Nintendo Switch #Bendgate!! Yup!

[Pemalite]

Nuvendil said:

First off, those temperatures are impossible to hit for any long period as the Tegra X1 has a built in throttling function that kicks in at 75 C.  That's precisely why Nintendo downclocked, so the system wouldn't have wobbling performance. 

That depends on how the thermals are recorded.

Not all chips record thermals on the chip itself, they instead have a temp sensor under or next to the socket...
And if you have temperature sensors on the chip, then different parts of a chip have different temperatures, aka. Thermal Zones.
Some SoC's only have a couple of sensors next to the CPU block or the Memory controller and the GPU block can run at 5-10'C higher than the rest of the chip.

Sometimes you have temperature bugs which require an offset to get a reliable reading.

We can't forget either that manufacturers can adjust when the chip throttles, nVidia's max temperature for Tegra in industrial applications is 105'C.

But I digress. Nitpicking at my 70-80'c example is just playing semantics, the point still apply's.

Nuvendil said:

I had a laptop with a failed fan that ran at 70 C almost constantly and bounced to 80 C and you could feel the heat coming off that thing.
 I kept it going for almost a year and a lot of issues cropped up internally but the shell never showed any signs of distortion.  If the system was getting hot enough to warp the structure, it would likely die before you noticed that.

Great. I love ancedotal evidence that is not applicable to the device we are talking about.
An ARM SoC in the switch isn't the same as an x86 chip+GPU in a laptop.

Besides.  GPU's most can handle 100'C sustained temperatures. CPU's can be a little more finnicky, depends on Intel or AMD's recommendations, but they have historically been 60-100'C.
For example on my Core 2 Quad Rig the Tj max is 100'C. But on the old Phenom 2 x6 rig it's 61'C and on my 3930K rig it's 85'C.

My Core 2 Quad rig typically runs at 20-25'C above ambient on idle. So right now it's sitting at 42'C according to Core temp. On a 50'C degree day it is sitting at 70-75'C and will approach 100'C under load.

And it's been that way since I got the machine back a decade ago. Of course higher temperatures can also accellerate the effects of electromigration as well. But that's a topic for another day.

And then you have Plastics. Some plastics will melt at 50'C. Others 200'C. Not all plastics are created equal.

Remember that you can *never* have temperatures lower than Ambient if you are passively, air or water cooling. Australian summers are brutal. Ours just ended and the Northern Hemispheres is about to start in a few months.

Nuvendil said:

And lastly, if the system was running 70 C in dock and close to that in handheld, you would sure as crap feel that when you held it. 

Who the hell sits their hand over the switch while gaming in docked mode? Aren't you busy gaming? And isn't it sitting on the otherside of the room next to the TV?

Nuvendil said:

With as small as it is, the surface temps would be ~60 C.  That's literally hot enough to physically BURN YOUR HAND.  And prolongued exposure to even 55 C would no doubt be uncomfortable and highly noticeable.  So no, the people reporting this who use it almost entirely in handheld, no, no it could not have resulted from the system running close to 70 C.  They downclocked to specifically avoid this.  It has a fan tied to heat sensors to avoid this.

Plastic doesn't like heat. Even small amounts of heat can result in warping and discolouration over time.