Tech

Nintendo Switch teardown reveals big battery and lots of cooling, just keep it away from your aquarium

Inside the new Nintendo Switch games console is a huge battery and the sort of cooling you'd expect to find in a laptop. Just keep it away from your aquarium!

Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Senior Contributing Editor March 4, 2017 at 2:06 a.m. PT

Nintendo Switch teardown reveals big battery and lots of cooling, just keep it away from your aquarium — Inside the Nintendo Switch
iFixit

It didn't take long for the folks at iFixit to get their hands on the new Nintendo Switch and carry out a teardown. It reveals a massive battery and the sort of cooling system usually reserved for laptops.

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Nintendo Switch tech specs

Customized Nvidia T1 Tegra chip
6.2-inch, 1280 × 720 resolution, multi-touch LCD screen
4 gigabyte RAM
32 gigabytes storage (upgradable to 2 terabytes using microSDHC or microSDXC card)
Stereo speakers
4310mAh lithium ion battery
802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 4.1
USB Type-C charge port
3 x USB ports
3.5 mm audio jack

While there's a lot of power packed into the Nintendo Switch, what's striking from the teardown is how much effort has been put into cooling.

The cooling system design consists of a large fan, heat pipe, and a metal plate that acts as a heat sink to prevent hot spots forming on the case and burning the plastic (or gaming fingers).

Since the Nintendo Switch is in essence a portable console (and consoles are traditionally plugged into a power supply), it has quite heavy battery requirements, and this is satisfied by a huge 16 Wh lithium ion battery, which is far bigger than the 5.6 Wh battery found in in the Wii U GamePad.

The Nintendo Switch is also surprisingly repairable (given availability of parts), with the iFixit team awarding it a repairability score of 8 out of 10 (where 10 is easiest to repair). While some proprietary tri-wing fasteners are used, along with some adhesive, most of the components, including the analog sticks, game cartridge reader, battery, and headphone jack are modular and can be replaced. Also, the digitizer and display are not fused, reducing the cost of repair, but at the same time increasing complexity.

The switch is not without its teething troubles though, with some users complaining of bricked consoles and display problems. The Joy-Con wireless controllers also seem to be prone to interference, with Nintendo advising owners to keep the console away from nearby TVs, wireless devices, microwave ovens, and, rather oddly, aquariums.