Nintendo Switch #Bendgate!! Yup!

[Nuvendil]

Pemalite said:

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.

The Tegra X1 has multiple heat sensors built in to the SoC to ensure that it throttles at 75 C.  It is a feature of the SoC to prevent overheat-related failure.  Do your research. 

Also, people are claiming this warp happened even with mostly handheld use.  Also, thermal benchmarks have shown 4 to 5 degree differences between handheld and dock.  So if in dock it was running your proposed (and ridiculous) 70 to 73 C ( which would be well above ambient unless some fool is playing their system in a house that is preposterously hot), the handheld mode would be in the mid to high 60s.  And with the Switch surface temperatures being, again, 10 to 13 degrees lower (this is verified fact) around the chip, it would still be physically painful to hold while playing, say, FAST RMX in handheld and would cause *second degree burns* if you touched the screen over the chip.  These temperatures would have been noticed pre-embargo.

Lastly, the Switch has a metal frame, it is not all plastic, it has been torn down multiple times.  It is reinforced with metal.  And it's been a gosh darn month so the "over time" argument is just silly. 

In short, looking at the reported and confirmed real-world temperatures the Switch runs at and the temperatures the surface (that is, the plastic) can reach, this kind of warping is 99.9% certainly NOT due to overheating.  Especially when you consider it's been out for only a month, so there's been little time in all reality for the heat to cause this.

Oh and I nitpicked your number not just because it is ridiculous (it is), but because such high temps are what would be needed to cause warping so darn fast and to emphasize that those tempearatures - the temps required for this to happen due to heat - would be impossible to hit for the long periods of time needed to cause the issue and would be impossible to manifest to the degree needed without causing numerous pronounced serious issues that you would notice.  And remember, this is an issue people didn't notice to such an extent that until they started holding their switch against straight edges they didn't even think to wonder to check. 

And finally, your assertion that the Switch if you take it outside will run exponentially higher...I mean for goodness sake man, heat doesn't transfer instantaneously.  Obviously the Switch shell has been designed to prvent thransfer of heat (hence why at the hottest the system's surface is still 10 to 15 degrees cooler and that's a 2 square inch patch of the screen) and that would work both ways.  Second of all, the heat would take time to transfer from outside to inside the system, you don't step out into a hot day and the Switch immediately jumps to that temperature.  And finally, just to go back to the thermal throttling,  YOU WOULD KNOW BEFORE HAND IF IT OVERHEATED.  So if overheating - legitimate, beyond what the system is intended to handle overheating - was happening, people would have known.  Long before this.  Now yes, if you set your Switch out in the sun for an hour or left it under the windshield of a hot car and then immediately grabbed it and turned on FAST RMX and played it for an hour, yeah you could cause an issue.  But that's you being a dumbass not the system suffering a major failure.