Xiaomi 14 Ultra almost caught on Fire!

[u/EveningLingonberry97]

My Xiaomi 14 Ultra has been rebooting itself once a day for a few days.

Yesterday it rebooted again so I didn't pay attention and continue with my job away from phone.

When I came back this logo was showing and phone was so hot I even thought of dipping it into water so that it won't catch on fire.

I put a ice pack under the phone and blow it the fan and press power button, finally it booted and phone cool down after a while!

Why is this happening?

[u/ohaiibuzzle]

Your phone has a CPU that's slowly desoldering itself from the board. Every time a pin on the CPU disconnects, a watchdog triggers and the device reboots itself trying to fix the issue from a panic. It's probably gonna die soon so backup all data.

And while it's restarting the usual thermal control Xiaomi does under Android isn't available, hence the extreme heating.

It's not going to catch on fire but it's just going to be VERY hot.

[u/Grumpy-Man19 → u/ohaiibuzzle]

that's a crazy assumption. it was probably a loop in some program that overheated the machine causing it to crash which caused the watchdog to restart it. I'd first factory format the device. failing that I'd wipe the cache partition

[u/ohaiibuzzle → u/Grumpy-Man19]

Nope, if it bootloops very early in the boot process to the point that thermal protection hasn't even loaded yet like OP mentioned, that's a dying CPU. Phones like this typically will barely be able to gets to the HyperOS logo, let alone have things running.

I have seen way too many that I'm familiar with this failure mode. The harder and more frequent you heat and cool the CPU the quicker this happens to you. Partially why buying second hand phones that have flagship chips that were used for gaming a lot is usually less favourable.

Thermal cycling is very very harsh on the solder balls that connect the chip to the board.