iPhone 17 Pro Max mod with SSD cooler maintains 90% stability in 3DMark stress test
We recently saw how the cooling system works in the Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max while running AAA games like Assassin's Creed Mirage and Resident Evil 4. Not only can the iPhone 17 Pro Max run such games at 60 FPS, but it also does so without thermal throttling. Even in GPU benchmarks, such as the 3DMark Solar Bay stress test, the iPhone 17 Pro Max performed well, especially considering it now has the new and more powerful A19 chip. For a mobile computing device without any active cooling like a fan, the iPhone 17 series feels like a genuine upgrade over the iPhone 16 series.
However, one Reddit user was seemingly not satisfied with the cooling performance on offer, so they decided to take matters into their own hands. User u/T-K-Tronix installed multiple M.2 SSD coolers and achieved almost 90% stability in the 3DMark Steel Nomad Stress Test. For comparison, my Lenovo LOQ powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 scored around 98% stability in the same test.
The photos on the Reddit post titled "17 Pro Max Cooling with M2 SSD Cooler 90% Stability in 3D Mark Stress Test" show a DIY cooling setup where desktop-grade heatsinks and heat pipe coolers, normally used for SSDs, are mounted onto the iPhone 17 Pro Max to reduce thermal throttling during heavy gaming or benchmarks.
As far as is understood, the phone’s metal frame acts as a heat spreader, and with thermal paste plus large copper heat pipes and aluminium fins (some equipped with small fans), the heat is drawn out and dissipated far more efficiently than the built-in passive system allows. This seemingly keeps the A19 chip cooler for longer, resulting in higher sustained performance and benchmark stability, maintaining around 90% in the 3DMark Stress Test as shown in the picture.
The reaction to this really unique iPhone cooling setup has been just as fascinating as the experiment itself.
On Reddit, u/shyamg94 commented, “This is nearly as thin as the Air.” Meanwhile, the original poster T-K-Tronix cheekily replied, “It is the True Air Version because of the Fans.”
u/DrTurb0, using an iPhone 17 Pro, pointed out a more technical limitation: “You need 3 times more of the coolers and plaster them on the whole screen. The vapor chamber is under the screen and the screen gets quite warm and with more coolers you can wick heat away from the display!”
Others took the discussion in more extreme directions. u/DarthBories quipped, “I'm slapping a water block on my Air and gonna see if I can get Pro numbers!” to which T-K-Tronix playfully responded, “Next in the list.”
u/opnupstrathclydpolis jokingly said, “It’s still somehow thinner than the Air with the ‘optional’ MagSafe battery.” Meanwhile, u/infernion highlighted: “Battery cooling is complete, but CPU cooling was missed.”
And it is indeed true, as the logic board containing the A19 Pro CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine is placed slightly further up the battery, underneath the new Camera Plateau. Nonetheless, the experiment is clearly a success in terms of thermal stability during stress tests. In case you're interested, the original Reddit thread is linked down below.
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