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I don't have any firsthand experience with gaming phones in particular. However, from all the testing I've seen in the past, the really available surface mounted coolers popular with gaming phones don't tend to make a huge difference (maybe 1 or 2 degrees). A slight boost to cooling can technically lead to slightly better performance, but it's hard to tell how noticeable it'd be for anyone not looking closely. Typically, if your phone is overheating, you'd get more gains from letting it rest and then lowering your settings. With that in mind, having a good fan inside the case (e.g., many modern handhelds) can make a large difference. Especially on larger devices, having more cool, flowing air over the processor should help delay thermal throttling quite a bit more than passive cooling alone.

@@GameXData Yeah I was thinking of devices like the ROG/ Redmagic phones or the Razer Edge with built in active cooling fans.

No

For sure! You'll want to use a hard drive with external power though. The USB-A connection available with the Wii U typically won't provide enough power to either power on the hard drive or maintain a stable data connection in use.

@@GameXData It’s formatted so it will only act as a hard drive for the Wii U. How do I connect it to an external power source?

@mememan3447 You either need a hard drive that has an extra port for external power or a y-splitter to separate your single USB port into two connections

3DS hardware is honestly a lot more complicated than most give them credit for. There's a lot more needed to emulate its library well than raw processing power. With that in mind, its performance is still a decent step up from DS hardware. That alone is still a huge contributing factor to pre-Snapdragon 855 devices having degraded performance. If you're looking for the most compact dual screen device to play 3DS games, I'd honestly recommend just getting a New 3DS. Considering most consumers are looking for larger screens, I doubt we'll see anything close to its size release in the near future.

@@GameXData Thanks, thats what most say also. Just wanted a device that can do multiple emulation. Looking at Retroid Pocket 4Pro. I do have a 3DS XL already but if i can have 1 device that can do all of them it would be optimal :D

Yep! Dumpling has never relied on the eShop. So, you should be able to use it far into the future.

@@GameXData Great, thanks.

You couldn't. Android devices don't currently have the ability to host a stream. Even if they did, few devices have multi-display support and only one emulator that I know of (DraStic) supports output between displays.

Unfortunately, my only exposure were the brief references in reviews back when they launched. I'd be interested in giving them a shot, but they seem fairly uncommon on eBay at the moment with the phone + dock being $500 - $600 investment.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM

There are paid services like Parsec that allow for virtual monitor creation. When I was making this video, I really wanted to lean away from subscriptions, complex setups, or proprietary solutions to make it as feasible as possible for folks. As for current functionality, I actually haven't tried it in a couple months. If there was a recent update, I'll definitely check it again to make sure nothing broke. However, in the past, the window focus issue is solved in Arch Linux by making the primary computer (e.g., a Steam Deck) the leftmost display. On other operating systems, my past recommendation has been to use the secondary device as the touchscreen to keep it in focus.

@@GameXData cool ill definitely be trying this soon ill lyk how it goes. I just got a jsaux mod case and found a 3d printed phone holder for it

@ApolloMclaren To follow-up, I just downloaded the latest version Steam Link and re-tested the setup with the same dummy plug I used in the video and everything still works on my end. Although, I accidentally flipped the positions of the screens in my last comment. You actually want the dummy plug's display on left. For whatever reason, as long as both displays have the same resolution and scaling, Steam Link only streams the leftmost display to other devices when streaming from Arch Linux machines.

@@GameXData ohhh interesting. Ill have to try that. I wonder if it also works like that on windows too

Digital

Y'know, it's never too late to start playing. For my physical collection, emulation is what really got me into trying a bunch of new games I'd been neglecting for awhile. Otherwise, there's never anything wrong with selling some games you don't care about or maybe even donating some to your local library.

That's not what this video claims. There's currently no PC Game Pass on the Surface Pro 9 with 5G. Microsoft's marketing materials indicate it's likely to be enabled for the Pro 11. However, there's no way of knowing for sure until folks get their hands on it.

If it helps, the Pro 11 should be faster than my Pro 9, and here's some extra details about each on my computer: VS Code is hard for me to comment on due to the number of different tasks it does. (I also mainly use it as a fancy text editor these days when working outside an IDE.) However, it is at least a native ARM64 app at this point which should be a good sign. For Excel, I just did some quick stress testing by opening an old large CSV file (containing all possible combinations of the Powerball lottery) I had from a previous project. Compared to older Intel-based laptops I've used, the file was a bit quicker to open to the Excel error explaining that the file was too large. Similarly, Excel didn't slow down once opening as much data as it could or creating a PivotTable based on that data (beyond an initial, small processing delay when it created the PivotTable). To take it a step further, I loaded the large file into Power Query twice, merged the tables, and grouped on a column with several calculations. The final data load was close to 1 GB and took around half an hour to load, which is maybe a touch faster than load times I've experienced with larger datasets on my work-assigned, i7-1165G7-equipped laptop. Most sane people probably wouldn't load this much data into Excel. But, if you do, RAM is still a limiting factor here. (Complex data tasks in Excel really appreciate 32+ GB.) The data load also hits all CPU cores at once, which leads to a ton of heat on my fanless computer and significant battery drain. (For me, that was about 30%.) Most of my testing was also done on battery in Performance mode. Even when the Pro 9 started to heat up, the CPU only marginally dipped below its 3.0 GHz base clock in Task Manager. All of which is likely to be good news if you're doing less intense tasks and don't plan to dock your Surface all day. As for Power BI, I don't have full access to Power BI through my personal computers. However, I loaded the same large file using the free Desktop version while Excel was still loading the file. I didn't apply a Power Query transformation here, but Power BI felt much quicker in general to load the data set. Of course, once it was loaded, visualizations were creatable and editable without any stuttering.

I have an M1 Pro MacBook Pro. It's an entirely different machine with an entirely different use case.

You have a really skewed memory of netbooks if you think they have similar performance

At the moment, yes. On my device, only the Cloud Gaming section is available unless I download games I've purchased through the Microsoft Store. From how Microsoft has talked about the Pro 11, that seems like it might change in the near future. However, it's still unclear how many of the proposed Windows on ARM updates will make their way either the Surface Pro 9 or Surface Pro X (despite both being fairly capable machines).

My first thought is to double check your display resolution and scaling. I've found that one display bleeds into the other more as the display resolution differs from the Steam Deck.

Large screen phones are essentially folding screen phones at this point, all of which will eventually have a screen protector or durability issue if you're not looking to update each year. Among those, I've seen a lot of positive reviews for the OnePlus Open (which has even bigger displays). The Pixel Fold and OPPO Find N also seem to have a decent following for their stout cover displays. Outside folding screens, the S24 Ultra is a rather large phone in a more traditional form factor. I'm also a huge fan of the Surface Duo 2 (though security updates for that are ending this year).