It is no secret that Apple has always wanted their computers to be silent. Well, most of their computers.
There is even an account of Steve Jobs
crying in frustration; crying when he was told by an engineer that the Apple Lisa might require a fan.
But does silence come at a cost?
Is Apple intentionally reducing the performance of their Macs in order to keep them quiet and in order to compensate for inadequate cooling?
I tested this to find out.
This episode is sponsored by IFIXIT, "the free repair guide for everything, written by everyone!"
Macs are quiet because Apple keeps the fan speed as low as they can for as long as they can,
but look, you can't escape physics!
Have you ever noticed how Macbooks are always very warm and sometimes uncomfortably hot?
That's because rather than exhausting hot air by turning up noisy fans like other PC laptop manufacturers,
Apple just doesn't, so their machines naturally run hotter.
My i7 7700K iMac idles at around 57°C.
Now my PC, with the same chip, idles at just 30°C. That's almost half!
So yes, Mac's run warm, but technically other than maybe shortening the lifespan of your CPU, It's okay.
What's not okay
is if modern Intel CPUs hit 100°C. That is the maximum operating temperature,
and the CPU will actually decrease the clockspeed and voltage to cool off.
It's called thermal throttling and it's seriously hampers performance.
So I wanted to see, naturally, if I could get my Mac's to thermal throttle.
But rather than try unrealistic benchmarks that are designed to punish the computers and make them as hot as possible, I decided to try
real-world workload scenario, stuff that you would actually do,
To see if I could get anywhere near the thermal throttle limit on both my base model 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro
and my loaded 2017 i7 7700K iMac.
I first tried exporting a 4K video on my iMac in Final Cut Pro.
Now, annoyingly, the fan speed didn't even increase from the lowest rpm
until the CPU hits 80°C; and it doesn't ramp the fan speed up to full speed, which is very loud...
until 95°C. That is really hot!
However, despite getting balls hot, the machine doesn't thermal throttle.
It hovers between 95°C and 99°C while maintaining its full 4.5GHz turbo boost clock speed.
However, once I opened Google Chrome and played back a 4K YouTube video while I was still rendering,
temps rose over 100°C and the CPU down-clocked as low as 3.9GHz!
That is a 600MHz underclock. Ouch.
Since the iMac's CPU and GPU share the same cooler,
I thought I would try something moderately taxing on both: a video game.
I thought I'd play Tomb Raider in macOS and see if I could get the machine throttled.
Now at 1440p, Ultra settings, I was able to play for about 20 minutes at a constant 60 fps. That's pretty good.
However, temperatures finally overwhelmed the machine after about 20 minutes
and my frame rate dropped to an average of 45 frames per second.
That is a 25% performance drop. Not good.
Now, that's pretty bad, but on the MacBook, things get even crazier.
Exporting the exact same 4K video as the iMac is just too much from my little laptop to handle,
and not only does it not maintain its turbo boost speed which I think is 3.6GHz,
but it struggles to keep up with the 2.3GHz base clock speed.
And this is the entry level model laptop.
Have even hotter CPUs jammed into the same computer with the same crappy cooler now
I obviously can't add a fan or a heat pipe to my laptop
But I can introduce it into a cooler environment now my office air conditioning maintains a 74 degree Fahrenheit
Which is 23 Celsius temperature except for what?
I'm shooting its balls hot right now, but I wanted to see if the video would export faster
And if thermal throttling would go away if I put it somewhere
Nippy I have a floor freezer in the office that we store drinks in that maintains a temperature of 29 degrees Fahrenheit
That's minus 2 Celsius
so I did what any sane lucid man would do I put my laptop inside the freezer close the freezer lid and
exported the video and holy
Now the machine temperatures stayed in the high 90s still, but it never hit a hundred degrees Celsius
It never thermally throttled and it ran at 3.6
Gigahertz the whole time not only that but the laptop actually exported the video seven minutes faster
Which is a 39 percent improvement? Holy smokes?
Obviously putting a laptop in a freezer is not practical, but I feel like it illustrates an important point Apple
Simply isn't putting an adequate cooling Hardware on many of their computers and since Apple uses the same fans and the same coolers
Regardless of your computer's configuration, if I'm thermally throttled on the base model
13-inch MacBook Pro, it's surely. There's going to be throttling on the more expensive 13-inch MacBook models
And it paid more money for a more powerful CPU that can't even be properly cooled doesn't make any sense
Now look sure on my loaded 5k iMac the machine runs very hot
But thermal throttling is rare unless you're gaming that is or watching 4k video as you export a 4k video
but on the MacBook Pro
And I'm sure other models a Mac that Apple sells unless you live in the tundra and use your computer outside
Thermal throttling is very real your Mac might be silent, but silence comes at a cost
Okay, so while you maybe can't fix your Mac's crappy cooling solution I fix it
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And I know you will too good ifixit.com slash snazzy labs to let them know I sent you well folks
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