A destroyed Samsung Galaxy S23, purchased for 1,700 Ukrainian Hryvnia (roughly $40), now runs God of War, Dolphin emulator titles, and Steam games through Samsung DeX. The builder, LastComputer, sourced the phone SIM-locked and visibly crushed, but its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC was intact, the same chip found in capable commercial gaming handhelds.
The build required frame straightening with a hammer, a replacement battery, a 3D-printed enclosure glued to an SSD cage housing a 512 GB SSD, two USB hubs with one providing HDMI out, and a heatsink hot-glued to the existing vapor chamber with an active fan. That cooling modification cuts thermals by 7 degrees C and measurably reduces throttling, which is the difference between DeX being a toy and being usable.
The full video is worth watching for the disassembly and thermal testing alone, but the real question it raises is how many high-end Samsung phones with DeX support are sitting broken in drawers right now. LastComputer does not stop at DeX, noting that alternative operating systems are also installable on this hardware. The gap between a wrecked flagship and a functional ARM gaming PC is apparently $40 and an afternoon.
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