[FYT Android Head Units] 96carboard:
You are missing two important things;

1) If you don't cool it, it WILL break.

2) The warranty isn't worth the paper its written on, since even IF they accept your claim, there are some serious problems with it;

a) return shipping is on YOU -- go ahead and look up what it costs to send something to china. Its not cheap, and frankly, not worth it. Its cheap for them to send things to you, since the entire chinese economy is based on high volume exports.

b) you will have a hole in your dashboard for a couple of months during the warranty process,

c) what they send back will *still* be junk,

Also be aware of this; if you add cooling, it will actually run FASTER. Still dead slow, just not nearly *as* dead slow.

You have a bunch of different options when it comes to cooling the thing.

The first thing I suggest, is that you remove the lid. If nothing else, that one thing alone will help, and doesn't modify anything. Its trivial to reverse also -- just snap the lid back down, and screw in the 3 screws you took out to remove it. Don't pay any attention to the warranty sticker, they locate it in a way that it will be scraped off by the majority of car DDIN kits anyway, so just say it got scratched off when sliding it into your dashboard.

Now to actually improve the cooling;

1) just put a fan above it pointing in. This will help, does not interfere with the radio, does not impact warranty. Nothing to worry over.

2) You could use a thermal epoxy to glue a heat sink + fan down to the top of the SoM. This works very well, but is permanent, which could be scary for you, since you seem worried about whether they will honor the warranty after.

3) In some cases, you can unscrew the top piece of aluminum from the SoM. You can remove it, and bolt down a proper heat sink + fan. This process will require a drill and tap to configure your heat sink to screw down to the SoM. This option would work the best as far as cooling, and is fully reversible. The downside is that it is more work. If there are multiple component heights that need to be in contact with the heat sink, use thermal pad on the shorter components, allow the tallest component(s) to touch the heat sink directly. Thermal pad will compress down into the space available.

4) Make a bracket that holds a heat sink + fan down to the top of the SoM. This should be roughly equal in effectiveness as (2), but is a lot more complex to implement since you'll have to fabricate a bracket, however the advantage (with respect to your sensibilities) is that it is fully reversible.

** For (3) and (4), don't forget about thermal compound.

Now what you can see, is that only option (2) is permanent. The other options are completely reversible. So if you do have to make a warranty claim and for inexplicable reasons, actually pay to send it back, then simply reverse it and send it.

Their warranty works like this; it costs SO MUCH to send it back for the warranty service, that they figure that most people will not actually do so, and instead just order another unit from amazon.

As far as getting an upgrade or your money back... think again. You won't get either of those. If they don't have any of what you had before, they'll tell you to give them more money for an "upgrade". And the only time you will ever get your money back from them is if you purchased it through amazon, and it fails within the returns window.