now some of you will already know this but for those of you who don't apple
will at times if they deem it necessary from a form factor or design perspective
actually design their products to thermal throttle that is to say not run
at full speed under intensive loads we observed this with the imac retina 5k
and this is a fairly well-known characteristic of the macbook 2015
retina which i have here in front of me
the Corsair hx 1200i power supply delivers 80 plus platinum efficiency for
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fans so when we start up a stress test you can actually see is what happens is
the CPU goes to two gigahertz so that is
full on turbo mode for two cores four threads CPU temperatures ramp up very
dramatically so we're all the way at 74 degrees now and we're going to continue
rising boom 80 degrees on that CPU within a matter of seconds and then what
you're going to see is within a couple moments here this baby's going to go
ahead and crank all the way back down to
its stock speed of about one gigahertz and the temperatures are going to come
back down to match
so there she goes we're seeing a little bit of thermal throttling detected
just a little spike there four percent
now we're at 95 degrees on the hottest core
21 thermal throttling
okay there we go so that's the behavior that we are looking for after a short
while she'll throttle down to about 1.1
gigahertz and then she's gonna go a little bit lower down to about one
gigahertz and the throttling disappears
so you can see we're no longer throttling and temperatures drop
dramatically but next let's have a look at a real world load since the ida 64
stress test is not exactly representative of a
well real world use case scenario okay so now we're running cinebench and
here we saw some really interesting behavior so we were able to observe that
same 2 gigahertz turbo at the beginning
of our run here if you check this out which then slowed down to as low as 800
to 900 megahertz by the end of the run and then what was interesting after that
is that a subsequent run so a second run
actually stayed at 800 to 900 megahertz the whole time and gave us a lower
overall score which led me to believe
that if we were to cool down
the macbook 2015 retina maybe through water cooling means we could actually
get better performance out of it let's
find out
so the first thing we want to establish here is a baseline for our worst case
scenario temperatures for the device we can see that the CPU is somewhere
towards the back center because that's where it is
actually hottest somewhere in this territory but since we're not going to be able to
water cool the top of it we're more concerned about knowing whether it is on
the bottom or the top and it looks like it's right about here
so we've come up with a solution maximum 41.1 degrees that's a good baseline
we've come up with a solution that will allow us to water cool the macbook are
we doing it properly is this something i would recommend no
if you guys are afraid to cringe maybe the time to tune out is now but if
you want to see us find out if improving the thermal performance of
the new macbook 2015 will help it's
also performance performance then stay tuned sekkas alright so we're
going to be using um kneaded eraser
oh let's hope that yeah that seems to be working we're going to be using kneaded
eraser to plug up all the ports that we don't want to damage here is this a good
long-term solution the answer is no we are not planning to run the macbook
water cooled for a very extended period of time
just enough to run benchmarks
is that going to seal i don't know i guess we'll find out
that six now my camera operator pointed out that
the macbook 2015 has no fans
and i kind of went yes that is a good
observation but more importantly the fact that it
has no fans is what's going to allow us to liquid cool it at all because most
laptops and here i have a demonstration i can show you guys most laptops would
have some kind of an intake where airflow comes in and then it cools a
heating element like a heatsink inside but because the macbook 2015 retina
only has passive cooling from its
chassis by liquid cooling the bottom of it we
should be able to cool effectively the internals
of the device as well so for the hinge at the back
i mean really a silicone or something would have been a much better solution
for this i know this is not ideal for the hinge at the back we're just
going to make a snake out of our kneaded eraser and we're going to kind of jam it
in there and hope that the water doesn't uh doesn't get around it or anything i
mean we're not going to be fully submerging the notebook or anything like
that i just want to give it the best possible chance of
survival that it can have given what we're doing
to it so i've had a bit of a bit of trouble with the hinge here i need to make sure
i hold the macbook still while not disrupting any of my other kneaded
eraser and
see if i can get that pretty much sealed here okay
so i think that's good now i don't want the hinge to move at all
oh which kind of means we're stuck with it in that position so now we're going
to build ourselves a little platform to sit this puppy on
okay the usb type-c port is the one i'm most
worried about it's the most likely to short in the event of a
problem and it's uh
the one that i'm having the most trouble getting what i would consider to be a trustworthy seal around let's just go
ahead and cake on more hoping for the best
every day because we don't have another way all
right now i can't put it down
yuck
oh gross
that's gross i'll do it four times
okay
so we're getting water out of the fridge i'm going for the lowest temperatures
that i can get on the macbook over there
and now it's time for the pour
oh well more poor
i could have told you that
now we want a fairly good volume of water in the pan i could have put it
lower down and then we'd have been able to we'd been able to cool the macbook a
little bit sooner but the reason we want that is we don't want the water to heat
up right away
so we want a fairly high thermal capacity for our water here oh oh you
can see the surface tension of the water has
actually uh let it make contact with the bottom of the macbook now
now we're going to have to move fast because we're not going to have long here but check this out
our memory has fallen all the way down to 28 degrees our CPU temperatures have
fallen although the individual cores curiously are still reasonably high
that's interesting that means this thermal sensor is somewhere else and our
SSD has also dropped down to about 24 degrees so now
and check this out we are turboing at the maximum two gigahertz in spite of
the fact that we still have a stability test running
so let's stop that and let's fire ups in a bench
so our CPU temps are way down now to
like 32 degrees that is much lower than
our idle temperatures before we started here
this is what we're going to want to watch here core speed
as well as our CPU temperatures
so we're quite a ways through our test we're still running at two gigahertz we
haven't seen this before air cooled
so it looks like that is definitely a thermal limit as opposed to a power
delivery limit on the uh the broadwell processor inside the macbook 2015.
look at it go it's not throttling at all it's staying
max turbo thanks to better cooling
now this will tell us something about the
way the chassis itself is being cooled by what we're doing so you can see
our max temperature on the top is almost 13 degrees cooler than our max
temperature on the top of the notebook last time so it's not just the bottom of
the notebook that's being cooled thanks to apple's unibody design that's
intended to be used as a heat spreader that cooling is actually occurring over
the entire body of the macbook and there
we go we have our score wow
look at that double the score from water cooling your
macbook right there suckers
so in conclusion would i recommend water cooling the
macbook 2015 retina no don't be an idiot
would it make it perform better if we actually had like
it waterproofed and then if we had like tubes going in and out like if we had a
cooling like a water-cooled cooling pad for it with like direct contact or
something would it make it perform better the answer is a resounding yes
i'm actually blown away by how much better that performed
so i guess all that's left now is to throw
a shout out to our bros over at dbrand canadian company they make vinyl skins
and wraps for phones devices like this you may have actually
noticed this one sports a carbon fiber dbrand skin on the bottom and a kind of
leather finish dbrand skin on the top game consoles all kinds of good stuff
like that they're reasonably priced and precision cut absolutely gorgeously
beautiful if you want to check out any more like really nice glam close-up
footage of dbrand skin on this particular macbook 2015 then you can
check out our macbook 2015 review right around here but guys go check it out
they've got a link in the video description thanks to dbrand for making
this video possible thanks to you guys for making this video possible by
watching it like the video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it just
plain sucked leave a comment if your feelings are a little more complicated than that and i have a feeling some of
you are going to have complicated feelings about water cooling the macbook
and as always don't forget to also check out the link in the video description to
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good stuff i can't believe this worked i can't believe it's not dead turn it
back on see if it's oh is it dead no it's not dead okay wow the touch pad's
like chilly
17 degree touch pad suckas
17 degrees