**The Surprising Truth About MacBook Air's Cooling**

As we delved into the depths of our trusty MacBook Air, we were surprised to find that its interior was surprisingly clean and tidy. However, upon closer inspection, we realized that there was a crucial flaw in its design - the lack of adequate cooling for its processor.

"It looks like there's nothing attaching the processor to the back panel," I pointed out, "which should be the one actually cooling everything and dissipating the heat." Our team leader agreed, stating that while it wasn't sub-optimal, it was certainly not good enough for professionals like us who push our machines to their limits.

To rectify this issue, we decided to take a more...unconventional approach. "You know what would be impractical?" I joked, "that would be very impractical." We opted to add thermal pads to ensure the processor's shield made solid contact with the aluminum panel, thereby transferring heat away from the SOC and into the air.

But we didn't stop there. In a bold move, we decided to forego traditional methods and instead used super glue (MX4) to attach our custom-made heatsink to the MacBook Air's copper bottom. "We're wasting it right now for a nebulous YouTube thumbnail," I quipped, "but it's fine." Our goal was to harness the heat radiating from the M2 chip using the copper and aluminum heat fins.

The results were nothing short of astonishing. After applying thermal paste to our heatsink and carefully placing it in position with the aid of a custom-made bracket, we logged back into our MacBook Air and began benchmarking its performance.

15 minutes later, we had our answer: 8,398 - a score that was "basically identical" to what we achieved without the mod. However, we soon discovered that this was only half the story. As we continued testing with Tomb Raider, we found that the MacBook Air's performance remained consistently high, even under prolonged stress.

"We're still running a couple extra to see if this will eventually throttle," I noted, "but we are way past the point where the completely unmodified MacBook throttled." Our temps were also looking good, with the keyboard deck reading three degrees Celsius cooler than usual. But what really impressed us was the underside of the MacBook Air, which had a rough average temperature of 36°C - a significant drop from its original reading.

"This tells me that this MacBook is really close to having terrific performance," our team leader observed, "if we can do something that simple, there's no way that with a little bit of extra work they couldn't remain this good." While we wouldn't recommend replicating this exact mod in everyday use, it was an eye-opening experience that highlighted the potential for improvement.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's better this is the new m2 macbook air and it has some of the nicest looking hardware around however it has a critical flaw and in this video we're going to try to fix it apple's newest macbook is causing quite the stir amongst tech enthusiasts due to some let's say hot compromises apple made during the design process and to discuss i've enlisted the help of my upper management austin evans to bounce off so you spent some time with this as well um what do you think obviously the macbook air is not a replacement for the macbook pro but this is the best macbook i think for most people there's a lot of merit to that as i talked about in my last macbook video the air has been the mac of choice for journalists and college students since the second generation one in 2010 for those looking for a consistent software experience in a form factor that's thin and light to haul around while it's not ridiculously crazy thin or anything like that it's not the thinnest laptop in the world but i don't think anyone's gonna pick up this new macbook air and not immediately go nice but what about power and price apple claims 1.4x performance gains over the previous m1 macbook air it's worth noting that obviously this isn't quite an apples to apples comparison especially since the new computer starts at 1200 however at that price the spec that you're getting is hardly the one that's worth buying into so the base model air has eight gigs of ram 256 gigs of ssd storage and that that's not enough for 1200 so it's unified memory you need that ram for your graphics for your cpu for and as soon as you start rolling a bunch of tabs up then it has to start throwing onto your ssd which is actually a 256 gig single nand module which compared to the dual nand setups on the higher capacity ssds means lower bandwidth and in more demanding tasks potentially a dip in performance so you can't look at this as a 1200 system you gotta look at it as a 15 1600 laptop when the m1 pro macbook pro can go on sale below 1800 on some days it really makes you think the vast majority of people who are not heavy content creators or using some very specialized software that's gonna blast the cpu and gpu at 100 are gonna be better off with the thinner lighter and cheaper macbook air i think the problem is is that if you buy this and you want it to do all the things you can be a little disappointed but i think if you go into with the right mindset of this is not the pro laptop this is the consumer laptop i think you'll be completely fine but really what this video is about is heat and we don't just want to talk about it we gotta take action huge thank you to polyarc for sponsoring this portion of the video to talk about boss book 2 which is now available on the meta quest 2. if you haven't heard of moss it's a charming action adventure puzzle game that's hailed as one of the best rated vr titles to date and book 2 continues with its fantastic story following the main character quills journey to save the world from the merciless rule of the arcane not only is moss book 2 one of the most beautiful vr games ever created but its graphics and gameplay are specifically optimized for the quest 2. utilizing the system's dual controller setup players can intuitively multitask interact with and manipulate the environment in a more dynamic way and of course since the quest 2 lets you play untethered this game feels more immersive than ever before mossbook 2 is now available for purchase on the metaquest 2. if you're interested visit the link in the description it'll send you right to the store and huge thanks to polyarc for supporting what i do here on denki channel the new m2 macbook air might have apple's newest silicon but it's a limiting factor is its lack of internal cooling fan johnny i get out of here austin and ken are on the case keep talking i'll be right back at least one of us came prepared we're going to do science now the macbook air is great i think we can make it better is the lab coat distracting do you want to wear the lab coat the last time i took thermal advice from austin we got cancelled look you'll be done with all your tasks three to five percent faster three to five i think there's some diminishing returns on your plant buddy for some specific things such as gaming for long video rendering like you know really smashing that cpu in the gpu at 100 for extended periods of time you are going to see eventually after a minute or five minutes or whatever some drop in performance because it has to throttle down because it just can't dissipate the heat however what if we could fix that by taking it into our own hands and to do this austin resorted to let's say an old trick he experimented with a while back last year i was in the middle of an edit i was transferring like a terabyte and a half of footage my drive my external drive was getting hot so i zip tied it onto this thing and it actually fixed it so first order of business we need preliminary benchmarks to know where we're starting from first of all was a cpu test with a cenobench we were once just a single time with everything nice and cool kind of like that ideal scenario and then we ran it for 10 minutes straight to let that thermal throttling if it exists which it does kick in it dropped but not by any kind of crazy amount in my opinion and then the next thing that we did was we ran tomb raider we ran its benchmark mode a bunch of times over just to try to get it to thermal throttle and that's a much more demanding task it took about four benchmarks before it started to throttle down yeah each one's about like 90 seconds long so it's five minutes when you're really smashing that cpu and gpu with 100 load it gets toasty you've seen the thermal limit you just see touching the top area where the cpu is it's really hot which is why we need to fix it surprise surprise this thing looks hella clean inside okay wait hold on let me just drop my head around there's nothing attaching the processor to the back panel which should be should be the one actually cooling everything and dissipating the heat there are some thermal pads but not much it's very very minimal i don't want to say sub-optimal cooling because it is enough but it is not good enough for us we're not most macbook air users we're pros now you know what that would be impractical that would be very what part of this did you think was gonna be practical it is dissipating it's just not doing it in a very efficient way to do this right you would add some thermal pads make sure that the processor at least this shield that's directly above the processor is making solid contact with this admittedly thin aluminum but at least that's going to transfer a lot of the heat out of the soc into this where it can be dissipated by the air by your legs by whatever yeah but i'm wondering if there's a way for you to not have to open up the macbook not have to do any real work lazy way it is so time to button up our macbook and slap our heatsink on in theory oh wait do we have any thermal paste are we at a thermal paste right now that is actually a key to this is thermal paste i think oh well look i found some super glue look we got the good stuff got mx4 we're wasting it right now for a nebulous youtube thumbnail but it's fine super straightforward we're not going to plug this into anything we're literally just going to use the copper on the bottom and all these aluminum heat fins to try to just pull some of that heat that is being radiated by the m2 away i'm gonna just guess that this is going to give us a small but noticeable performance bump it may do nothing but i'm curious if in a pinch you don't want to have to modify your macbook you literally want to use an external cooler or anything like that if that makes a difference after bumping some fingers and marking our spot we applied the thermal paste to our cooler and now the fun part scientifically going to place this right about with the help of our custom-made bracket let's go we're good now okay all right let's log in and let's start benchmarking 15 minutes later the results were looking promising 8 398. is this better basically identical to the score we got without it throttling just doing the single run yes this solved the throttling sorry um don't you have that on at all times i'm glad that i had no doubt about that whatsoever cool like there's no reason why i wouldn't work it's just i hate that this stupid idea is actually look it's just physics so we're gonna again pull up tomb raider it doesn't really matter what game we're playing it just managed to see what the performance is when it's cool and it's running at full potential and then as it gets warmer and warmer how much performance you lose or don't lose long story short we're still running a couple extra to see if this will eventually throttle but we are way past the point where the completely unmodified macbook throttled we're now on test number nine and it has not dropped any performance whatsoever we're staying between 37.8 and 38.2 frames per second completely fine and our temps were looking good too the keyboard deck was reading three degrees celsius cooler but what really impressed us was underneath where our heatsink was um rough average of like the bottom and the heatsink itself is like 36. oh wow that's a lot of heat look this might seem dumb but you know what this tells me this macbook is really close to having terrific performance if we can do something that simple there's no way that with a little bit of extra work they couldn't remain this bit better i wouldn't do this exact thing because this is crazy and i don't know why you would want to do this all the time but i would definitely get the thermal pad mod going it's understandable why everyone's seeing all these performance gains by doing just a small tiny little mind so close to being flawlessit's better this is the new m2 macbook air and it has some of the nicest looking hardware around however it has a critical flaw and in this video we're going to try to fix it apple's newest macbook is causing quite the stir amongst tech enthusiasts due to some let's say hot compromises apple made during the design process and to discuss i've enlisted the help of my upper management austin evans to bounce off so you spent some time with this as well um what do you think obviously the macbook air is not a replacement for the macbook pro but this is the best macbook i think for most people there's a lot of merit to that as i talked about in my last macbook video the air has been the mac of choice for journalists and college students since the second generation one in 2010 for those looking for a consistent software experience in a form factor that's thin and light to haul around while it's not ridiculously crazy thin or anything like that it's not the thinnest laptop in the world but i don't think anyone's gonna pick up this new macbook air and not immediately go nice but what about power and price apple claims 1.4x performance gains over the previous m1 macbook air it's worth noting that obviously this isn't quite an apples to apples comparison especially since the new computer starts at 1200 however at that price the spec that you're getting is hardly the one that's worth buying into so the base model air has eight gigs of ram 256 gigs of ssd storage and that that's not enough for 1200 so it's unified memory you need that ram for your graphics for your cpu for and as soon as you start rolling a bunch of tabs up then it has to start throwing onto your ssd which is actually a 256 gig single nand module which compared to the dual nand setups on the higher capacity ssds means lower bandwidth and in more demanding tasks potentially a dip in performance so you can't look at this as a 1200 system you gotta look at it as a 15 1600 laptop when the m1 pro macbook pro can go on sale below 1800 on some days it really makes you think the vast majority of people who are not heavy content creators or using some very specialized software that's gonna blast the cpu and gpu at 100 are gonna be better off with the thinner lighter and cheaper macbook air i think the problem is is that if you buy this and you want it to do all the things you can be a little disappointed but i think if you go into with the right mindset of this is not the pro laptop this is the consumer laptop i think you'll be completely fine but really what this video is about is heat and we don't just want to talk about it we gotta take action huge thank you to polyarc for sponsoring this portion of the video to talk about boss book 2 which is now available on the meta quest 2. if you haven't heard of moss it's a charming action adventure puzzle game that's hailed as one of the best rated vr titles to date and book 2 continues with its fantastic story following the main character quills journey to save the world from the merciless rule of the arcane not only is moss book 2 one of the most beautiful vr games ever created but its graphics and gameplay are specifically optimized for the quest 2. utilizing the system's dual controller setup players can intuitively multitask interact with and manipulate the environment in a more dynamic way and of course since the quest 2 lets you play untethered this game feels more immersive than ever before mossbook 2 is now available for purchase on the metaquest 2. if you're interested visit the link in the description it'll send you right to the store and huge thanks to polyarc for supporting what i do here on denki channel the new m2 macbook air might have apple's newest silicon but it's a limiting factor is its lack of internal cooling fan johnny i get out of here austin and ken are on the case keep talking i'll be right back at least one of us came prepared we're going to do science now the macbook air is great i think we can make it better is the lab coat distracting do you want to wear the lab coat the last time i took thermal advice from austin we got cancelled look you'll be done with all your tasks three to five percent faster three to five i think there's some diminishing returns on your plant buddy for some specific things such as gaming for long video rendering like you know really smashing that cpu in the gpu at 100 for extended periods of time you are going to see eventually after a minute or five minutes or whatever some drop in performance because it has to throttle down because it just can't dissipate the heat however what if we could fix that by taking it into our own hands and to do this austin resorted to let's say an old trick he experimented with a while back last year i was in the middle of an edit i was transferring like a terabyte and a half of footage my drive my external drive was getting hot so i zip tied it onto this thing and it actually fixed it so first order of business we need preliminary benchmarks to know where we're starting from first of all was a cpu test with a cenobench we were once just a single time with everything nice and cool kind of like that ideal scenario and then we ran it for 10 minutes straight to let that thermal throttling if it exists which it does kick in it dropped but not by any kind of crazy amount in my opinion and then the next thing that we did was we ran tomb raider we ran its benchmark mode a bunch of times over just to try to get it to thermal throttle and that's a much more demanding task it took about four benchmarks before it started to throttle down yeah each one's about like 90 seconds long so it's five minutes when you're really smashing that cpu and gpu with 100 load it gets toasty you've seen the thermal limit you just see touching the top area where the cpu is it's really hot which is why we need to fix it surprise surprise this thing looks hella clean inside okay wait hold on let me just drop my head around there's nothing attaching the processor to the back panel which should be should be the one actually cooling everything and dissipating the heat there are some thermal pads but not much it's very very minimal i don't want to say sub-optimal cooling because it is enough but it is not good enough for us we're not most macbook air users we're pros now you know what that would be impractical that would be very what part of this did you think was gonna be practical it is dissipating it's just not doing it in a very efficient way to do this right you would add some thermal pads make sure that the processor at least this shield that's directly above the processor is making solid contact with this admittedly thin aluminum but at least that's going to transfer a lot of the heat out of the soc into this where it can be dissipated by the air by your legs by whatever yeah but i'm wondering if there's a way for you to not have to open up the macbook not have to do any real work lazy way it is so time to button up our macbook and slap our heatsink on in theory oh wait do we have any thermal paste are we at a thermal paste right now that is actually a key to this is thermal paste i think oh well look i found some super glue look we got the good stuff got mx4 we're wasting it right now for a nebulous youtube thumbnail but it's fine super straightforward we're not going to plug this into anything we're literally just going to use the copper on the bottom and all these aluminum heat fins to try to just pull some of that heat that is being radiated by the m2 away i'm gonna just guess that this is going to give us a small but noticeable performance bump it may do nothing but i'm curious if in a pinch you don't want to have to modify your macbook you literally want to use an external cooler or anything like that if that makes a difference after bumping some fingers and marking our spot we applied the thermal paste to our cooler and now the fun part scientifically going to place this right about with the help of our custom-made bracket let's go we're good now okay all right let's log in and let's start benchmarking 15 minutes later the results were looking promising 8 398. is this better basically identical to the score we got without it throttling just doing the single run yes this solved the throttling sorry um don't you have that on at all times i'm glad that i had no doubt about that whatsoever cool like there's no reason why i wouldn't work it's just i hate that this stupid idea is actually look it's just physics so we're gonna again pull up tomb raider it doesn't really matter what game we're playing it just managed to see what the performance is when it's cool and it's running at full potential and then as it gets warmer and warmer how much performance you lose or don't lose long story short we're still running a couple extra to see if this will eventually throttle but we are way past the point where the completely unmodified macbook throttled we're now on test number nine and it has not dropped any performance whatsoever we're staying between 37.8 and 38.2 frames per second completely fine and our temps were looking good too the keyboard deck was reading three degrees celsius cooler but what really impressed us was underneath where our heatsink was um rough average of like the bottom and the heatsink itself is like 36. oh wow that's a lot of heat look this might seem dumb but you know what this tells me this macbook is really close to having terrific performance if we can do something that simple there's no way that with a little bit of extra work they couldn't remain this bit better i wouldn't do this exact thing because this is crazy and i don't know why you would want to do this all the time but i would definitely get the thermal pad mod going it's understandable why everyone's seeing all these performance gains by doing just a small tiny little mind so close to being flawless