A high-end vapor chamber has also already been confirmed for the iPhone 17 Pro Max — a great means of achieving sustained performance. It is an important feature when running heavy workloads for a long time such as playing AAA games. But user T-K-Tronix on Reddit has just come up with an idea that seeks to mobile thermal management to a whole new, ludicrous plane of existence. So, they said how about we bolt/text these on to a smartphone, and give us a huge boost, courtesy of the faithful old M.2 SSD cooler bols refurbished.
Its highly ‘excessive’ customization includes an M.2 SSD cooler, which is actually five M.2 SSD coolers, installed on the rear of the iPhone 17 Pro Max flagship phone. The change might seem massive, but it gave the device a whopping 90 percent stability in one of the most taxing benchmark apps around: 3DMark’s Steel Nomad Light Unlimited.
If we look at the images, we can see that five different M.2 SSD cooler units are installed on the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Those giant copper heatpipes and dainty fans indicate these very cooling solutions were designed to control the thermals of PCIe NVMe Gen 5 solid-state drives. It means that m.2 ssd cooler set up for smartphone is gonna be an absurdly jacked, but interesting mod.
The iPhone 17 Pro Max has only undergone a single benchmark test so far. A massive 21.45 percent improvement in the best 3DMark Steel Nomad Light Unlimited results as measured versus the default, uncoolered 3DMark scores with the M.2 SSD cooler is shown in the final draft results. So if you attach one of those enormous desktop heatsinks you see in the backs of an iPhone 17 Pro Max, it does indeed come with huge, measurable gains in performance consistency.
Now, here are the numbers coming from this truly beautiful M.2 SSD cooler mod:
| Test Scenario | Score | Improvement Over Default |
| Without M.2 SSD cooler (Default) | 2,233 | N/A |
| With M.2 SSD cooler (Highest Score) | 2,712 | 21.45 percent |
| With M.2 SSD cooler (Lowest Score) | 2,455 | 9.94 percent |
Those are some pretty big numbers, and they suggest that whatever AAA game is launched on the iPhone 17 Pro Max with the additionally attached M.2 SSD cooler configuration, it can be stated with the highest degree of confidence that very few if any performance decreases are likely.
Already offering as much as a 69% framerate uplift in games like Resident Evil 4 Remake, Death Stranding, and Assassin’s Creed Mirage over the A18 Pro and A17 Pro, the A19 Pro’s 6-core GPU likely has a lot more performance to offer. The M.2 SSD cooler is just icing on the cake, and ensures that the device can maintain maximum performance indefinitely.
The main problem now will be safely affixing these several M.2 SSD cooler units for type use in the long-term. But based on this experiment, it shows that very serious thermal management provides real performance dividends for mobile chipsets.
