there's no denying the macbook air 2020 is a pretty sleek little machine except
for one small flaw instead of doing what every other laptop manufacturer ever
does and put a fan right next to the CPU
where the majority of the heat is generated apple opted to put the fan
data over yonder somewhere leaving the CPU with only about 10 watts of cooling
capacity to work with how much performance did they leave on the table
to find out the answer to that we have collected this bin of cooling
apparatus with everything from upside down air things to water cooling
pumps to this tray which you guys might recognize from our
video from several years back water cooling the original macbook 2015 by
actually submerging it in water yes my friends today is gonna be
a lot of fun and it's brought to you by ting why pay for what you're not going
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to tell if our wacky cooling solutions are doing anything we will first need to
establish a performance baseline running our macbook air which is a quad core
eight thread CPU with no aids whatsoever
i'm just going to fire up Intel power gadget here and you can also see we've
got a quad core 8 thread macbook pro 13 inch running right next to it now it
does run a different CPU but it should give us some idea of what we might
strive for with a properly cooled chip looking at the power draw of these cpus
our macbook pro starts by shooting up to about 40
45 watts and then dips down closer to 30
35 and finishes out the test there so
there's no way that a 25 watt peak CPU is going to be able to
match that in terms of performance but you can see that over time we fall
down as low as 10 watts so i think we
should be able to close the gap a fair bit here 100 degrees
that seems perfectly reasonable actually they both run at 100 degrees just this
one doesn't have a fan attached to it
1016 points darn it
about half the speed let's try and close that gap cooling
method number one a stand well and a fan oh and we're
gonna add a fan to it put that there yeah that's why the the rubber chummies
are on it that's pretty cheesy so between 40 and 45 we'll consider that
baseline before we start each test yeah sounds good is that reasonable okay so
here we go 1016 so score to beat conspiracy theory time
tell me i'm wrong here apple has been sandbagging the
performance of their Intel based macbooks
for years now so that when they announce the ARM-based
macbooks they can be like bam it runs at like half the temperature
no no applause nothing all right it is amazing how quickly this thing shoots up
to 100 degrees isn't it it's pretty much instant how can it not love itself if
itself is so hot hey
got on lttstore.com okay you told me this was gonna work i don't think this
is working we're down to like 11.6 watts already so tell me brandon where do you
think the CPU is i don't know Linus
in the middle of the pc could it be here no
or here no 10 34.
all right well so much for this idea working hey that's a two percent
increase two percent all right we're gonna have to get more extreme what's test number two
fan with no bottom so this is kind of the test where like
if they just put a fan in there this is how good it would perform all right with the unit open we've got a great look at
what we were talking about before so here's the CPU right under this
tiny little sort of a heat sink so it's got
some little folded metal fins over it it's like it's a heat sink and then
here's the fan that they went and they put it in the
laptop so like it has a fan they just didn't bother to have the fan draw air
over the heatsink to cool the CPU before exhausting it i don't think anyone has
yet offered up a clear unbelievable explanation for why they
would have done this they went and they they put the heatsink
and the fan in there they just didn't bring them together you know run number
three definitely going slower it's making its way to 100 degrees slower now
we're having a look at the heart of the system here that is
almost 10 degrees lower maybe not 10 but
more than five for sure dang macbook you
fly our package power consumption is higher than last time which means i'm
expecting better performance but our utilization is only about 87 percent
and of course we did hit 100 degrees here so it looks like it looks like
anyway that we are thermally limited right now why is it asking for 3.4 gigahertz it's
got to know it's not going to get that there it is 1088.
what's that like another 4 but we can do better
so far we've got about an 8 uplift in performance over our stock configuration
but that's without changing out our thermal compound so that's going to be
the next leg of our journey we're going to go with Noctua nth2 thermal compound
see i'm pushing that down flat it seems like it's not actually designed to sit
right against the die that makes no sense i mean it makes sense if you want
the thermal performance to not be as good as it could be do you wanna just put it back on and like give it a wiggle
it's not gonna do anything because it doesn't go down far enough
see so i can i can wiggle it all i want but it's
it can't go down any farther hmm
see oh shoot are we taking a trip to the
milling machine i think we have to huh
that's fun i knew you'd like that recessed those a little bit please don't
ruin it that's the plan stressed out alex
you and me both they don't exactly sell this replacement part on apple.com have
you tried getting the apple card maybe they have it then now it's touching
we want to take this nut right here that controls the depth
it's nice and snug there we're going to back it off just
that much i'm uncomfortable yeah i
i was not thinking we'd be doing this here today well i guess
i can't look but i can't look away
okay that's lots that's enough
oh i think that's more than we needed i hate this why did i buy you this you
know what sucks though alex is while we might be getting better contact we now
have what i would consider to be a significant amount less copper on the
heatsink like we didn't remove much but compared
to what's there the worst part is this was supposed to be the like reasonable do it at home
option we had no way of knowing that they were going to have such a
boneheaded i mean i don't want to call it a flaw because it's clearly
intentional but design decision we use thermal pads because they allow for
greater tolerances in things like surface mount components like like a
memory chip to do it with a dye like this where the manufacturing tolerances
are so tight there's no reason for it
that i'm aware of other than just
not wanting it to perform well i don't get it well i'd say it's just cheaper
for them to make all they had to do was put a spring on each one of those screws
into a spring mount like everyone else ever got a little wiggle wobble
let's have a look here oh yeah
that is way better now we just need to be careful not to accidentally over
tighten these because that is a definite possibility
if it's not immediately at 100 degrees then it's way better we're still at 17
watts package power huh
and only 90 degrees really okay so that actually is worse
than before with the fan but the temps were
definitely better so i feel like it might just be the turbo profile but
that's better than our first run isn't it yeah that's three percent better even
if i'm not sure exactly what to make of that the show must go on so let's move
on to our next idea which is
expanding the amount of cooling surface area that the machine has
by putting a thermal pad in between
this heatsink here and the chassis
it actually seems like apple's using like a thermal insulator
in order to keep the bottom of the computer cooler so i guess we're going
to have to pull that off first yep that goes rib to be clear the inclusion of
this insulator here is not something that i actually oppose the difference
between you know something being comfortable against your skin and being
literally burned by it is actually a
surprisingly small amount yeah like 43 degrees is what you shower at and 46.7
will burn you in 35 minutes 50 degrees will burn you in one minute okay how how
many layers thick should we go here boys sure why not if we're gonna wing it we
might as well wing it hard these kinds of pads are hardly the most thermally
conductive material but they're obviously better than an insulator for
trying to cool the CPU at the cost of the user
so if the bottom of the chassis gets above 46 degrees then we're bad if it
stays below that then we're all good 40 degrees
now that's a hot bottom no that's actually
fine well it's also not done yet
yeah but like 40 degrees is totally comfortable well let's see how
comfortable 43 degrees is like a bit uncomfortable 46 as you bring it too bad
yeah we are still under 75 degrees what the hell
well you got so little heat sink area and then you go and spread all that heat
out over this giant piece of aluminum yeah it
makes sense it would do a little better it did so much better when you just had
the heatsink mounted properly and it probably has a tiny bit more mounting
pressure now 43.9
oh it's getting hot it's getting hot it's a hot bottom
results coming in alex you ready
11 55 we never cracked 80 degrees so that's a
14 improvement that is stock freaking
nuts hold on i'm gonna start it running again just so that it doesn't really get
a chance to cool down too much i want to see what our hot bottom temperatures
ended up at 46. yeah you're getting burned territory now yep that's that's
too hot that's not comfortable now like
lots of gaming laptops will be hotter than that on the bottom well i mean it
doesn't have to be like that they could have put a fan on it yeah that was an
option so much performance left on the table
though it's clear that to reach our next performance tier we need to do something
about the cooling of the chassis itself that
is where this comes in yes my friends i would like to do a
recreation of our 2015 experiment
immersing the laptop we really should not do this in water
i don't think we should do that at all well what's your brilliant idea we water
cool it so i got this little thing right here
off of amazon it was 17 amazon lies yes
you've been shopping on aliexpress again it was 17 and it says laptop water
cooling that's it no documentation this is all that came in the box
i think you can do the job way better than that cookie sheet right there okay
i'm gonna go get water for this look it's not like the thing died last time
yeah but like you can fall off your motorcycle on the highway and not die just mean you want to do it again that
is a false equivalency it wasn't even damaged you could just you know slide
along the road and be like oh it's fine next time i definitely won't turn into
jam so there's that really yeah
huh you know what i think you might be right this might actually perform better
than putting it in non-frozen water
but we could also put it directly in frozen water
and maybe kill it big brain time that's what the kids say right big brain
let's just you know have some safety here safety i see you didn't even catch my
pun safety i see
oh that's chilly boys
is it zero degrees give or take it's hard to tell because of like
emissivity issues or whatever are you able to see like a cold spot on the
macbook now it's chilly ah nope it's still hot huh
i mean i'm sure the bottom is a bit of a different oh yeah
the bottom's a different story what's the CPU temperature right now 17 16
we're sub-ambient here we go boys
what's it at it still hits 70 degrees but 16 really oh well it also spiked to
35 watts damn that's way faster than before attempts are 51 and our package
power is over 16 watts still wow it
really is a shame how aggressively this thing gets power limited because even
though we're at 41.5 degrees right now it's still all
the way down to about 13 watts package power i'm disappointed
i thought keeping the thermals under control would net us significantly
better performance it's just power limited yeah did our pump just stop nope
it ain't flowing fast though i was really hoping it would stay up in
the like 15 to 18 watts neighborhood and we were gonna see like a really big
performance jump yeah cause it's like 40 degrees now
definitely not thermally limited oh yeah like the top of this thing is
24 degrees it's cool to the touch so you can see
this look alex's hand is actually warmer
than the surface of the laptop hey do you have less blood flow in your pinky i
mean we learned a lot of things today just i didn't expect this i think that
none of the things that we learned today we expected the score is 11.55 so there
was no real benefit from going from just putting a thermal pad on the CPU that
helps the bottom of the chassis dissipate heat to putting an ice
cold water block on the bottom of it that's disappointing we didn't get the
result that we expected or wanted but we
still learned a lot today one is that the macbook air is going to be in a
completely different performance class from the macbook pro no matter what kind
of cooling you put on it because a even though they've both got four cores and
eight threads it is a different model of CPU and b because the macbook air just
doesn't have the power delivery robustness to keep up with allowing that
CPU to really stretch its legs number two
is that the cooling solution on the macbook air is even worse than we
thought to the point where even just removing a little bit of material from
the already minuscule heatsink gave us a
20-plus degree improvement in temperatures while under sustained load
unfortunately like i said we didn't get the performance improvement that we
wanted from that but that's how she goes just like she goes
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enjoyed this video if you like these kinds of wacky laptop cooling
experiments maybe you'd enjoy our five gigahertz uh laptop with like blowy
matrons hooked up to a shroud blown through the bottom of it it's a gaming
notebook it's pretty crazy it's definitely worth a watch man i really
wanted to post some crazy performance numbers today but we just couldn't do it
but it is cool yeah it's a 10 degrees right now get it it's cool