Repurposing old smartphones for more general purpose computing isn’t a new thing, but the project by [LastComputer] ups the ante by going from a Samsung Galaxy S23 that looks like it got run over by at least a few cars to a very serviceable gaming computer, courtesy of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC.
The somehow still working but definitely worse for wear phone was purchased for 1,700 Ukrainian Hryvnia (~$40). It being SIM locked also helped reduce the price, even if someone had somehow wanted to use it again as a phone. Since the SoC inside is also used in quite capable gaming handhelds, but with good cooling, that would be a real waste.
Converting it into proper gaming system requires some careful disassembly, some gentle whacking with a hammer to straighten out the frame and a new battery as the mainboard won’t work without one installed.
A 3D-printed phone case glued to an SSD cage for the 512 GB SSD serves as the enclosure, along with two USB hubs, one of which also provides HDMI output. For the active cooling system a heatsink was hot-glued to the vapor chamber with a properly sized fan mounted to it. Here we could definitely see some zip ties being added to prevent it from falling off.
Compared to running the phone in its stock cooling configuration this shaves off about seven degrees C, with thermal throttling noticeably reduced. This consequently provides a much better desktop experience in Samsung’s DeX (Desktop eXperience) desktop mode, which is what’s used for running applications and games.
Running God of War as an emulated PS2 game works pretty well, as does running games with the Dolphin emulator and the GameHub app using which PC games on Steam, GoG and others can be run. Although you can also install other OSes on the phone hardware, Samsung DeX doesn’t appear to be a bad option if you happen to repurpose a high-end Samsung phone that supports this mode.
This’ll get even better as Valve develops that x86->arm emulator thing for this same family if SoCs on its Frame.
soon the scrape of old mobile devices intensifies while RAM starts to show it’s signs of turning into real-estate /j
There are projects that already make a lot of use of Valve’s work, turning moderately priced Snapdragon 865 devices into passable Steam gaming machines.
If you have a phone device: Gamenative app
If you have a purpose-built handheld: Armada OS
Now this is what I would call a hack, thanks for the article! I want more phone-to-linux conversions, they are amazing SBCs basically.
I’ve found Samsung Dex an actually nice experience. Can even wirelessly connect to my TV via my Firestick.
Does Samsung have an unlocked bootloader that would let you install other, more standard, OSes?
Works with LineageOS. And you could ve the first to port NURA to it.
Why haven’t you already done it? You seem to know enough to get the job done in no time.
I just looked and the US models don’t seem to have a way to unlock the bootloader.
Back when Qubic CPU Mining was a thing, I bought about 80x S8/S9/S10/S20 phones with screens broken or not present and built a crypto miner
You could flip the script on THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN and replace the broken bits with flesh—-
(signed, David Cronenberg)
Go full throttle and flash PostmarketOS?
Also free the SATA SSD from it’s enclosure, if you’re already 3D-printing.
Now do it on a pixel phone that doesnt support Alt-DP output on its USB-C port. 😬
Hot-gluing a heatsink down seems kind of sketchy.
Absolutely – I have used thermal epoxy on SBCs with decent results.
The hot-glued heatsink cutting about seven degrees is a nice reminder of how much these Snapdragon phones are held back by cooling rather than the SoC. Since the build relies on GameHub for Steam/GOG titles: the open-source DroidDeck project takes a similar Proton-on-ARM approach, and the S23’s Adreno 740 is on its supported GPU list (Adreno 730 and newer). We keep an unofficial page of DroidDeck supported devices by GPU in case anyone wants to check their own salvaged phone before trying it.