Patents show Nintendo Switch has active cooling
The Nintendo Switch has an onboard fan for active cooling. This is stated in Nintendo patents that the US patent office has published. When using the Switch as a handheld, the fan runs at a low speed to reduce noise.
The patent drawings show that there is an air inlet and outlet on the Switch. In the housing patent, the parts designated 11c and 11d in the drawings are also described as air holes. The patent also refers to a fan for cooling, indicated in the images with number 96.
The patent states that the fan in the housing draws in air through the holes in the bottom of the housing and that air is blown out again at the top. There is also a setting that can limit the operation of the fan to a certain speed. This setting is activated when the Switch is used as a handheld. It is not known how hard the fan runs in portable mode.
It is likely that the processor in the Switch will be clocked to a lower speed when the console is used as a handheld, to limit the heat production. Connected to the dock and a TV, the processing power and rotational speed of the fan can be increased. That would allow display in a higher resolution. Nintendo has not yet disclosed specific details about this and they are not in the patents either.
Furthermore, the patents show that the Switch has two card slots. One is probably for the dedicated GameCards, while the other is a memory card slot, possibly for storing media. Another image shows a kind of VR headset, in which the Switch can be inserted. It seems unlikely that such an accessory will actually come on the market. The Switch is large in size and probably has a 720p resolution with a low pixel density as a result. Those are not good qualities for VR glasses.
The publication of the patents was discovered by a user of the Neogaf forum. Nintendo filed the documents on June 10 and they were published by the patent office on Thursday. This concerns a total of six patents, three of which describe the controllers in their various positions. The patents can be found on the website of the patent office Uspto under numbers 15/178972, 15/178991, 15/179011, 15/178984 and 15/179022.
In this image the air holes can already be seen in the photo that indicates the GameCard