here we have the new M1 MacBook Air and this is the new Macbook Pro externally
they differ very little brighter screen here a fan there but under the hood
these two machines have exactly the same processor with just one catch because
there's no fan in the MacBook Air its only way of cooling is passively
radiating heat away and once the cooler has soaked up all the heat it can handle
it's got to slow down the processor to keep itself safe but never fear because
for about $30 I'm going to show you how to make this perform just like this or
maybe even
better by forcing air across the heat sink inside the MacBook Pro is able to
maintain its performance better because it's actively removing heat from the
system enclosure the MacBook Air on the other hand and as counterintuitive as
that might sound it's got air right in the name has no air flow and uses a
completely passive cooling solution so
in Le of a fan Apple's Engineers opted to use a large heat sink inside which is
essentially using the thermal mass of a block of metal to soak up the heat and
then passively radiate it away through air channels below the screen and for
short bursty workloads this isn't a problem that thermal mass is able to
contain the short spike in heat output
unfortunately when it comes to longer workloads the heat sink well heats up
essentially filling up its thermal tank until it's at equilibrium with the CPU
with no way to further remove heat the air will reduce its clock speeds and
slow itself down so that the heat input matches the heat output and we can see
this when we Benchmark these two machines side by side if the Benchmark
is relatively short meaning that it doesn't heat soak the cooler both
machines perform nearly identically coming within margin of error in terms
of performance but when we get to more extended workloads the performance Gap
widens significantly let's take a look at how
it works here is the CPU and this over
here is the heat sink all the heat the CPU generates is transferred into this
heat sink and then the only place it can go is radiating around inside the
chassis except for one exception it can
actually waft this Gap at the back of
the machine right here but that ain't much so it stands to reason that if we
can improve the ability of the heat sink to get that heat out of the system we
could improve the performance of the CPU but besides the low hanging fruit of
like slapping a water block on it with like tubes and a radiator hanging off of
it and calling it a day what can we do if we don't want to make permanent
unwieldy modifications well that I'm
glad you asked is where these come in these are thermal pads and they're
designed to move heat around this this one is really squishy that is a fat
thermal pad anyway all we have to do is slap these bad boys between the heat
sink and the bottom of the chassis and we'll turn the back panel which
conveniently is made of aluminum which happens to be great for dissipating heat
into one big heat sink as it turns out
all we need to do to make room for it is take off this insulating sponge right
here see you later easy peasy but how
does it perform well we already ran the benchmarks and the improvements are
nothing short of amazing in bursty loads
we saw essentially the same scores within our margin of error but on
moderate to Long benchmarks we got a remarkable result up to an 8%
Improvement even more impressive is that on the standard length multi-course C
bench we actually beat the MacBook Pro
by nearly 100 points our Theory here is that the delay between the load being
applied and the fans ramping up on the MacBook Pro actually leaves a gap in its
performance that the air is able to take advantage of with its beefier heat sink
which is the entire chassis of the device there's essentially no delay it
just immediately shunts the heat out of the case hence the win but that win
comes at a cost a dire cost Comfort
because the bottom of our MacBook Air Saw temperatures Rise by 7 1/ 12° to 47°
C now if you're an old fogy like me you might actually remember a story
circulating back in the early 2000s about a researcher who managed to burn
his uh how do you say delicate bits by
means of a scalding hot laptop well I'm sorry to say the story is probably bogus
because we couldn't find any actual first party reporting on it but
nevertheless that is initely a danger so
there's got to be some kind of Regulation around that right well yeah
lots of them in fact but the most important is the international
electrotechnical commission standards the safety standard for information
technology equipment AKA laptops is this
and it specifies the requirements for products to remain safe during both
normal operation and abnormal operation
the specs are pretty exhaustive so to
keep it simple the limit for metal unco or anodized for normal use contact is
55° C at an ambient temperature of 35°
to get this temperature without using a heated chamber we can calculate it by
taking the macbook's external temperature subtracting the room temperature then adding 35 so let's do
the math our office sits at a ball KN 20° so for our stock macbook's Peak temp
of 392 we subtract 20 for the room plus 35 bringing us to 54 1/ 12° that is half
a DE below the IEC limit and this right
here is exactly the trade-off that Apple's Engineers needed to make for the
MacBook Air to operate fanless hats off
by the way guys for hitting that Mark exactly doing the same math for our
modified version means that we would be 7° over that threshold and that might
not seem like a lot but the difference in temperature between threshold pain
and maximum pain according to ASM is
only 8° so that's from 48 to 56° we do
have some leeway here because the numbers that we calculated are at an
unreasonable ambient temperature at least for us but in actual use yeah this
thing does get uncomfortably hot with the thermal pads like I could do a
faster 30-minute blender render on my lap but I wouldn't want to and I'd wager
that you wouldn't want to either so where does that leave us well the mod
works it brings darn near MacBook Pro level performance to the MacBook Air at
a cost of like 50 cents worth of thermal
pads but it also comes at the cost of
external surface temperatures and obviously we wouldn't warrant your
MacBook once you've modified it in this way because we don't know exactly what
the long-term effects would be even if we think that they would be minimal for
a mod that is completely reversible though and cheap I don't see why you
wouldn't do this as long as you use your common sense and uh don't burn your junk
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