A phone can’t deliver maximum performance under heavy load if it risks overheating, which is why heat mitigation is important. Phone makers try to find ways to keep things cool, but they aren’t always successful. The Samsung Galaxy S22 series, for example, runs hot. We discovered this in our reviews of the phones, and more broadly the company has gotten into a big controversy over its thermal management practices.
In the past, other phones aside from the Galaxy S22 have had issues with temperature management. In 2019, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset was known for its thermal problems. In 2019, the first generation of 5G phones would overheat in warm weather when trying to connect to millimeter-wave networks. The fault in these cases can lay with the chipset maker, the phone maker, the carriers, or some combination of the three, but whatever the reason, your phone is still overheating and not performing as well as it could.
Why is this a problem?
How Overheating Affects Your Phone
Enobong Etteh, a prominent YouTuber known as BooredAtWork, says that S22’s temperature affects his longterm Genshin Impact play, with his iPhone throttling down from 60 to 38fps during a 20 to 30 minute session regardless of the setting. This is just one example, but overheating can hurt any game’s performance.
I have a different, critical application. Every year, PCMag sends phones and drivers around the US and Canada testing cellular performance for our Fastest Mobile Networks project. It involves running nearly continuous speed tests and cranking those radios constantly, which makes our test phones overheat almost every year. Some years, we mount them in front of car air conditioning vents, with the A/C on full blast. Some years, we sit them over trays of ice. Once, we sat the phones on those blue, freezable gel packs you get for sore muscles.
This year, we have a new method.
Razer Phone Cooler Chroma: A Cooler Phone Leads to Better Benchmarks
I tested Razer’s $59.99 Phone Cooler Chroma, a clip-on cooling fan with a universal clamp for virtually any phone model, or a MagSafe vesion specifically for compatible iPhones.
This being flashy gaming hardware company Razer, the cooler has shifting RGB lights when you turn it on. There’s an app you can install on your phone to control the fan speed and toggle the RGB lights off, but it’s totally optional to use, as the fan has a physical on/off switch.
Ergonomics are a little awkward. The fan has to be plugged in, and not to the phone itself—it draws 8 to 9 watts of power from a USB port. Since the fan needs airflow on all sides, you can’t set the phone down while you’re using it, or even use the phone one-handed. You basically need to hold the phone with two hands with the cooler attached. I’m going to design a custom bracket for my network-testing phones to accommodate the cooler.
The fan makes some noise, about 13db at 6 inches according to my decibel meter. It’s noticeable, but not that annoying. What’s important is that it works, as you can see from the numbers below:
I tested the universal clamp of the Phone Cooler Chroma with a Galaxy S21+, a Galaxy S21 Ultra, a Galaxy S22, and a Galaxy S22+ using an app called CPU Throttling Test. The app slams the CPU for 15 minutes until it overheats and throttles down. In addition, on the S21+ I ran Wind speed tests, which also report CPU temperature.
On the S21+’s Wind test, as well as the S21 Ultra and S22 tests, Razer’s cooler noticeably reduced temperatures after five minutes, and increased overall performance for the full test length.
The S22+ has the best thermal management of the S22 family, and there wasn’t much difference in CPU temperature, but I did see better performance in the CPU throttling test.
This tells us that phone overheating is real, it affects performance, and using a fan to cool down your phone helps.
The Best Phone Coolers Beyond Razer
Razer is the most prominent brand making phone fans here in the US, which is why we tested the Phone Cooler Chroma. However, because hardware-intensive mobile games are a huge thing in Asia, a lot of other, less-expensive phone coolers also exist.
Amazon has models from FlyDigi, Neveika, Ofiyaa, ZeeHoo, and other brands we haven’t heard of. The only non-Razer cooler I would trust is the $48.88 Magnetic Cooler from Black Shark. Black Shark is a unit of Xiaomi, an actual phone maker with a reputation to uphold.
Now, I get that this is a silly product category, as clip-on coolers make handheld phones a lot less handheld. But for some people (including me!), they’re a necessary solution to an annoying problem.
I’m ordering a bunch to clip onto the phone we’re using for our Fastest Mobile Networks testing, so check back when that story comes out this summer to see how well they fared.
