What you need to know
- A 24GB Snapdragon 8 Elite Nubia Z70 Ultra was rebuilt inside a custom acrylic case and sandwiched between two full-size CPU coolers.
- The oversized setup helps prevent thermal throttling, delivering 99% stability across 20 3DMark Wild Life Extreme loops.
- Termux with GPU acceleration lets the phone power an XFCE Linux desktop with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
- The phone reportedly manages around 20–30fps, with the GPU reaching roughly 99% utilization.
Most smartphones hit a thermal ceiling the second you push them beyond casual mobile gaming. But someone took that limitation as a personal challenge and stripped down a Nubia Z70 Ultra, literally sandwiching it between two full-size PC CPU coolers inside a custom acrylic housing. The outcome is a franken-rig smartphone that doubles as a surprisingly viable desktop replacement.
The project, shared by Reddit user ntsow, takes a 24GB Nubia Z70 Ultra with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite and places the phone’s main hardware between two desktop processor coolers inside a custom acrylic case. The original display of the phone has been moved to the front of the case, but the coolers are in direct contact with the shielding over the Snapdragon chip.
Why go that far? Reliable performance. Smartphones can throttle their processors when temperatures climb, but this overbuilt cooling setup means the Snapdragon 8 Elite can keep up a much more consistent performance. In a 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test, the modified phone scored 6,980 on its best loop and 6,910 on its lowest with 99% stability over 20 loops.
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Outside of benchmarks, the Z70 Ultra runs a full XFCE Linux desktop via Termux with GPU acceleration, enabling it to work with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Tools such as Wine, Box64, and GameNative can also make the setup run Windows software and games.
The experiment doesn’t really prove a phone can replace a PC, but it does show that sustained cooling might be just as important as raw silicon when you push modern smartphone chips into PC-class workloads.
(Image credit: ntsow / Reddit)
And yes, it can run Witcher 3. The game apparently runs at around 20-30 frames per second at 1920 x 1080 with the Ultra preset, with the GPU hitting about 99% utilization. In some scenes, it can even push a little over 30fps.
However, there is a drawback to the performance. The phone is still working very hard, and a screenshot showed temperatures nearing 100 degrees Celsius. That was recorded in Nubia’s Diablo Mode, which pushes the hardware to its maximum power and allows overclocking, the builder says.
But it’s not a practical substitute for a gaming PC, and that’s almost beside the point. The experiment shows just how powerful modern phone hardware is when thermal limits are aggressively removed. The creator is still working on the software and intends to push the setup further, possibly turning one Android phone into an all-in-one machine for Android, Linux, and Windows workloads.