Smartphones made for gaming come with serious hardware, flashy design, active cooling, and sometimes additional buttons to enhance the overall gaming experience on a mobile phone. But what if you want to make your own? This is what people on the YouTube channel do Geekerwan decided to do. Well, like. These guys took a Xiaomi Mi 9 with a Snapdragon 855 and significantly tweaked both the hardware and software to make it a mobile gaming monster.
The idea is that a three-year-old flagship smartphone has enough power to run modern mobile games and can be bought cheaply second-hand. In this video, the Mi 9 with the cracked back was bought for just CNY 700 (around $ 107) and is perfect for converting into a gaming phone. Basically, anyone who wants to find a budget smartphone to do this should look for a Snapdragon 855-powered device with moderate community support that should do just fine, something like a OnePlus 7T.
The Mi 9’s 3,300mAh battery won’t cut it. Then the battery is tripled by connecting them in parallel, so the phone now technically has a 9,900mAh battery – this will require changing the software to tell it how big the battery is. This implies acquaintance with bootloader unlocking and aftermarket software flashing.
The next step is to overclock and overload the chipset. Flashing an aftermarket kernel also makes it possible to overclock the display to operate with higher framerates than those provided by the factory.
The cost of these modifications is heat. So a custom thermal management system is needed. At the factory, the smartphone is not optimized for extreme heat, which is why the camera module has been removed and a heat sink with 40mm cooling fan with thermal compound has been added. Of course, you will need to tap into the battery to power the fan. In this case, a DC to DC converter board is added to adjust the current for the 5V output to the cooling fan. They also added switches to control the fan speed.
Everything is wrapped in an SLA 3D printed case to house the new brick, complete with a universal bracket for mounting it to a game controller. Watch the video to see how the phone performed in benchmarks and stability tests.
Spoiler alert: does not disappoint. Genshin Impact, a graphics-intensive game, averaged 39 frames per second before changes at the highest settings. With the new mods an average of 50 fps was achieved.
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