everybody is talking about the new m2 macbook air thermal throttling but of
course we expected that and we knew it because we found that even the pro
thermal throttled under heavy load and that one has a fan but what's different
about this video is that we are gonna find out just how hot it gets we're
gonna look at the actual temperatures how long it takes to get severe thermal
throttling what the frequencies are doing and is there any cap is the actual
cpu slower than the version in the pro and with that does this thermal
throttling issue really matter that much should you actually worry about it well
let's go ahead and find out this right here is the base model that a lot of
people are gonna buy it does have eight gigs of ram 512 gigs of ssd and the
eight core gpu right out of the gate we're idling at about 34 35 celsius now
this is the macbook that we did do a full teardown on we're super careful
with it we reapplied thermal paste that performs the same as apples and we did
get a note from an engineer saying that the whole metal cover likely isn't a
vapor chamber but more of a metal shielding with a sticker there because
these modern electronics are a lot more sensitive than they used to be when
they're packed with so many different chips with that i have to tell you about
our giveaway because we are giving away one of these brand new m2 macbook airs
and i don't care where you are in the world i will pay for the shipping and i
will pay for the import duties or taxes all you have to do is one be subscribed
and two comment below on each one of our launch week videos each time you comment
on a video that gives you an extra entry to win and on monday july 25th we will
be randomly selecting a video on camera so make sure you guys check out that
video as well and before we start testing let's grab our thermal camera
and get a baseline of the temperatures now take a look at that
this thing is running pretty dang cool the hottest spot is actually on the
display at 33 degrees celsius and the whole base now is just showing
a nice cool blue so it is very cool at idle now the first thing that i want to
test is to see if there is any cap on the wattage or the frequency with this
fanless design so i'm going to be running geekbench 5 and i'm going to be
taking a look at the cpu frequency here as well as the peak wattage now the
highest that i saw with the m2 macbook pro was 3
316 megahertz and 23.78 watts so far it is hitting over 3
300 megahertz so apple did not cap it thankfully and as far as the wattage we
just hit 24.6 watts
basically within margin of error or difference with the m2 macbook pro and
the scores also look fantastic matching up with the macbook pro so if you do
short bursty tasks like most people do you are not going to have any issue
don't be worried but with that said what if you do want to do some gaming some 3d
rendering you say xcode photoshop stuff that keeps a bigger longer load on the
cpu and gpu and now let's put that full 100 cpu load on with cinebench now i'm
going to start our multi-core run just a single run right here to see what
performance we get for just a short render without that throttling test and
before we look at the frequencies because that does use a little bit of
the cpu to run that program now right out of the gate we're at 95 degrees
celsius right away 99 it's been what i don't know 10 15 seconds we're at
101 103 right there i should probably just wait till it caps
104 107.
all right it should stick 108 right there now people said that we were
freaking out about it hitting 108 with the macro pro because we were doing some
heavy ak rendering but it looks like we're getting the same
exact temperature now it hit that in what like half the run so this just
proves that this is the target temperature that apple is capping at it
used to be 95 degrees celsius with the intel max and then some of them would
hit 100 like the m1s now 108 is what apple is comfortable for that ceiling
and that is above boiling temperature that's crazy all right we have our score
and it is 8551 compared to our m2 macbook pro that
scored 8 600
that is a difference of only 1.7 which is a lot less than i expected
after we saw how fast it heated up and how hot it got so for those of you out
there that are going to be typing comments saying you did a tear down in
this machine you can't test that you're messing up the thermals well look at
that that is actually pretty impressive and it shows that everything's working
properly but with that said let's see what happens when we have an extended
load and what happens with the frequencies and our wattage i'm going to
start doing a single run right here and let's take a look at what we get right
at the gate we're running at 3.204 megahertz which is just like the m2
macbook pro and we hit a peak wattage of 22.4
we're now at 103 degrees celsius the cpu is still running at full blast all right
it's slowing down a little bit more now we're almost at three gigahertz the
wattage is dropping uh down just under 18. so we got 8357
for that run right there so slower than the previous run and i started it up
right away so we have a consistent load and now we're running just under three
gigahertz running at about 16 and a half watts now halfway through that second
run it dropped down to 2.6 gigahertz the wattage dropped down as well in order to
cool itself down it didn't want to stay at 108 bam
7891 for a second run that's dropping quick wow it's running at 2.2 gigahertz
now and only 9 watts alright guys we are on our fifth run and it looks like the
macbook just changed something up instead of cooling down quickly and
ramping up all the way now it is choosing to run cooler by lowering the
clock speed consistently we're running at 2.5 gigahertz at about 10 watts or so
which is actually pretty impressive it's a low wattage for that frequency
and we're going to get about 95 degrees celsius 94 now so it looks like apple
will not let it run indefinitely at 108 which is why some people are getting
not that great performance doing longer renders and comparing it to even the m1
macbook pro which we will be doing soon 73
30. wow alright so that was our sixth run
and that is already slower than the m1 macbook air doing its first run which
that also does uh slow down but i don't think as much as this one seven two nine
five it keeps getting slower and slower so i have to keep testing it seven 7302
that is our last run so it looks like the m2 macbook air loses up to 17
of its cpu performance after it settles in and it started out at 3.2 gigahertz
and then ended up at 2.65 once it was heat soaked and started
running cooler but slower so yes this does throttle more and it ends up being
slower than the m1 chip with proper cooling like in the macbook pro now with
that said let's go ahead and take a look at the temperatures now that we've been
running this for a while it looks like we're at 46 47 degrees celsius that is
pretty dang hot hotter than most laptops that we've seen it is starting to cool
down a little bit here uh and most of the temperatures right
there it's right where the m2 chip is we're not getting too much heat transfer
and that might also show that that whole metal shield just like the engineer said
is not a vapor chamber system because then it'd be more even across but that
is just more shielding now there is actually one benefit with this you guys
saw that the score dropped by 17 but our power usage dropped by more than
half so that trade-off is actually pretty impressive meaning that your
macbook air after it's gone through its hot phase will run cooler than the
macbook pro yes it will have less performance but it's also going to use
less than half the wattage for the cpu meaning that helps out with battery life
if you're pushing your machine now if you want to see us mod this macbook air
and add some thermal pads to transfer that heat and to see if we can fix or
greatly improve this thermal issue make sure you guys click that subscribe
button below and that notification bell because we're going to be testing out
that video and it made a big difference with the m1 macbook air and now let's go
ahead and talk about the graphics now some people have tested the 10 core
graphics but this is the 8 core with the base model let's see how much this new
thinner profile affects the thermal performance let's go ahead and start our
3dmark wildlife extreme stress test this is going to run for 20 minutes it's
going to put a full load on the gpu just like if you're rendering and using the
graphics or your gaming right out of the gate we are running at about 10 and a
half watts at almost 1400 megahertz for the graphics now unfortunately we don't
have any software yet that can read the gpu temperatures the closest thing we
have is our cpu and that is of course on the same chip
it's not as hot and it is starting to heat up after we've been running this
for a few loops and it looks like after four minutes we are getting some
slowdowns uh for the gpu now running at about a thousand three hundred and
thirty four megahertz and is going a little bit lower as well so i presume
now the graphics is over a hundred degrees and at the fifth run we're
nearing a thousand megahertz now and that is quite disappointing i was hoping
that a core would fare better and wouldn't throttle much but it looks like
it definitely does so this is that just has me thinking if the acor's throttling
this much what about the 10 core we might end up with very similar
performance just because of heat now we will be doing a comparison to the
highest spec m2 macbook air as well with 16 gigs 512 and the 10 core gpu so you
guys can look forward to that video we just hit
990 megahertz 989 right there so looks like after about 10 or so minutes it
starts slowing down even more we're using less than half the power that it
did initially as far as the actual temperatures we're
not sure but they did definitely drop from about 90 92 in the cpu to about 75
so once again after about that 10 minute mark or so the macbook decides hey let's
just get slow as long as we can cool down now part of that could be like i
mentioned about it just getting too hot on the bottom for comfort there are
legal limits i believe it's about 50 degrees celsius uh right now we're
looking at about 43 i did check about two minutes ago before it starts slowing
down under a thousand megahertz and it was 47
so it was getting dangerously close to the legal limit for surface temperature
which is why it's probably slowing down this much so we're almost done with the
last run so it's been pretty much 20 minutes and it looks like the graphic
settles in at about 950 megahertz and about 5 watts or so so
that is pretty low now here we see all of the runs we start out pretty strong
with the score 5611 and the few first few runs you're kind
of just losing a little bit of performance not drastic and then when we
get to the fourth run is when it starts taking a dive and that pretty much shows
that our system even though we took it apart the heat spreader the thermal
paste everything's working properly until it gets saturated and it just
falls off a cliff there after that massive dive it does recover just a
little bit but then slowly starts tapering down and it just continues that
trend so it looks like you can only rely on getting the full graphics performance
for about four minutes which are these first runs and then it gets drastically
lower our stability score ended up being 73.8 percent meaning that we got a 26.2
loss in graphics performance and this is only the eight core model that makes me
even more interested to compare it to the 10 core as well as the m1 macbook
airs graphics so now to answer the question we had at the start should you
worry about this does it really matter should people be freaking out well
what we found in our testing is that if you're doing a cpu based task that
really hammers the cpu and it is a task that is quicker than 10 minutes or so
especially in the first five minutes you won't get too much slowing down after
about the 10 minute mark is where it decides to really slow down to cool
itself down and as far as the graphics if you're hammering the graphics for
example gaming or rendering with graphics
then as long as it's quicker than five minutes it's also not that terrible of a
performance but if you're doing tasks that are
longer than that then you'll benefit greatly from the macbook pro and with
that keep in mind that these are tasks that are exclusive if you're doing
something that uses both for example video editing with tougher footage that
maxes it out or maybe 3d rendering both with cpu and graphics combined or other
tasks that time is going to get cut down drastically my guess is about two or
three minutes until it's saturated because you're hammering both of those
at the same time and we'll test some of that in our macbook comparisons
you guys let me know your thoughts down below did you think you're gonna get
this much throttling about 17 for the cpu and then about 26 for the graphics
we want to hear your guys's opinions click that circle above if you want to
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i'll see you in the next one [Music]