Water Cooling the Macbook 2015 - Increased performance or dead Macbook!?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,036 words · ~10 min read
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now some of you will already know this but for those of you who don't apple
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will at times if they deem it necessary from a form factor or design perspective
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actually design their products to thermal throttle that is to say not run
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at full speed under intensive loads we observed this with the imac retina 5k
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and this is a fairly well-known characteristic of the macbook 2015
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retina which i have here in front of me
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the Corsair hx 1200i power supply delivers 80 plus platinum efficiency for
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quiet performance and Corsair link digital advanced monitoring and control
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click now to learn more it actually features no active cooling
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fans so when we start up a stress test you can actually see is what happens is
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the CPU goes to two gigahertz so that is
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full on turbo mode for two cores four threads CPU temperatures ramp up very
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dramatically so we're all the way at 74 degrees now and we're going to continue
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rising boom 80 degrees on that CPU within a matter of seconds and then what
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you're going to see is within a couple moments here this baby's going to go
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ahead and crank all the way back down to
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its stock speed of about one gigahertz and the temperatures are going to come
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back down to match
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so there she goes we're seeing a little bit of thermal throttling detected
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just a little spike there four percent
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now we're at 95 degrees on the hottest core
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21 thermal throttling
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okay there we go so that's the behavior that we are looking for after a short
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while she'll throttle down to about 1.1
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gigahertz and then she's gonna go a little bit lower down to about one
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gigahertz and the throttling disappears
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so you can see we're no longer throttling and temperatures drop
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dramatically but next let's have a look at a real world load since the ida 64
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stress test is not exactly representative of a
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well real world use case scenario okay so now we're running cinebench and
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here we saw some really interesting behavior so we were able to observe that
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same 2 gigahertz turbo at the beginning
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of our run here if you check this out which then slowed down to as low as 800
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to 900 megahertz by the end of the run and then what was interesting after that
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is that a subsequent run so a second run
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actually stayed at 800 to 900 megahertz the whole time and gave us a lower
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overall score which led me to believe
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that if we were to cool down
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the macbook 2015 retina maybe through water cooling means we could actually
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get better performance out of it let's
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find out
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so the first thing we want to establish here is a baseline for our worst case
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scenario temperatures for the device we can see that the CPU is somewhere
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towards the back center because that's where it is
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actually hottest somewhere in this territory but since we're not going to be able to
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water cool the top of it we're more concerned about knowing whether it is on
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the bottom or the top and it looks like it's right about here
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so we've come up with a solution maximum 41.1 degrees that's a good baseline
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we've come up with a solution that will allow us to water cool the macbook are
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we doing it properly is this something i would recommend no
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if you guys are afraid to cringe maybe the time to tune out is now but if
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you want to see us find out if improving the thermal performance of
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the new macbook 2015 will help it's
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also performance performance then stay tuned sekkas alright so we're
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going to be using um kneaded eraser
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oh let's hope that yeah that seems to be working we're going to be using kneaded
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eraser to plug up all the ports that we don't want to damage here is this a good
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long-term solution the answer is no we are not planning to run the macbook
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water cooled for a very extended period of time
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just enough to run benchmarks
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is that going to seal i don't know i guess we'll find out
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that six now my camera operator pointed out that
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the macbook 2015 has no fans
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and i kind of went yes that is a good
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observation but more importantly the fact that it
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has no fans is what's going to allow us to liquid cool it at all because most
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laptops and here i have a demonstration i can show you guys most laptops would
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have some kind of an intake where airflow comes in and then it cools a
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heating element like a heatsink inside but because the macbook 2015 retina
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only has passive cooling from its
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chassis by liquid cooling the bottom of it we
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should be able to cool effectively the internals
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of the device as well so for the hinge at the back
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i mean really a silicone or something would have been a much better solution
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for this i know this is not ideal for the hinge at the back we're just
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going to make a snake out of our kneaded eraser and we're going to kind of jam it
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in there and hope that the water doesn't uh doesn't get around it or anything i
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mean we're not going to be fully submerging the notebook or anything like
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that i just want to give it the best possible chance of
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survival that it can have given what we're doing
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to it so i've had a bit of a bit of trouble with the hinge here i need to make sure
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i hold the macbook still while not disrupting any of my other kneaded
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eraser and
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see if i can get that pretty much sealed here okay
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so i think that's good now i don't want the hinge to move at all
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oh which kind of means we're stuck with it in that position so now we're going
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to build ourselves a little platform to sit this puppy on
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okay the usb type-c port is the one i'm most
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worried about it's the most likely to short in the event of a
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problem and it's uh
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the one that i'm having the most trouble getting what i would consider to be a trustworthy seal around let's just go
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ahead and cake on more hoping for the best
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every day because we don't have another way all
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right now i can't put it down
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yuck
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oh gross
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that's gross i'll do it four times
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okay
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so we're getting water out of the fridge i'm going for the lowest temperatures
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that i can get on the macbook over there
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and now it's time for the pour
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oh well more poor
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i could have told you that
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now we want a fairly good volume of water in the pan i could have put it
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lower down and then we'd have been able to we'd been able to cool the macbook a
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little bit sooner but the reason we want that is we don't want the water to heat
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up right away
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so we want a fairly high thermal capacity for our water here oh oh you
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can see the surface tension of the water has
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actually uh let it make contact with the bottom of the macbook now
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now we're going to have to move fast because we're not going to have long here but check this out
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our memory has fallen all the way down to 28 degrees our CPU temperatures have
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fallen although the individual cores curiously are still reasonably high
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that's interesting that means this thermal sensor is somewhere else and our
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SSD has also dropped down to about 24 degrees so now
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and check this out we are turboing at the maximum two gigahertz in spite of
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the fact that we still have a stability test running
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so let's stop that and let's fire ups in a bench
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so our CPU temps are way down now to
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like 32 degrees that is much lower than
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our idle temperatures before we started here
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this is what we're going to want to watch here core speed
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as well as our CPU temperatures
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so we're quite a ways through our test we're still running at two gigahertz we
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haven't seen this before air cooled
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so it looks like that is definitely a thermal limit as opposed to a power
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delivery limit on the uh the broadwell processor inside the macbook 2015.
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look at it go it's not throttling at all it's staying
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max turbo thanks to better cooling
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now this will tell us something about the
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way the chassis itself is being cooled by what we're doing so you can see
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our max temperature on the top is almost 13 degrees cooler than our max
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temperature on the top of the notebook last time so it's not just the bottom of
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the notebook that's being cooled thanks to apple's unibody design that's
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intended to be used as a heat spreader that cooling is actually occurring over
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the entire body of the macbook and there
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we go we have our score wow
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look at that double the score from water cooling your
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macbook right there suckers
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so in conclusion would i recommend water cooling the
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macbook 2015 retina no don't be an idiot
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would it make it perform better if we actually had like
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it waterproofed and then if we had like tubes going in and out like if we had a
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cooling like a water-cooled cooling pad for it with like direct contact or
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something would it make it perform better the answer is a resounding yes
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i'm actually blown away by how much better that performed
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so i guess all that's left now is to throw
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a shout out to our bros over at dbrand canadian company they make vinyl skins
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and wraps for phones devices like this you may have actually
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noticed this one sports a carbon fiber dbrand skin on the bottom and a kind of
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leather finish dbrand skin on the top game consoles all kinds of good stuff
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like that they're reasonably priced and precision cut absolutely gorgeously
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beautiful if you want to check out any more like really nice glam close-up
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footage of dbrand skin on this particular macbook 2015 then you can
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check out our macbook 2015 review right around here but guys go check it out
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they've got a link in the video description thanks to dbrand for making
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this video possible thanks to you guys for making this video possible by
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watching it like the video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it just
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plain sucked leave a comment if your feelings are a little more complicated than that and i have a feeling some of
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you are going to have complicated feelings about water cooling the macbook
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and as always don't forget to also check out the link in the video description to
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our community forum where you could you can join and discuss stuff you can also
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buy a cool t-shirt like this one change your amazon bookmarks one with our affiliate code that kind of thing helps
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us out a lot and as always don't forget to subscribe and follow and all of that
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good stuff i can't believe this worked i can't believe it's not dead turn it
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back on see if it's oh is it dead no it's not dead okay wow the touch pad's
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like chilly
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17 degree touch pad suckas
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17 degrees