The M1 MacBook Air is already,
a really powerful laptop.
I've pushed it to its limits.
I've, modded it, air cooled it.
And now to squeeze every bit of performance I possibly can
out of the M1 chip, I'm going to water cool it.
And in this video,
we're going to see if water cooling is even possible.
And if it is, can we unlock the true potential
of the M1 MacBook Air with a CPU cooler,
meant for some of the biggest
and most powerful CPUs ever made?
And you know what?
The results were pretty surprising.
So let's jump straight into it.
Quick thanks to Private Internet Access
for sponsoring this video, but more on that later.
Okay, so this is a base model M1 MacBook Air.
No upgrades, just 8 gigabytes of RAM
and also the seven-core GPU.
And this is a 280 millimeter AIO cooler.
Now AIO stands for all in one.
It means that the water is actually,
self-contained within this unit.
So you don't need to do custom piping.
You don't need to fill the radiator up yourself.
It's all just ready to go.
You essentially just plug and play.
So first things first,
let's get this out of the packaging
and see if we can set this up.
Now, just while we're taking this out of the packaging
you guys might have seen a couple of videos on this channel
where I've actually modded this particular M1 MacBook Air.
So there was one where I actually added,
some thermal pads onto the back.
And the purpose of that is,
to actually draw all of the heat from the CPU
and the GPU heat sink inside the MacBook,
and dissipate through the bottom of the chassis.
Now, what I'm going to try to do with this particular AIO is
use a combination of those thermal pads,
hook it up to this,
and see if we can actually improve that heat transfer
and get it into the AIO,
which is going to be a more effective cooling solution.
Now, right now, as you can see there,
it does have some thermal paste applied.
So first things first is to actually remove that
because we're not going to be using that in this video.
So I'm going to quickly use some cleaning solution here
to actually get this thermal paste off
because we just want this bare copper plate
to come in contact with the thermal pads
I'm going to put onto the MacBook.
Okay, so that's looking nice and shiny and clean.
So now I'm just going to pop these fans
onto the radiator itself
and screwing these fans down is a really simple process.
You just need four screws that go through the fan
and then directly into the radiator behind.
One thing you also want to make sure is,
don't screw these screws in too hard.
Otherwise you might crack the radiator.
So I'm just trying to do them as gently as possible.
Okay, that's the first fan installed.
Let's get the second one in there.
Okay, so let's put the radiator off to the side for now.
And we're actually we're going to open up the back chassis
of the M1 MacBook Air,
and just see what we are working with.
Okay, so if we take off the back cover of this MacBook Air,
you can see, this is one of the MacBooks
that I've had modded for the last year.
So you can see the thermal pad here.
And obviously that just gives you
a bit of a better contact on the back chassis
or the back cover which is obviously solid aluminum.
And it just allows the heat to transfer
just a little bit more effectively.
So as you can see,
we are now swapping this piece of thin aluminum out
for this massive, massive CPU cooler.
So hopefully this should make
for a pretty good little experiment.
Okay, at this point, everything is pretty much ready to go.
We just need to set up the air cooler itself
and make sure that it's actually going to turn on and work.
This is going to be a pretty difficult little setup
because obviously these things are designed to be
in a case attached to a full desktop CPU,
not on a desk water cooling an M1 MacBook Air.
Now with these particular PSUs
they won't actually turn on
unless they're connected
to the 24 pin header on a motherboard.
So to get around that,
I've actually bought a cheap, little,
dummy, 24-pin connector, just from eBay.
This is going to directly attach to the 24-pin power cable
that comes with this particular PSU.
And we're going to now plug this particular PSU into power.
And if everything is going to work, which I hope it does,
if I flick this power button, we should see some action.
So let's get started.
Okay, as you can see, we've got some fans on the PSU.
The pump on the header has definitely just started
and the fans have just started as well
on the radiator itself.
Okay, so we are in business it looks like,
which is awesome to see.
I really didn't expect this particular janky set up
to actually work.
Now, typically when attaching this AIO cooler to a CPU
you would use thermal paste.
That's not going to work in this situation.
You might be able to see here,
that the heat sinks of the CPU and the GPU
are actually slightly recessed.
And that's why the thermal pad mod was so successful.
It kind of bridges that gap
between the heat sink and the external chassis of the Mac.
And likewise, I'm going to be keeping these on
for this particular video
because this is going to help me make contact
with the CPU and the GPU,
and the copper plate of the cooler.
Now, how am I going to make them attach?
That's a good question.
I'm going to have to have this particular CPU cooler
flat on a desk like so,
and then I'm just going to have to lay this MacBook
on top of it like that,
and make contact with the thermal pads.
So, anyway, guys
I'm going to do some benchmarks and do some tests.
I'm going to figure out a way to keep this
in one place while I do them.
But just before that guys,
a quick word from our sponsor, Private Internet Access.
In this digital world having a reliable VPN is essential
and Private Internet Access, or PIA, is the one I use,
with over 30 million downloads,
more than 10 years of experience in the VPN industry,
and 100% open source VPN apps.
So what is a VPN?
Well, VPN stands for virtual private network
and it encrypts all the data sent
between your computer and the internet.
When using PIA, your IP address will be hidden from websites
and your online activity will be hidden
from surveillance by your ISP
and network admins like hotspot owners.
And PIA has one of the strongest,
most battle tested, no logs policies.
So you can be super sure your data is protected.
You'll also get unrestricted access
to all of your favorite content,
anywhere in the world,
on any device or operating system.
And PIA in particular has a stellar VPN app for MacOS.
All in all,
PIA comes with way more customization and features
than virtually every other VPN.
And it's one of the few VPNs
that fully supports P2P file sharing and torrenting.
You can try PIA risk free
with their 30-day money back guarantee.
And if you click on the link below
you can get an extra four months for free.
That's 83% off and less than $2 a month
for the best VPN on the planet.
Okay, so here is how I ended up testing
what effects the liquid cooler would have.
I kept those thermal pads from the thermal mod attached
and simply placed the MacBook Air
on top of the AIO block,
making solid contact with the gray thermal pad.
This pad is directly on top of the M1 chip
as this is where all the heat is coming from.
And this particular thermal pad also has,
a very high thermal conductivity rating.
So it should transfer heat
into the AIO block quite effectively.
It's not as conductive as thermal paste,
but using thermal paste here isn't really possible
or practical.
I found the weight of the MacBook
kept it firmly attached to the liquid cooler block,
without having to prop it up
or put any weights on top of the MacBook.
Now, there are some limitations here,
for example, the orientation of the liquid cooler block
and also the radiator,
and also the AIO fan and pump speed cannot be controlled.
So it's at a default low setting.
But as you're about to see
none of this really makes any kind of difference.
Also all the non-liquid cooled tests were conducted
with a few centimeters of space underneath the MacBook
to keep the testing environment similar
to the liquid cooler setup.
So did the liquid cooler actually end up working?
Well, yes.
And it actually ended up working really well.
I ran the Endurance CPU Benchmark
which utilizes all CPU cores at 100%.
And after 10 minutes, I recorded the average temperature
of all the CPU cores combined.
The liquid cooled MacBook's CPU was over 40 degrees cooler
or almost twice as cold as the stock and modded MacBooks.
When running a Cinebench benchmark,
which is one of my favorites
as it stresses the CPU and produces a lot of heat,
we see similar results
when looking at just the performance cores,
which run much hotter than the efficiency cores.
This massive heat difference
can also be observed in the chassis.
With the water cooled MacBook chassis,
almost a massive 10 degrees cooler
than the stock MacBook.
Looking at temperature over time,
during the Cinebench benchmark,
you can see the stock and modded variance of the MacBook Air
reaching their thermal limit of around 95 degrees Celsius,
while the liquid cooled MacBook continuously stays
at a cool 60 degrees.
And almost instantly drops to an idle temperature
of 25 degrees once the benchmark is finished.
Okay, so this is interesting and all.
And sure the M1 chip is new now running a lot cooler
but how does this translate to real life performance?
Looking at the Cinebench scores, actually a fair bit.
The liquid cooled MacBook Air
keeps the CPU almost twice as cold,
and outperforms a stock MacBook Air by about 16%.
Although the modded variant is a close second
and arguably is the better choice,
because it's a much simpler and cheaper way
to squeeze out more performance.
Switching to rendering a five minute,
6k BRAW timeline with color correction
into 4k H.264 in DaVinci Resolve,
we also see a difference
but not as significant as the Cinebench results
because we're now using the entire system
not just the CPU.
Video rendering on Apple silicon is actually,
quite GPU intensive.
So we typically see GPU temperatures getting quite hot,
as you can see here in this screen recording
on a stock M1 MacBook Air while rendering this video.
When the liquid cooler is applied,
we can observe that the GPU stays cool the entire time.
And so does the CPU,
even though it's typically not
at 100% utilization the whole time.
Now, it's interesting to note here
that we're starting to see almost no performance gap
between the modded and liquid cooled M1 MacBook Airs.
One reason for this is they're both simply very good
at absorbing all of that heat from the M1 chip,
and either dissipating it into the metal case of the MacBook
via the thermal pad
or into the pump block of the AIO cooler.
We can confirm this,
when running the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark,
which notoriously produces a ton of heat
on Apple silicon MacBooks.
Once again, the results were very similar,
especially between the modded MacBook
and the liquid cooled MacBook,
which had almost identical performance.
Now I did run some other benchmarks
but they were all about the same.
So in the interest of keeping this video relatively compact,
I left them out.
So what do these results mean?
Well, in the grand scheme of things
a 5 to 10% increase in performance,
over a stock M1 MacBook Air is not that much at all,
especially because to get that extra performance
you have to water cool the MacBook.
And that is not practical at all,
and it's just not something that you would ever do.
But what liquid cooling does do is it gives us an insight
into how well the M1 MacBook Air regulates its thermals
and also how its performance is impacted
by the thin chassis and lack of a fan.
Now, I think it's fair to say
that the M1 MacBook Air does thermal throttle under load
but what's interesting is how little it throttles.
While under full load, particularly CPU intensive tasks,
you're only losing out on maybe 5 to 10%
of the maximum available performance of the M1 chip.
Now the keen eyed among you maybe wondering
why the M1 chip performance didn't increase
even though it had a ton of thermal headroom left
while being liquid cooled.
Well, this is because the M1 chip is limited
by how much power or wattage it can consume in total.
Even if I were to use liquid nitrogen
to get the M1 chip temperature down
to something ridiculous like two degrees Celsius,
performance wouldn't increase
because the chip can only use a certain amount of power
which is up to 40 Watts.
And this just shows how balanced the design
of the M1 MacBook Air really is.
Totally silent, very slim chassis, yet decent performance
and very little thermal throttling,
even when under full load and close to maximum wattage.
Sure Apple could have included a fan
or a slightly beefier heat sink
to squeeze out that extra 5 to 10 performance
under full load,
but this kind of defeats the purpose of a laptop
with the word air in its name.
The biggest takeaway for me from this little experiment
is how interesting it will be to see
how Apple develops super powerful Arm-based desktop systems
in the future.
They won't have to worry about cramming everything
into a tiny laptop chassis,
and the reduced heat dissipation
and restricted wattage that comes with it.
Which means,
they're probably going to be able to unlock,
the full potential of their Apple silicon chips.
But apart from that guys,
hopefully you enjoyed this video
and I'll catch you in the next one.