Inside the REDMAGIC 11 Pro: What a Teardown Reveals About the "First Water-Cooled Smartphone"
イチケン / ICHIKEN
The REDMAGIC 11 Pro is billed as the first commercially sold smartphone with a liquid-cooling system, a circulating loop of fluid you can see moving through a transparent section on the back. REDMAGIC asked the electronics YouTuber Ichiken to take the phone apart and examine its technology. The central question of the video is what the visible water cooling actually does inside the phone, and how much it contributes compared with the phone's other cooling hardware. After a full disassembly and a set of benchmark temperature tests, Ichiken's view is that the liquid loop mainly spreads heat and evens out temperature, and that most of the cooling work is done by the forced-air fan.
Two Cooling Systems Visible From the Outside
The REDMAGIC 11 Pro is a gaming phone, and it looks like one. From the outside, two cooling mechanisms are visible: a forced-air fan and the liquid-cooling loop.
The air path runs across the phone. Air enters through an intake on the right side and exits through a vent on the left, and a sirocco (centrifugal) fan can be seen near the exhaust. When Ichiken held an object near the exhaust, the airflow was clearly visible, but they described the actual volume of air as modest, closer to a breeze. In a quiet room the fan noise was surprisingly noticeable. The fan can be switched on and off manually, set to run while charging, and toggled between high and low modes. The noise demonstrated in the video was the high setting.
The liquid loop is visible through the back panel. White bubble-like specks move in a circle, which makes the flow speed easy to see. Judging from the outside, Ichiken's first guess was that fluid is routed through the hottest areas and then carried to cooler areas to spread the heat, with that heat eventually handed off to the forced-air system. They said they would confirm this during disassembly. Like the fan, the pump can be turned on or off, and its flow rate can be set to high or low.
REDMAGIC also sells the phone in other colors. On the black model the water-cooled section isn't visible from outside, but Ichiken notes it contains the same cooling mechanism. Other features mentioned include a wired headphone jack, which is now rare on smartphones, a dual-SIM tray, and a FeliCa chip for mobile wallet support.
Opening the Back and Tracing the Liquid Loop
The back cover came off fairly easily. Peeling away more layers exposed the liquid flow channel. The pump sits at the lower left, and pressing on it with a finger pushes the liquid visibly forward. According to Ichiken, it is a micro-pump driven by a piezoelectric element. With an ear pressed close, you can hear it running, but at a normal distance it is inaudible and did not bother them. The fluid leaves the pump outlet, travels around a roughly circular path, and comes back to the pump inlet.
The pump has its own power connector. The water-cooling module could not come out yet because other components were mounted over it, so Ichiken removed those first.
Camera Cover, Flash, and Camera Modules
The top cover protects the camera and SoC area. The camera ring is machined aluminum. The rest of the cover appears to be metal bonded to resin, with only the camera portion made of metal.
The camera's light module has four fairly large LEDs. In the middle sits a component Ichiken tentatively identified as a brightness sensor. The part of the camera cover above that sensor has a graduated, Fresnel-lens-like structure. Next to the LED module, a metal cover hides a MEMS microphone.
The phone has three rear cameras, and the largest main camera includes optical image stabilization. Ichiken remarks that the phone puts its emphasis on gaming performance, so its camera performance is not especially high. The wired headphone jack is a separate module.
The Cooling Stack Comes Out
Under a silver cover, the forced-air module and the liquid-cooling module are mounted side by side. The back of the liquid module is covered in graphite sheet, which has very high thermal conductivity. The wireless charging module sits between the two cooling units.
Once the water-cooling module was out, Ichiken pressed the micro-pump again to show the fluid moving. They had first wondered whether the white material in the channel was oil or some additive meant to make the flow visible. On closer inspection it appeared to be air bubbles.
What the Water Cooling Actually Touches
Before the teardown, Ichiken had expected the design to work like a desktop liquid-cooling system. Heat would move from the hot components into the liquid, circulate, and then be dumped into the air-cooling system. The teardown did not support that picture. The water-cooled and air-cooled modules sit close together, but they have very little physical contact. Ichiken found no sign that heat moves into the liquid and is then released by the fan.
Instead, the battery sits directly beneath the water-cooling module, so the liquid loop appears to serve the battery. Ichiken points out a problem with this. If battery heat goes into the liquid, that heat still needs somewhere to go next, and in this layout the liquid has hardly any path to shed it. As far as there is a route, it runs through the graphite sheet on the back of the module.
From this, Ichiken concludes that the water cooling has a strong decorative element and does not seem to contribute much to heat dissipation. In their reading, its real job is to even out temperature across the battery area. Heat from that area is spread by the liquid and then moved efficiently by the graphite sheets toward the air-cooling mechanism, which actively exhausts heat because it also cools the main board. Ichiken adds that for temperature uniformity alone, graphite sheets are probably the more cost-effective and better-performing option.
Benchmark Tests With and Without Water Cooling
To measure the effect of the water cooling, Ichiken logged temperatures while running a benchmark. The battery was at 100% with the USB cable connected, so the phone was always on external power. They tested three configurations:
- No fan, no water cooling
- Fan on, water cooling off
- Fan on, water cooling on
In every configuration, the benchmark ran at full performance for roughly the first four loops. After that, the first stage of thermal throttling kicked in. The temperature logs show the same thing. Temperature shot up right after the benchmark started and slowed around the four-minute mark, which Ichiken attributes to first-stage throttling. The temperature then kept climbing slowly until it more or less leveled off, and that plateau corresponds to the second stage of throttling.
With the fan running, adding water cooling made little difference during the first throttling stage. After that, the water-cooled runs, unexpectedly, showed a larger temperature rise. Ichiken repeated the experiment several times and saw the same trend every time. In some water-cooled runs the temperature rose so fast that the phone shut itself off.
Ichiken was explicit that the explanation they offered was little more than speculation. Their hypothesis is that turning on water cooling may push the SoC and other components into a higher-performance operating profile. Since the water cooling itself has only a small effect and the air-cooling behavior stays the same, the extra heat from the higher profile would show up as a higher temperature.
Because the first tests could not separate these effects, Ichiken fixed the CPU and GPU operating profiles and measured again. This time the test started from a steady state with the phone already fully heated, and the graph's vertical axis covers a different temperature range from the earlier results. For the first 10 minutes both the fan and the water cooling ran. At the 10-minute mark the water cooling was turned off. The difference was barely visible. Ichiken thought the temperature rose slightly more with the water cooling off.
They connect this to what the teardown showed. The system is not a radiator and heat exchanger. Its main purpose is heat transport and temperature equalization. It helps to some degree, but its cooling effect is far weaker than the air cooling's.
The Air-Cooling Module: The Real Workhorse
Ichiken calls the air-cooling mechanism the main player in the phone's thermal design. The removable module draws heat from two places. One is an area coated with thermal grease. The other is a copper-foil-covered region of the chassis over the main processor and SoC. Air enters from the right side of the screen, cools the SoC region first, and then continues cooling the rest of the unit before exiting on the left.
Where the module meets the thermal grease, its surface is bare metal for better heat transfer, and the finish is slightly rough. Taking the module apart showed that the part visible from the outside is only a cover, with the air channel underneath. The channel is only 1.7 mm deep, and the fan sits in a deeper section. The channel has no cooling fins. It is a simple, open flow path. Ichiken explains that adding many fins would raise the pressure drop, and with a fan of this size it would then be hard to maintain enough airflow.
The fan spins at 24,000 rpm. Rather than using a larger fan, the design raises the RPM to increase flow. The fan is made by Delta Electronics.
Waterproofing an Open Air Channel
The phone is waterproof, which raises an obvious question about a design that deliberately pulls outside air through the body. When the phone is submerged, water does enter through the air intake and floods the area around the fan, but it gets no farther than the intake and exhaust passages. Where the fan's power flat cable passes through a hole, the gap is sealed with silicone caulk, so water cannot reach the interior except along the air channel.
Because the fan sits in that channel, its board is fully exposed to water, so it has a waterproof coating. The impeller appears bare but also seems to be coated. Rubber gaskets around the intake and exhaust ports keep water out of the phone's internals.
The intake also has a mesh filter to keep debris out. Ichiken notes that the mesh is quite fine and suspects it will clog with dust over time, with no practical way for a user to remove it. Since the phone is waterproof, you could in principle flush the filter by running air or water through the exhaust port, but they do not recommend doing so.
Battery
Removing the battery took anhydrous ethanol to loosen the adhesive. Ichiken mentioned that pull-tab stickers like Apple's, which release when voltage is applied, would have made this easier, but the REDMAGIC 11 Pro does not appear to use them.
The battery is large: 7,500 mAh, or 28.43 Wh. Ichiken notes that the product page emphasizes battery life and the ability to game for long stretches without a charger. The cell is made by NVT and has a temperature sensor mounted at one end, which suggests its temperature is closely monitored.
The Lower Module
With the battery removed, a flat cable linking the upper and lower module boards becomes visible. The lower section holds a speaker unit, with a matching speaker opening in the body. There are two flat cables, and their backs are covered in metal mesh, which Ichiken guesses is for EMC shielding. Under the cables is a gold-colored sheet, which is a vapor chamber that Ichiken examines later.
The lower board mainly handles USB-C and the SIM card, and some areas under metal shields presumably contain ICs. Directly beneath the USB port sits a linear motor for vibration. Opening it confirmed it is a proper linear motor.
Main Board: Liquid Metal and Stacked Chips
The back of the main board has thermal grease on it. Judging from how the grease was applied and where the board contacts the vapor chamber on the display side, Ichiken infers that this is the phone's biggest heat source.
On the vapor chamber's surface sits a metal piece that REDMAGIC calls "composite liquid metal 3.0." Up close it does look like liquid metal, but it is not a pooled mass of liquid metal like the one in Sony's PS5. According to REDMAGIC, it uses a proprietary sandwich structure in which only the surface melts when heated, bonding to the SoC and transferring heat well. Ichiken heated it with a heat gun, and the surface visibly took on a liquid-metal appearance as it warmed.
Under a copper foil on the board's shield was a generous layer of thermal grease. Beneath that was Micron RAM, with a green substrate under it and the SoC underneath. Stacking RAM on top of the SoC in two layers shortens the wiring paths and improves performance, and Ichiken notes this has become the common arrangement in recent smartphones.
On the opposite side of the board, where the air-cooling module makes contact, the copper foil covered a thermally conductive material that felt more like a thermal pad. This area holds the power-supply circuitry, which makes heavy use of three-terminal MLCCs that can reduce ESL.
How the Heat Paths Fit Together
Ichiken then recapped how the heat sources line up with the cooling hardware.
The body has a vapor chamber. The main board's main heat sources, the stacked SoC and RAM, sit on it, and their heat flows through the composite liquid metal 3.0 into the vapor chamber. The power circuitry faces the other way, and because the SoC is directly behind it, SoC heat also reaches that side. The air-cooling module sits over this side, and the incoming air carries away the heat concentrated there.
In Ichiken's understanding, heat from the power circuitry, SoC, and RAM is therefore handled two ways. It is actively removed by the airflow on one side and spread into the vapor chamber on the other, where it is also dissipated.
A Two-Story Board Around the Speaker
A large speaker sits under the main board. To make room for it, part of the main board has a visible recess. That section of the board is two layers high, with circuitry on the raised tier. Ichiken sees this as a way to make efficient use of board area while fitting the speaker in.
Display, Graphite, and the Vapor Chamber's Inner Structure
The back of the display is covered in copper foil, and there is a fingerprint sensor in one area. The transcript also describes a hole for the front camera and says that region of the panel is also display, with a solid image.
On the body side, a graphite sheet covers almost the entire surface. Beneath it is a very large vapor chamber, which Ichiken cut open to see the cross section. Liquid remained inside. The chamber moves heat as this liquid evaporates, travels as vapor, and condenses back to liquid.
The wick inside is made of two different meshes, which Ichiken examined under a microscope. The two look similar at first glance, but they differ. One has a coarser weave with thicker strands, and the other has a finer weave with thinner strands. The thick, coarse mesh near the center moves liquid quickly. The thin, fine mesh across the rest of the chamber holds the liquid firmly by capillary action. Ichiken reads the design as combining the strengths of both mesh types.
Conclusion
Ichiken's overall assessment is that the REDMAGIC 11 Pro combines liquid and air cooling to move the heat it generates out of the phone efficiently. They also acknowledged that it was hard to keep conditions consistent across the benchmark temperature tests and that they gave up partway through.
Their conclusion is that the water cooling can be expected to help to some degree, but the air-cooling mechanism does far more of the cooling, and the liquid loop is unlikely to have a major effect by comparison. In Ichiken's view, the water-cooling system's main purpose is not to dissipate heat but to transport heat and even out temperatures inside the phone.
This video is brought to you courtesy of JLCPCB.
Hello. I got a smartphone today that is very sharp technologically. I will disassemble and review it. This is the REDMAGIC 11 Pro. A closer look at the main unit reveals—can you see something moving? This smartphone is water-cooled. Smartphones available in the market so far were basically naturally air-cooled. As a commercial model, this is an unprecedented smartphone that is the first of its kind in the world to introduce a water-cooling system!
A device as challenging as this—we can't afford not to take it apart. This time, directly from REDMAGIC, we received an offer to disassemble it because they wanted Ichiken to look at the technology used in this phone. Today, we're going to take this apart and confirm what kind of structure is inside. But first, here are today's sponsors. Go ahead.
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Let's start by checking the exterior. This is a gaming smartphone. On the face of it, it looks like a gaming smartphone. There are two cooling mechanisms visible from the outside: a forced-air cooling fan and a liquid-cooling mechanism.
For forced-air cooling, there's an intake port here, and there is an exhaust vent on the other side. This part is the airflow path. Air enters from the right side and exits on the left side. Near the exit on the left side, a sirocco fan is visible. If you put an object close to the exhaust port, you can see how the wind is blowing so vigorously. But as for airflow, it's not that much—breeze level. The fan noise is surprisingly noticeable when used in a quiet environment.
As for the fans, in addition to being able to switch them on and off manually, you can choose whether to run them while charging. You can also choose between high and low. The fan noise you heard earlier was the sound in high mode.
Next, here is the liquid-cooling mechanism. Can you see the liquid moving in a circular motion? There is a white bubble-like substance moving, so I think you can see exactly how fast the flow is moving. From the outside looking in, flow paths are provided in areas where there is a lot of heat generation, and then run down to the area with the lowest heat generation to disperse heat. It appears to be designed to disperse heat through this liquid to the forced-air cooling. I'll actually disassemble this part later to make sure.
Incidentally, with this liquid-cooling mechanism, fluid circulation can be switched on and off, and high and low flow rates can be selected. The REDMAGIC 11 Pro is also available in other colors. For the black ones, the water-cooled part is not visible from the outside. It contains the same cooling mechanism as the other colors.
Other features of this phone include a jack for wired earphones, which is a rarity in smartphones these days, a SIM card tray for two cards, and a FeliCa chip with mobile wallet compatibility. From here, we will actually disassemble it.
First, the cover on the back that was pasted here was pretty easy to remove. Peeling off further, this area is also peeled off.
We could see the liquid flow path like this. It looks like the lower left side is the pump. Press the pump part like this with your finger, and you can see how the liquid progresses. The pump is a micropump using a piezoelectric element. While it is operating, you can hear the sound when you put your ear close to it. It doesn't bother me because I can't hear it if I'm far enough away. If you put your ear close to it, it sounds like this.
As for the direction in which the liquid flows, this is where the pump exits. It goes around in a kind of circle, and then it's back to the entrance of the pump again. That is the flow channel. We will break it down further.
Here is the connector for the pump's power supply. I would like to remove the water-cooling mechanism here as it is. There's a lot of stuff attached to this part, so I can't remove it yet. We will first disassemble the other parts.
Let's take off this top cover. This is the cover for the camera and SoC. The camera part is made of machined aluminum material. It can be removed like this. This is metal and resin. Is it like a bonded assembly? Only the cover part here is made of metal.
Next, this is the LED module of the camera. As for the lights, four rather large LEDs are installed. What's in the middle of it? What is this? Is it a brightness sensor? If you look at the cover of the camera module here, it can be installed over the sensor in the center. The part covering the sensor has a gradual, Fresnel lens-like structure.
Right next to the LED module, some parts are covered by metal covers. Seen from the side, the MEMS microphone is hidden like this.
While we're at it, let's take a look around the camera. There are a total of three cameras attached. The largest main camera is equipped with an image stabilization mechanism. Because this phone is fully focused on gaming performance, the camera's performance is not very high. It has a camera there.
Here is the next one. This is a module for wired earphone plugs. Next, we also have this silver cover. Let's remove it. It looks like everything can be removed. It looks like this.
The cooling module looks like a forced-air cooling module with the liquid-cooling mechanism attached. Looking at the back of this liquid-cooling module, graphite sheets with very high thermal conductivity were applied. Let's peel this off too. This one in the middle is the wireless power supply module. The water-cooling module could be removed like this.
The back side of this liquid-cooling module has a micropump. As I showed you earlier, press like this, and you can see the fluid flowing inside. There is some white stuff mixed in with the flow path. I thought maybe they put oil or something in it to make the flow easier to understand. On closer inspection, they appear to be air bubbles.
We'll look at the cooling of the water-cooling system here in a little more detail. Before disassembling this one, I was imagining it would transfer the heat from the part of the body that is generating heat to the liquid, then pump it back into circulation and cool it with forced air. Apparently not. Although the water-cooled and air-cooled parts are close in location, there was very little physical contact. They don't seem to be transferring heat into a liquid and then releasing it by air cooling.
If you look at the underside of the water-cooling mechanism here, there is a battery. This water-cooling mechanism seems to be for the battery. However, if the battery heat is dissipated into a liquid, the heat of this liquid needs to be released somewhere further. In this arrangement, I think it would be hard to release the liquid's heat anywhere from here. It means there's no place for heat to escape to. Heat transfer can be done with the graphite sheets attached to the back of the water-cooling mechanism. The water-cooling mechanism has a strong element of decoration. It does not appear to contribute much to heat dissipation.
It does contribute to equalizing the temperature in the battery section. What does that mean? The heat generated in this area is efficiently moved close to the air-cooling mechanism by the liquid and the graphite sheets. Since the air-cooling mechanism also cools the main unit, you'd be actively letting the heat out. But as for temperature uniformity, I feel like graphite sheets win in terms of cost-effectiveness and performance.
To check the effect of cooling with and without water cooling, temperatures were also measured during benchmark operation. Charge is at 100%, and the USB cable is connected, with power supplied continuously. In this case, three patterns of temperature measurements were taken: no fan and no water cooling, with fan and without water cooling, and with fan and water cooling.
First, here are the benchmark results. Every benchmark is working well up to the first four laps. Thereafter, the first phase of thermal throttling takes effect. This is also evident in the temperature measurement results. Immediately after the start of the benchmark, temperatures are soaring in every state, but the temperature rise slows down around four minutes. This is due to thermal throttling in phase one. After that, the temperature continues to rise gently. The temperature rise stops to some extent, and temperatures equilibrate. This is the second phase of thermal throttling.
With the air-cooling fan running, compare temperature results with and without water cooling. The first stage of thermal throttling does not change that much. After that, for some reason, the temperature rise is greater with water cooling. I've experimented several times, all with this trend. Also, with water cooling, the temperature rose too fast, and my device turned off.
What I'm about to tell you is not much more than speculation. If water cooling is operating, the operating profiles of the SoC and other components may shift to higher performance, but the impact of water cooling is not that great. Also, since the air-cooling operation has not changed, we consider this temperature rise to have occurred.
I couldn't tell much of a difference, so I fixed the CPU and GPU operating profiles and took temperature measurements once again. Here is the graph. We are starting the experiment from a steady state where the temperature has risen fully. Note that the temperature range on the vertical axis is different from the previous result. Up to 10 minutes from the start of the measurement, the cooling fan and water cooling are working. Water cooling is turned off after 10 minutes. What do you think? I can hardly tell the difference. I think the temperature is rising slightly more when the water cooling is off.
As I said at the time of disassembly, I think this water-cooling method has heat transfer and temperature uniformity as its main objective, rather than acting as a water cooler and heat exchanger. Although it is effective to a certain extent, the cooling is not as effective as air cooling.
Next, we will look at the star of the cooling process, the air-cooling mechanism. The air-cooling mechanism is removable like this. This is the air-cooling mechanism. Which part of the body is it taking heat away from? This is the area coated with thermal grease. It lets heat escape from this copper foil-covered area here and the rest of the chassis. This copper foil is applied to the area where the main processor, the SoC, and other components are located.
Air passes through this module. The part through which air passes is quite thin. As for airflow, intake air is drawn in from the right side of the screen and exhausted from the left side. It cools the SoC first, and then the unit afterwards as well. If you look at the cooling module here, the area coated with thermal grease is bare metal for better heat transfer. This is where the grease is wiped off. The surface is also a little rough.
The air-cooling module is disassembled. The area visible from the main unit was a cover. You can see the air passage like this. This one looks like this from the side. The cooling fan is included in this deeper part here. The depth of the air passage here was 1.7 mm. As for the air passage, there are no cooling fins standing. It is a simple flow path. If you put up a lot of cooling fins, the pressure drop becomes large, and given the cooling fan's specs, it can be difficult to achieve a sufficient flow rate.
The fan part is also disassembled and checked. This phone is waterproof. If you submerge your phone in water, naturally, water enters through the air intake here, and the area around this fan will also be flooded. But water does not leak beyond the intake and exhaust passages. If you look closely at the fan section here, the hole through which the power supply's flat cable is threaded is sealed with silicone caulking compound. Water does not enter the system except through air channels. Water is not allowed to enter the interior of the phone.
This fan here is 24,000 rpm. Rather than making the fan bigger, the approach is to increase the RPM and increase the flow rate. It is manufactured by Delta Electronics. This board is fully exposed to water, so there is a waterproof coating on the surface. The wheel part also appears to be bare. This is also treated with a waterproof coating.
If you look at the intake and exhaust ports here, there is a rubber gasket to prevent water from getting inside the phone. Furthermore, the air intake area had a mesh filter to prevent debris intrusion. However, this mesh filter is quite fine. I have a feeling it will clog up with dust and stuff. There is no way to remove that dust. It looks pretty tough. The phone itself is waterproof, so you can clean the mesh filter by pouring air and water through the exhaust port here, but it's not recommended.
The battery is also removed. We just use anhydrous ethanol to weaken the adhesion. An adhesive that releases when you apply voltage, like Apple's, would be useful, though. This one does not appear to use it.
It's out. We will look at the removed battery. This phone is equipped with a high-capacity battery. Capacity is 7,500 mAh, 28.43 Wh. Even the product page emphasizes battery life and running games for long periods without a power supply. The battery manufacturer is NVT. A temperature sensor is mounted on the end. Temperatures seem to be well controlled.
Looking at the underside with the battery removed, a flat cable connecting the upper module board and the lower module board is hidden here. We'll look at the lower module first. First of all, here it is. This is a speaker unit. There is also a speaker hole in the body like this. Remove the flat cable too. So it's double. Let's take this one off too.
Looking at the back of the flat cable, it is covered with metal mesh, perhaps for EMC shielding. Under the flat cable, this gold sheet here is a vapor chamber. I'll disassemble it later and take a look at the internal structure. Further removal of the lower module.
It's out. This removed board basically includes features such as USB-C and the SIM card. Some areas are covered by metal shields. I think that's where ICs and the like are located.
Next is this component hidden right under this USB. This is the linear motor used to create the vibration. Open it up, and it is indeed a linear motor like this. Next, we will remove the main board.
I got it. Looking at the back side of the main board here, thermal grease is applied like this. Given how the thermal grease is applied and the contact with the vapor chamber on the display side, I'm guessing this is the part that generates the most heat.
Looking at the surface of this vapor chamber, there is some kind of metal fragment. To quote the official expression, this is a component equivalent to Composite Liquid Metal 3.0. Remove it and take a closer look. The surface certainly looks like liquid metal. It doesn't feel like a heap of liquid metal as in the Sony PS5.
According to REDMAGIC, by using a unique sandwich structure of liquid metal, only the surface melts and adheres to the SoC when it heats up. They say it transfers heat well. Try heating it with a heat gun. It looks like liquid metal. I'm sure you can see it well this way, as temperatures rise.
You can see how this liquid metal feels. I also remove the copper foil attached to the board's shield. There is a good amount of thermal grease.
With the copper foil removed, you can find Micron's RAM here. There is a green substrate under it. The SoC is on top of this. By stacking RAM and the SoC in two layers like this, wiring paths are minimized, increasing performance. In recent years, smartphones generally have their SoC and RAM arranged like this.
On the opposite side of the board, I also remove the copper foil from the area where the air-cooled heat sink was making contact. This was also filled with a heat-conductive material. This is more like a thermally conductive sheet. This is a power supply circuit. Three-terminal MLCCs, which can further reduce ESL, are widely used.
Let me reiterate the cooling mechanisms we have seen so far and the locations of the heat sources. First, there is a vapor chamber on the phone itself, with thermal grease and Composite Liquid Metal 3.0. The SoC and RAM are the primary heat sources on the main board. These overlap like this. Heat from the SoC and RAM flows into the vapor chamber through Composite Liquid Metal 3.0.
This is the power circuit, which you can see on the main board now. There is heat from this power circuit, and the SoC is just on the back side of this. Its heat also reaches this side. How do we release that heat? The air-cooling mechanism overlaps in this way. Air comes in from here, effectively cooling this area.
Therefore, heat from the power circuit, SoC, and RAM is actively removed by air cooling, and heat also escapes into the vapor chamber. Heat is dissipated there as well. That's the picture.
Let's take a further look at the main body. There is a component here that was hidden by the main board. This is a speaker. It's pretty big. Can you see the indentation in this part of the main board to accommodate the speaker? You can see it clearly from the front. This part actually has two layers. To fit a speaker in this area, the board also has two layers. There is circuitry in the section with two layers, making effective use of the board area.
Lastly, I removed the display from the body. The display is entirely covered with copper foil. There is also a fingerprint sensor in this area. This part of the display is the hole for the front-facing camera. Actually, this part is also a display and shows an image properly.
Next is the body side. There is a black sheet here. This is a graphite sheet, covering almost the entire surface. I peel it off to inspect the vapor chamber underneath.
The vapor chamber is also very large. Let's take a look at the cross section. The inside looks like this. You can see that some liquid remains. Heat is transferred as this liquid evaporates into a gas and then becomes liquid again.
I'm checking the mesh now. The mesh consists of two pieces, like this. I checked the mesh structure using a microscope. The smaller mesh is on the left, and the larger mesh is on the right. There appears to be little difference. The smaller mesh has a coarser weave and thicker wires. The larger mesh has a finer weave and thinner wires.
The thick, coarse mesh placed near the center transports liquid quickly. The thin, fine mesh laid throughout is responsible for drawing the liquid in firmly. The structure is designed to take advantage of the characteristics of each mesh.
Today, I reviewed and disassembled the REDMAGIC 11 Pro. As we have seen, water-cooling and air-cooling technologies are used to efficiently release the heat generated by the phone to the outside.
For the temperature measurements during the benchmark, it was hard to match the conditions, so I gave up halfway through. Although some effect can be expected from water cooling, it is unlikely to have as significant an impact on cooling as the air-cooling mechanism. We consider the main purpose of water cooling to be heat transfer and temperature uniformity inside the unit, rather than heat dissipation.
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