A Run Over Galaxy S23 Bought for $40 Became a Desktop Gaming PC

Most people treat a phone that looks like it lost an argument with traffic as scrap. LastComputer paid about forty dollars for one anyway. The listing came to 1,700 Ukrainian hryvnia, and a carrier lock kept the price down because nobody was going to drop a SIM in it again. This Samsung Galaxy S23 arrived bent in half, back cover smashed, battery squished, and still willing to boot.

The desire to save that board was what made it worthwhile to salvage. At the heart of it is a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, a seriously strong eight-core processor paired with an Adreno 740, the same type of chip found in some high-end handhelds costing five, six, or seven times as much. The vapor chamber was originally developed with a thin phone in mind, not a beast sitting on your desk for hours at a time, but abandoning that piece of silicon to accumulate dust would have been the true tragedy. Turning it into a desk machine was a bit of a compromise; you had to accept that the case was already ruined and concentrate on getting any useful bits to function.

Taking it all apart began with a hot air gun and a plastic card to coax what remained of the cover off. The charging circuit, ribbon connections, and mainboard all popped right out, along with the display, as an external monitor had always been the goal. Getting the frame back into form required some TLC with a hammer, as the trick was to flatten the bend without damaging the vapor chamber. A new battery was on the order list because I knew the board wouldn’t boot up without one. The original battery had somehow managed to keep a charge despite being a bit of a bent up mess and a terrible thing to leave running on a case you intend to leave on.

The next issue was storage, as 128 gigabytes on the phone is simply not enough for all of the PC games he wanted to try; It’s fine for applications and things, but for a proper PC gaming setup, it’s laughable. So he used a SATA-to-USB adaptor to install a 512 gigabyte Team Group SSD, giving me some breathing room. The enclosure is a 3D printed phone shell that was hot-glued to a small SSD cage and left open to let heat out. Two USB hubs handle all of the wiring: one for powering and transmitting HDMI as well as a data port, allowing Samsung DeX to drive a monitor, and another for the drive and a small fan.

Cooling is what truly sets this apart between a fast demo and a full-on gaming session. He utilized thermal paste and hot glue to attach a northbridge heatsink to the top of the vapor chamber. A 40-millimeter fan, which is an appropriate size for this type of application and can run on five volts, is secured down to keep it in place and operational. When compared to the phone’s original cooling system, it lowers temperatures by approximately seven degrees Celsius. The final consequence is also clear, as the processor runs at full power for longer periods of time, and the throttling that used to shorten my gaming sessions has all but vanished.

So Samsung DeX gives me a desktop view. Simply plug in the hub, connect a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and the phone will abandon its phone home screen and go to Windows. Dolphin allows GameCube titles to run smoothly. Even my God of War II using a PS2 emulator performs admirably, despite the fact that this is a particularly difficult test for this type of gear. PC games are played using GameHub, where he can import his Steam collection or run GOG installs stored on the SSD. Some titles still require a controller, while others require you to configure the appropriate driver settings before launching.
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