Even When Under Pressure The Nintendo Switch Isn't Too Hot To Handle

Cool. Damn, your subheading has that word.

And Celsius is the correct way to measure temperature. Those bloody Americans again.

It's still going to be a "hot" console even though it has good air conditioning

The temperature of the system hadn't even occurred to me as a potential problem, as most of the attention has been directed to whether this thing will have a Virtual Console at launch, whether games will be linked to Nintendo Accounts (they will), and how internal memory will hold up. I am glad to know that the Switch won't be overheating.

Too hot to handle, too cold to hold. We call......oh, sorry. 😁

Is there any fan noise, that's what I wanna know. Or is it as silent as a 3DS?

Tell me now please

Well, they've vastly underclocked it for a reason...

I wonder if a developer could purposefully make a game run hotter? You know, for added immersion in lava levels and what not.

Probably a house fire and a lawyers phone call away from never happening

@gcunit None that I heard when playing Mario Kart in handheld mode

Happy to see Nintendo stay aware of the simple things.

Going above 37 would start feeling unpleasant. I would have suspected the JoyCon on the right side to stay cooler, because of the separation.

Weird that it prefers one side. And @SLIGEACH_EIRE : kelvin is the correct way to measure temperature

I guess the ice cubes in the joycons help to keep it cool

@manu0 "Weird that it prefers one side."

Not really. The whole left size is mostly being filled by the battery. It's a good sign if that part stays coolest.

Fahrenheit? We don't use that F word here at Nintendolife!

Good to know it won't be burning hot to touch.

Heheh. Fahrenheit was made by a dutch physicist, most of the world used it for over 2 centuries until the 1960s

Looks like it's being played in a controlled air conditioned evironment. Wonder how much hotter it gets or if it's actively able to keep cool in the spring or summer outside and the temp is 85+.

Coooooool Runnnings

Nintendo engineers deserve an award.. this is beyond what they done with the GameCube. Genius engineering.. gorgeous.. robust.. efficient.. that battery..

@SLIGEACH_EIRE You seem to hate On Americans a lot. Why is that?

Nice.

What's your problem with Celsius? It's used everywhere (but USA). it's the norm, not the exception.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE Im American lol. Born in Russia though. Im with you going through school I was not sure why we dont just only use the Metric system. Its easier to understand and the rest of the world uses it.

@Moneyjaypr7 I don't hate Americans.

This is weird, why is the left side cold, and the right side hot? It's strangely uniform. Shouldn't most of the heat be coming from the areas around the SoC and the heat pipes? And shouldn't there be a line or wave of cooler temperatures where the exhaust port and fan are?

Well, in any case, due to the teardown, we now know that the NS has a fan inside it to cool the heatpipes connected to the Tegra X1 Custom. So it doesn't really need the dock to cool it under load...

Almost 40° C under some kind of load sounds about right, which is actually pretty hot if you touch it directly. It only feels warm because the outer shell is what's being touched. In fact, that temperature isn't very high, so they probably weren't using a program that pushes the NS very hard. Which game/program were they basing the temperature/load from, anyways?

On another note, I bet that when modders eventually get into the system, (come on, you know it's going to happen...) that it will be possible to push the core higher, with temperatures reaching up to 50° C or even higher, which is still safe for a SoC. Anything past 60° C is trouble, though.

@gcunit My guess would be a new NS fan is under 20 dB in idle, somewhere between 20-30 dB under load, and over 30 dB once it ages some number of years. In other words, unless you damage the NS and knock the fan off of it's bearing center, or the fan starts failing after years of use, it won't be very audible. (But not silent like every previous Nintendo portable, factoring out aged speakers which may be removed in favor of complete silence and headphones.)

Now the Ice Cube demonstration makes sense.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE Don't be so 32 F°! We like inflating our numbers to make our imperial system seem more important! (Except techies, none of us use F° for pretty much... anything. )

37ºF seems pretty hot to me, but the joycons are what you will be holding, and I'm sure they're cooler than the rest of the system.

Wake me up when they release a freezer-friendly Switch (with Frost Rotom-themed Joy-Cons). I want the convenience of storing my Switch alongside them tasty unflavoured ice cubes. Zzzzzzzzzzzt.

What if you have hot hands?

This might surprise all you upscale Brits, but we actually do use Celsius to measure computer temps here in America.

40 C is pretty much 80 degrees. Those numbers are amazing!

Easy conversion from C to F:
"Double it and add 30."

• Bob and Doug McKenzie

Celsius! Finally a source that respect comprehensibility over nostalgic attachment. Teehee ;p

@PlywoodStick I strongly doubt the fan runs when in handheld mode at all (thus the thermal concentration around the heatpipe, which is why it goes to one side. It steers the heat AWAY from the battery. An ideal solution. Motors guzzle power, so keeping the fan off in handheld mode would really be almost essential.

Ugh, why does metric vs. imperial have to always include temperature systems? 32F may seem arbitrary, but metric, while a wonderful measuring system for distance and mass, is an absurd system for temperature. Setting the zero point as the freezing point of unsalinated, stagnant water is arbitrary to the point of uselessness, and featuring far too small an integer scale necessitating the use of rational numbers to convey meaningful information. Neither system is particularly good for temp, but at least Fahrenheit set zero at the point of ice suspension in salinated water (like most of the water on earth) rather than an odd human relational setpoint. Defending metric is fine, it's based on more logical setpoints than imperial. Defending centigrade is as silly as defending feet and yards. Both are arbitrary human relational systems. "New" doesn't always mean "improved"

So you guys use Celcius for temp, we use feet and inches for distance, and we both defend our silly traditional systems despite neither being a particularly good system, because it's what we're used to, and we'd prefer to keep it.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE Kelvin*

@SLIGEACH_EIRE I didn't say hate Americans. I said hate on Americans. Just notice a lot of times you make comments about us.

First picture:
Avg~ 77.4 F
Min~ 65.5 F
Max~ 99.68 F

Pretty close guess to max temp as it matched body temperature.

I wouldn't expect the switch to reach above 120F so I think we're good.

@NEStalgia it is defended because it is a standard all over the world save some really few english speaking countries.

There is a reason why the metric system became the most used, though scientifically speaking kelvin would be the right measure to use.

Impressive. This is not easy to do folks...

Nintendo ( or Nvidia???) is still great at engineering.

@Moneyjaypr7 I don't remember your comment saying that. Anyway, it's mild ribbing.

@Kmno It became the standard because the organizations behind it made a very concerted and focused push for its adoption and was successful in doing so. The thing is they were largely successful because meters and grams ARE superior systems. That and because they were offering to replace a lot of small, local, little used systems with a bigger standard, but, obviously, the push didn't make as strong an inroads in places already using the "imperial" system since it was its own well known pseudo standard. They kind of bundled centigrade as a pack-in to their proposition for whatever reason, so everyone got stuck with a worse thermal measuring system when adopting a superior distance and weight measuring system.

Just like defending feet/yards, it's what people are used to and they know it by instinct now and wouldn't want to change it if a superior system was demonstrated. If someone told you your weather forecast would now be in Kelvin you'd throw a fit, just like we throw a fit every time they tell us they're going to measure food in grams. But that doesn't mean it's actually a good system and that the alternative isn't actually superior, it just means most people prefer sticking with a system they already have a natural understanding of regardless of how meaningful the values are in an absolute sense.

If we could all speak in binary, life would be so much easier, and we could interact with our machines so much better. I don't imagine many people exchanging their native languages for it though

Heat was my only concern with the system. So I am happy to hear that the Switch doesn't turn into a molten ingot under load.

@speedracer216
Ehem...
Let me correct from C to F.
(9/5 x Current temperature in Celcius) + 32° = °F
Example : 20°C = ...°F
9/5 x 20° = 36° + 32° = 68°F

....So the system will keep burning my right hand then?

@NEStalgia actually I wouldn't mind kelvin, though I'm accustomed to it because I study engineering and I'd say it is the definitive system for measuring temperature.

And while you are right that people wouldn't want to change to a superior or more comfortable system because they are accustomed to theirs, it still is a pain in the back to manage the imperial when most of the times you are working on the metric.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE Ahhh okay. Just wanted to know.

Does anyone know what the thin, blue outline on the hands/arms/Switch is?

@Kmno Haha so true. Though the funny part is that for engineers and scientists, despite the righteous indignation at people's refusal to adopt a standard, the real problem there is the same exact one as everyone else's, It's the system they're used to and think in naturally

Great news. With all the concerns I had, heat never crossed my mind. They have done a good job with the design. Hopefully it doesn't run too loud. Not the biggest concern though.

@NEStalgia kind of but goes far beyond that, it is the system used to build everything we use, to investigate the very essence of existence, its not just something we use to think how much we will walk or hot our coffee is. So I'd say we kinda have a greater reason to use it beyond being accustomed to it.

But still you are right.

@NEStalgia
I disagree with your assessment. The zero point is arbitrary, but hardly useless: while the majority of water is salinated, it's also immensely less important for humans than the little fresh water we have. And you know what's also unsalinated water? Rain, which means celsius degrees offers a handy way to know when it'll snow and the ground will freeze. 100 °C is the boiling point of water, which is once again more useful than whatever Fahrenheit has. Celsius – Kelvin conversions are also extremely easy to make, a nice bonus.

I'll give you that the integer scale Fahrenheit has does make it easier to present minute information, but for everyday use Celsius is more than enough – and for other uses there are the decimal numbers.

The Nvidia shield got seriously hot. I didn't read the fine print but I am pretty sure that like some mobile phones they publish a disclaimer about devices getting hot when used to run games.

No way "kiddie" Nintendo was going to allow that.

I can imagine the lawsuits coming their way from parents claiming their kids fingers caught on fire using the system.

Wasn't there an issue with the 3DS giving kids headaches that was taken to court or something? Don't quote me on that though.

@SLIGEACH_EIRE Actually, Kelvin is. Those pesky divisions by zero in chemistry requires it, and for that Kelvin is superior.

@ClockworkMario It's still a human relational measurement system which is a really bad place to start when designing a measurement system. Why not base it on the freezing point of dairy cream since we all love ice cream? In any system you have to know the boiling/melting/freezing/gas state temperatures of the particular substance you're measuring. 0/100 vs 32/210 is just a single set of numbers to learn once and know forever. And it applies only to desalinated water at sea level, so in both systems you have to know the numbers for any other substance or elevation anyway. But the fact that it was designed to be relative to human thinking rather than to be designed as an absolute scale of measurement for the physical world compromises it from the start. It's kind of a consumer-oriented measurement system that the world of science adopted as a standard. Granted, both F and C aren't very great systems, but between the two I'd have to go with F as the "less awful" of the two. Considering F has nearly double the integer range between freezing and boiling without resorting to rationals, even for your average weather forecast or cooking methodology it provides more detail. A 1C difference is far too broad to make use of. It needs the tenths to provide meaning. Personally I don't even think F provides enough granularity.

Kelvin at least remedies that by setting absolute zero. So the measurements MEAN something. But it suffers from the same constraints of scale as celcius. It's not arbitrary, at least. But it's still terribly imprecise.

I say Rankine scale or bust! It solves almost all the shortcomings of the other systems, has real meaning, and is about 10 years newer than the 180 year old or so Kelvin scale

@Kmno Yeah, maybe the better way to say it is that the system you have the most innate understanding of without having to analyze it is probably the best one to use to evaluate anything. Sci/Eng students learn to make it their native system early on (though it's kind of like being bi-lingual for Sci/Eng practitioners in a place where everything involving daily life is in imperial, you end up having to be equally intuitive with both )

Pretty good, I am used to my laptop fan burning my hand though so I don't think it will really matter to me haha.

@Kmno @ClockworkMario And conversations like this are why Nintendo communities are awesome. Imagine finding something like this on an XBox forum! Who says Nintendo is for kids?

@SLIGEACH_EIRE

Fahrenheit is the correct way to measure temperature when speaking in regards to human tolerance; the extremes of which are 0 and 100 on the Fahrenheit scale.

Celsius is the correct way to measure temperature in regards to water. Freezing and boiling, I get it.

Kelvin's good for everything else. 0 is literally no heat, it makes the most sense.

#allTemperatureScalesMatter

Like how most of the comments are about Farenheit and Celsius

Why can't we talk about how they didn't show how Botw works?

@Sam_Loser2 #notheydont

the temperatures on the 1st pic are useless, as the min temp is the air temperature and the max temp is the body temperature of whoever is holding that switch.

and to get an idea what temperature it is, stick your finger under your tongue or in your ear.(i recommend not reversing that order)

@SLIGEACH_EIRE
Might be interested to learn the Fahrenheit scale was actually invented before Celsius.

Although, as a metrologist who works in both English and Metric, I have to admit I absolutely despise the English systems of measurements, be it inches vs mm, thousandths vs microns, Fahrenheit vs Celsius/Kelvin, psi vs newtons, pound vs kilogram, mile vs kilometer... all of it.

I'd lobby for adopting the SI base units any day, but I know it'll never happen.

pic upload

Interesting to see that -40℉ = -40℃

picture share