Minecraft server on a smartphone with an AMD cooler and built-in UPS

When people imagine a home server, they picture a humming tower in the corner, a rack in the basement, or at least a single-board computer stuffed into a 3D-printed case. In reality, running a Minecraft server for a few friends requires so little that you could build one from parts pulled out of a junk drawer.

And if you really want to, you can turn the whole thing into a piece of art with questionable engineering value.

That's exactly what one user did, strapping a Poco F3 smartphone with 6GB of RAM to a stock AMD AM4 cooler, complete with thermal paste, fan, and all the usual trimmings.

The whole rig stands upright thanks to a forearm trainer holding it in place.

From a physics standpoint, the setup doesn't really hold up. The phone has a plastic back, so the cooler is essentially chilling the battery rather than the Snapdragon 870 sitting underneath it. But when it comes to actual workload, everything checks out.

A vanilla server for a handful of players doesn't need raw computing power so much as memory and single-thread performance, and a flagship chip from 2021 handles that without breaking a sweat. The server runs through an app called Anvil-MC, which lets you run a Java core on Android without rooting the device, with Paper serving as the backend.

The real charm of this build lies in its power efficiency. The phone draws just a few watts compared to the hundred or so a full PC would need, and its built-in battery doubles as an uninterruptible power supply. If the lights flicker at home, the server won't even notice.

No need to buy a separate UPS for this setup. It's already glued to the motherboard straight from the factory.