The Nintendo Switch knew how to come up with the concept of a hybrid console that, along with the enormous pull of the big N’s exclusive franchises, allowed it achieve huge successand made it one of the best-selling consoles in history despite being an outdated system in terms of raw power.

Brute force isn’t everything, that’s for sure, but in the case of the Nintendo Switch it’s true that we’re dealing with a console that it has much more potential than meets the eye. Thanks to overclocking, a well-known modder brought the console to the world 2.3 GHz frequency in the CPU and this triggered the GPU speed to 1.267 MHz. For comparison purposes, the console defaults to 1 GHz and 768 MHz. memory too it was overclocked to 2,500 MHz (defaults to 1,600 MHz).

If you wonder why Nintendo designed this console with such low operating frequencies compared to what we can achieve with overclocking, the answer is simple in terms of consumption and autonomy, as well as the issue of operating temperatures, and that is that the higher the frequency, the more heat is generated.

With this high level of overclocking, the Nintendo Switch’s performance in 3DMark WildLife Extreme was 1,010 points, a number that puts it just a little behind the Snapdragon 865 SoC, but what’s really interesting is that this modder advanced install ubuntu linux on the console and downloaded some PC games.

Titles like God of War and Titanfall 2 worked, of course not acceptably, but given that we are talking about a console with only 4 GB LPDDR4 unified memoryand with a Maxwell GPU that would be similar to the GeForce 920MX, the mere fact that said game starts it’s quite an achievement. Other games like GTA V and Devil May Cry 5 also ran without a problem, but again the performance was too low to make the experience even remotely acceptable.

Undoubtedly, a very interesting experiment shows how well current games can scale even in very limited hardware scenarios, where we can also see other important things, such as major CPU bottleneck Nintendo Switch and how good the NVIDIA Maxwell architecture was. This architecture was used in the GeForce GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti (first generation Maxwell) and in the GeForce GTX 900 (second generation Maxwell).