TIM/K5>Copper>Solder>Heat pipe>Solder>Heatsink. Also, you *technically* don't even need the first layer of copper attached to the heat pipe, and could attach it directly to the SOC by flattening it on one side, making sure not to crush the actual pipe. This would also decrease the weight of the build. A final consideration is the fact that there is an opportunity here to fab the entire outside case out of a block of copper, that you would then attach to the heat-pipe through soldering, and get passive cooling without an open area for the M.2 heatsink. At their max, these SOCs use about 10-13W of heat, meaning it can be easily dissipated passively in this regard. All in All it is a novel idea and i appreciate the video- just some thoughts on what I would consider. (I was someone who built their own laptop heatsinks in the 2016-2020 years, particularly for Clevos)

13:57 Just a tip for playing with the sealant (and anything you can fit into a caulk gun tbh): you can buy, or in your case print, extra tips to fit most tubes, and you can cut them to specific angles. In the case of your sled, you can cut both sides to make a 45° angle, and with even pressue it will perfectly smudge the silicone so that you dont have to smear it with your fingers!

You should recalibrate the battery because the phone can't really recognize that it has a bigger battery and it will have some charging problems, you can just set the capacity manually if the phone is rooted but since you can't root it, it's worth trying to recalibrate it...just for the sake of it 🙂

You do some top notch builds. Keep it up

This is one of the few videos that I watched the whole time very carefully and sincerity.

Your creativity is on par with your execution. Both are amazing! Great vid, keep up this interesting content ♥

7:36 I experienced this first hand few weeks ago. I was doing some messing with my old torch battery, I thought it was such a small and old battery that nothing would happen, but all of a sudden it caught fire. Thank gosh it evaporated right away and I didn't die.

A little tip for anybody wanting to double up a battery in a project or something. As long as you put hot to hot and negative to negative when you're only wanting to increase the amount of battery life you want. You should be fine. Just make sure that you keep everything well isolated and do your best to try not to bridge any connections to ground

Nicely done, Zac, thank you

I can't remember the last time I sat through a full add and watched it, what a great job.

Great job. You also can use Thermal Grizzly Kryo sheets for thermal transfer if you don't have any K5 or prefer a less messy solution.

Ever since you teased it I was pumped up. And you didn't disappoint! Keep it up 👍🏿

absolutely amazing 🔥🔥🔥🔥 i really like your work 👍

Need more videos like this. I love tinkering with phones and pushing them to their absolute limit.

Everything's perfect. The wood looks amazing and is not a fire hazard. I like the idea of selling your knowledge. Good job as always.

This was great and I love your idea of digital sales to offset the need for a sponsor! Keep up the good work sir

final unit is gorgeous!

it looks so nice as well!!

Man I wish I had the skills/tools to build this, this is amazing. Solid work bro it turned out awesome 🤙🏽

Amazing build, did you consider using a heat pipe to bridge the contact pad on the SOC with the heatsink instead of solid copper? They're pretty cheap and can be braised as well if you're careful with the heat.

A bit similar to geekerwan's gaming phone vid last 2022. Amazing though! I like the ingenuity you put into designing even a custom midframe. I am very happy people are doing modifications like this. I am quite amazed you did it in a s21. What a project I've been dreaming for. Too bad I could only afford a K20 Pro. Building DIY gaming phone is indeed a very fun project to do, it has its own set of challenges, especially if you'll give it better cooling. I would recommend also rooting the phone and overclocking the GPU if it is a Snapdragon CPU, and add active cooling so you could utilize the full potential of the phone. Still, awesome build! Keep doing more of these project please

I love it when i come across these videos

Awesome Zac! Thanks for sharing! I hope you’re doing well! 😎👊

Amazing vid! Thankyou for going beyond what other youtubers have done countless times before. And giving ideas on how to use black listed phones. Feel like this would be a good project for wood veneer on the outside for both stability and looks.

We need a part 2 on just the battery performance. Thats something I've always that of doing for years without worry about the chunkyness it add😍😍

Impressive. And the wood brings a special uniqueness to your build.

If you ever decide to make a V2, a kickstand would be overkill, but it'd be cool to see done. Regardless, this turned out great. Awesome video, definitely one of my favorite channels to watch!

Man, the whole interesting part for me was seeing this get overclocked and how the battery and heat would work out in the end how was the phone the part you thought less about? Really great video, but this felt like a "it's the journey that matters, not the destination" type of vid would love to see something like this being pushed to it's limits while still being usable and looking nice

nice work love it mate

Zac you are so underrated in RU-vid. Love your content 🙌🏻

Two little advice that I think I can provide: I personally don't think that using copper as a heat conductor from the Soc to the fins is not very effective, even though copper is some of the most thermally conductive metal on earth. However, there is this thing called heat pipe, which is more effective than copper at conducting heat, especially at longer distances. Samsung used vapor chambers (basically a flattened out heat pipe) to cool some of their phones' Soc. Maybe you can use a heat pipe or two to get the heat of the Soc into the fins faster. I think the Soc of modern phones typically face towards the screen, so in this project you are likely to be cooling the back of the Soc through a metal shield, and there is a possibility that there is an air gap under this shield. It might not be too big of a concern, but for an "ultimate DIY gaming phone", it would be interesting to see whether desoldering that shield, adding a blob of thermal paste, and soldering the shield back on will help with heat dissipation. Other than that, great work, and thanks to you I now know an easy way to get cheap phones😆

Such a cool build. Well done.

This was really cool!

Wow this is a cool build! My phone is a standard gaming phone and actually came with a heat sync in the box (It's the ROG Phone 7 Ultimate, if you were curious as to what crazy phone maker does that) The only thing it didn't come with is a controller grip. The heat sync has extra programmable buttons on the back which is cool, but the main controls are still just virtual buttons. So maybe I should do something like this, though of course just making the controller. Food for thought. Awesome! I might need to subscribe to you, i just found your channel and there are so many cool projects there.

You should have added a little fan in the back

that phone has a desktop mode when connected through hdmi, you missed an opportunity to make it dockable. Maybe in the next revision

one of the best videos on youtube, i am your latest subscriber, hope to see more content like this

I hope you make like this more in the future! In different model/brand of phones

I was very skeptical about the use of wood, but from the looks of the final product, it turned out to be super cool.

I love your work. Your videos are consistently informative and entertaining. You deserve a million subscribers for these builds.

That was the best ad i have ever seen

1:42 dude I had no idea, thank you!!

When you doubled the battery your amps increased so you have to reprogram the phone to the new battery capacity

Specifically for this unit you might want to make a Custom ROM to make gaming and emulations and stuff way neater and also to force the phone to be landscape oriented permanently. For the gamepad flanking both sides, it'll be weird if you have to go portrait mode i think hahaha

Bro i hope you put this on market. Definitely gonna buy one of those. ❤❤❤❤

With phones having wireless charging now you could probably avoid anything battery related and just have a small powerbank integrated into the case if you are worried about that. It may be a little thicker but there are some very thin ones available now plus you can easily swap it in and out during those heavy game sessions 😆

I would have loved to see you do this with Asus Rog phone 6-7 ultimate. Although it's expensive af. So maybe kinda defeats the purpose. But would be insane to see if they can actually emulate botw at 60fps because they are seriously powerful for being a phone.

There was someone who used a Xiaomi mi9 with a similar setup Just that he actually removed the camera module to install a fan,and was able to root the phone And the oc Game Performance was so great it was on par with the sd888

I'm glad I stumbled upon this just for the incredible sponsor section of the vid

Subscribed just for this diy. Was wondering why you used wood instead of 3d printing the sled, but it looks really good.

@ZacBuilds have you considered that "blacklisted" very well could be due to being stolen

5:36 W Moment

Great work zac! It’s one of my dream that i could build one out of my old android phones. And recently, i only could make a simple heatsink only with graphite stickers and thermal paste on my ios. I wonder if you could giving me ideas how should I cooling this my XS Max(it’s framing only for online classes before applying thermal paste, it sucks you know). I looking forward of your ideas. Once again, your DIY builds are Awesome!

Geekerwan did this 1 year ago glad there's another one I can watch!

You could use graphene pads by derbauer, they are better at thermal transfer than a puddy and don't dry out like a paste, but a paste or liquid metal would be better at thermal transfer, but for not having to touch something for a long time I think the pad is good for that, im so gonna make an octoprint device out of a old phone and soup it up like this so I don't have to worry bout having it on 247

Anyone else cringing at the thermal paste application?

nice, just bought your pdf material,. very well explained, nice stuff indeed, thanks for the good material

you can root it. i can help if you want to

Great build! Hopefully you don't anger Nintendo with this one 😂

Bro forgot im on pc not phone but these videos are good keep up the work you get a subscribe

You're a legend..... subscription added..... indeed you can't skip that ad....lol

5:35 is this some sort of maker joke that im too normie to understand?

Steamdeck 2.0 sort of

Might be a good idea to revisit this

That's a cool project

I used to listen to a cool ska/bluegrass fusion band called Silver Hearts. You sound and look like their Trombone player. And I'm glad I found your channel.

Soldering the battery, you are truly a madlad with balls of steel😂

the sudden appearance of DIY Perks at 5:36 really burst the laughs off of me😂

that DIY Perks cameo got me, love that guy ❤

Bro, in my country that's a lot of money.. amazing work... Kudos

one question , did you change the battery config file in the system to read the new battery capacity correctly ?

the DIY Perks easter egg makes my day as he's my favourite diy craftsman on youtube.

You could have tried to overclock the cpu , gpu as well as the refresh rate of the mobile as it has a good heat sync for temperature management

Could you do something like this with an old iPad? Mines gathering dust as its no longer supported because of its age

someone finally made my dream phone practical

Bro i couldn't understand anything but i was enjoying the vedio i subscribed to your channel ❤

It could be interesting to add your own controllers with more grib and having the ability to transfer data as well.

Hi, great videos. I found your channel today and cannot stop watching your videos 😅. May I ask you what case are you using with your Samsung ultra 😁. Thanks, great content.

this dude made a custom handheld, thats sick!

I made similar (but also much less sophisticated) build to my old phone. I used wooden sticks for starting fireplaces (very well machined, perfect rectangle/thickness on all of them, sold by Baumax I think), cut them to proper pieces and made a fitting "cradle" that attached the phone to GPU heatsink (with fans of course). Then used high capacity power bank to power the fans on the heatsink and could also charge the phone if needed (charging slows the performance of course but was neat). I could play for hours on my potato phone some really good games without fast thermal throttling. And the phone stayed cool so you didn't get those sticky/hot fingers after a while. It was quite heavy, also like 0,5kg maybe more. But totally worth it.

You have just solved two of the major problems of mobile gaming with DIY... Heating issues and Battery life...🔥🔥🔥

That's really good to see, because i didn't knew smartphones were at this level of customization. I wish there was a video were they turn the Redmi 9T into a gaming beast. Y'know, it would be very good to see a snapdragon 665 get into the level of a 855 ...

the self sponsorship thing is so cool, and i definitely want to support it. will be back when i have a project going on

In case you wanted the absolute best performance in thermal transfer, there are a handful of companies that will just sell you pre-bent, pre-flattened heat pipes of various dimensions. The only challenge is actually attaching other bits to the heat pipes. You can solder to them, but you need to use a relatively low temperature solder and you need to use a fair amount of heat because the heat pipe will be sinking that heat rapidly. But you can't use too much heat or the liquid inside will boil and it'll pop.

I think we also need a unlocked and rooted phone and possibly kernel level modification to change the battery mah too

Hey, awesome one! Just to mention, there are great hub devices in the market, with usb-c plug, with pass-through charging, although this will fill the device more slowly, and HDMI output. Soldiering the kishi's plug to one of USB-A input of the hub, provide a port to transfer data to the phone, and make free way to the HDMI port, if the phone support it, should be not a problem for your skills! And yeah, the final product would be more bulky, I guess...