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Improved performance (?) from changing out thermal paste on Switch - and a question for anyone else who has tried (feddit.uk)

submitted 1 day ago by heythatsprettygood@feddit.uk to c/nintendo@lemmy.world

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I've been doing some experimentation lately with my Switch, and have replaced the thermal paste on all layers (under the copper heat spreader, under the heat sink, and on top of the heat pipe). I used a combination of Thermal Grizzly PhaseSheet (for heat spreader and heat sink) and K5 Pro (for heat pipe) if anyone is curious. I am running a Switch with the original SOC (higher heat and power) that I bought in about late 2018.

I wasn't expecting much if anything, but in games they seem to have had a bit of a performance improvement, especially in docked mode. The two games I especially noticed were Fire Emblem Three Houses and Pokemon Violet. In Three Houses, the loading sections in explore mode (so fully in game, with everything still showing on screen) took far less time than I remember (1-3 seconds compared to 5-10) along with a higher frame rate during the loading, and in Violet the frame rate seems a decent bit more stable. Unfortunately, since my Switch is not modded, I do not have any hard performance numbers to back up these perceived improvements. I have heard that the Switch will prioritise CPU clocks over GPU when loading due to thermal restrictions, but I cannot find anything about it being able to boost both if it has the thermal headroom. The outside of the Switch is definitely exhausting more heat, which could suggest more heat is being taken away from the SOC and consequently cooling it down.

Does anyone have any experience with doing this, and have you gotten a similar result? I am curious to find out if this is just placebo, or if this is genuinely a way to increase performance even just by a little bit.

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[–] heythatsprettygood@feddit.uk 2 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the data sheet! I struggled to find anything even vaguely official about the X1, so this is quite helpful. I think the throttling at around 70 could be our culprit, as (assuming most of the docked power goes to the SOC) I've had processors in portable devices in that sort of power class with similar size coolers have junction temperatures go into the 80s and 90s regularly, so probably in heavier games the temperature goes past that threshold regularly on a lot of systems. This is not helped by the thermal compound both ageing and probably not being the best thing even on day 1, in comparison to something like PhaseSheet that is among the top performers.

Part of me is curious as to if Nintendo have a low temperature target set for the SOC that could see the boost stop early, and the lower temperatures from a repaste allow us to get past it. The data sheet suggests that the throttling thresholds are configurable considering there are no default numbers in the document at all, so Nintendo might have gone more conservative to increase system reliability. If you can, try and get some frequency data, as this might be the reason as to why I'm seeing an improvement.

I am excited to see your results, as it'll give some hard numbers to see if this is worth all the trouble for everyone to accomplish (the heat spreader is quite the pain to remove).