Why does nobody talk about the overheating on Switch during 4 player Mario Kart?

Went to my buddy's place in Portland last weekend. We fired up Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with 4 players on the same couch. After about 45 minutes the Switch was almost too hot to touch near the fan vent. The console actually dimmed the screen to prevent damage. Has anyone else had their Switch throttle performance during long couch co-op sessions? We tried propping it up with a book but it barely helped.

2 comments

2 Comments

michael51917d ago

Jumped right into the same situation last month actually. It got me thinking how everything these days just kinda... tries to do too much without the cooling to back it up. My old phone did the same thing after 20 minutes of Pokemon Go in the summer, just dimmed itself and slowed to a crawl. Even my laptop gets loud and hot if I have more than like 5 tabs open. I feel like companies are so focused on making things thin and fast that they forget the basic physics of heat. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like every piece of tech we own is one long gaming session away from turning into a space heater.

susan_ward17d ago

Get what you're saying but have to ask - do you think it's actually gotten worse or are we just more aware of it now? Because I remember my old flip phone getting super hot too, just nobody cared since it didn't have all these sensors and apps to throttle. But then again, my laptop from 8 years ago never spun its fans like this new one does when I'm just typing in Word. You'd think with all this talk about "thermal management" and vapor chambers and stuff they'd have figured it out by now. But nope, they just keep cramming more power into thinner cases and calling it progress. Makes me wonder if they even test these things in real world conditions or just in some lab with perfect AC.