can we fix or improve the m2 macbook air's thermal throttling issue well
today we're gonna try it out with these guys right here this is a thermal pad
and we have a set of them and this is gonna allow us to help transfer the heat
from the m2 chip faster away from it and into the chassis itself now in our
previous video we did a full teardown we showed off the chip and we showed off
the metal casing and shielding the apple has on this macbook and people reached
out and said this is not a vapor chamber this is simply shielding for all of
those sensitive components and we saw in our thermal test how hot that cpu got
how quick he heated up and that most of the heat was concentrated right there in
the center using our thermal camera now we also got some benchmarks we know how
much it throttles and how fast it throttles and also some real world
testing so let's go ahead and open this thing up so we can do this easy and
simple and cheap modification i'll go ahead and link those thermal pads on
amazon down in the video description now as i unscrew these four simple bolts on
the m2 macbook air i have to tell you about our giveaway because we're gonna
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button now this case is almost removed we got to pull back here all right there
it is and as you can see this is kind of marked up already
now we've done our thermal testing and some people were saying well if you
already took it apart uh you're going to mess it up and it's going to thermal
throughout the way more well ours actually performs slightly better than
other reviewers that we've seen so maybe we actually improved it before we even
do this test let's go ahead and grab our first chunk now we actually used these
in our previous video for the m1 macbook air
and we're going to reuse them just because other ones are taking too long
to come in but you can order a larger sheet and then have it be perfectly cut
to size for this and we'll put the second one right here and these are just
designed to grab heat quickly and disperse it and i have a couple scrap
pieces
that we pre-cut that will fit perfectly bam right there
so we have this whole section covered over here and you guys see here i have
nothing now underneath this section there is actually no motherboard at all
which is what we found in our teardown so the part with the motherboard is
completely covered here but of course if i had more thermal pads i would probably
just run it all the way across and now let's go and see if we can close this
cover these are a little bit on the thicker side they do have thinner ones
so i'd probably buy a long thinner sheet if you're going to do this yourself all
right one side went in there goes the other side wow okay that is perfect
thankfully everything works the machine is running and before we do our
cinebench test i'm going to go ahead and open up adobe lightroom classic uh we've
already done a run before we did this mod we didn't show it off in our thermal
comparison and we're just going to go ahead and do
another one of these exports and see if we have any improvement and bam let's
hit our export for these 50 edited 42 megapixel images all right we're one
minute into this export and our temps are pretty low now one thing is this is
using both the cpu and the graphics it's close to maxing out the graphics and the
cpu right now it's kind of bouncing between 24 23 they'll go 70 80 percent
so the temps kind of go up and then they drop down but it does seem to be running
uh cooler than it did last time and with that it is definitely moving faster so
we are getting some good improvements we're at a minute and 50 seconds we are
almost done now oh okay
okay um
yes now this is we just did one run that took a minute and 56 seconds to
export these 50 images now the m2 macbook pro with the active cooling fan
takes two minutes consistently to run this export now that is taking longer
i don't know if it does throttle slightly but we do know with that
machine even under cinebench it does throttle at first because apple waits
way too long to crank up that fan it's like over 100 degrees by the time it
cranks it up whereas here the heat is getting taken from that chip through the
thermal paste and then through that metal and then into those pads and
spread it out so that literally did that faster now wait until you find out how
long it took before we added those pads take a guess down below how long that
took all right this one took a minute and 56 seconds with a thermal mod fix
and then without it it took two minutes and 55 seconds now that is crazy fast i
want to pick this up and feel i definitely feel some heat on the
bottom and that was literally less than a two minute render so that seems to be
working surprisingly well so it must have not throttled at all
whereas the m2 macbook pro does throttle a little bit before the fan kicks up and
then the one without this thermofix definitely was throttling when we were
you know hitting the cpu 80 and the gpu we were kind of surprised i mean that
definitely got slower than two minutes at that 255 mark so wow okay very
impressive a bigger difference than i expected and now let's go ahead and run
cinebench the first run i'm not gonna have my cpu frequency and wattage
monitoring software open uh last time we did a single run just the same way
and it took just 28 seconds to hit 108 degrees let's see how it does this time
99 100 after 40 seconds 101 still getting hot pretty quick now of
course that chip is getting saturated very
quickly that is where our temperature sensor is at and then that heat is going
to get drawn out so looks like we're at almost a minute now we still have not
hit 108 degrees we're hitting 104 and now still pretty dang hot and bam we
just hit 180 degrees took about a minute and 23 seconds compared to 28 seconds of
course this is maxing out our cpu so if you're doing things that do max it out
and it cools down a bit you will avoid hitting those really high temps and look
at that score right there 8 684
that is incredible itch that beats out of course
the original run that we had of 85 51 which already was much higher than the
8200 that luke miani got and other people got lower scores proving that our
we did not damage ours by taking it apart but that literally not only beat
that that also beats our m2 macbook pro we just retested it just to make sure it
was sitting there on the desk not being touched all day in an ac room cool we
ran it once and it got 85 57 and this with a thermal mod just got 8 684
very very good results now last time we did a bunch of runs so i'm gonna do it
the same exact way this time and we'll see what the difference is in
performance after each consecutive run and how fast it drops off round number
two we're 8619 still
last time our second run was 8 351. 84.95
we're slowing down a little bit but it is still almost at the point of the best
score we got and still way better than luke miani's macbook stock run 4 is 8
240. that is still it they believe better
than luke miani's very first run and defeating the 7792
that we got without the thermal fix 8151 now for our fifth run we've been running
close to 10 minutes now compared to 7542 without the thermal fix guys
this is going even better than i expected i'm pretty impressed
8072 compared to 7454 i wonder if we can maintain above 8 000
that would be crazy now i do see that our frequency does start slowing down it
is of course doing better than it did before and our wattage is running higher
whereas before it got all the way down to like 9 watts where it would still
perform decently but put out a lot less heat
8056 i thought it was gonna dip under but it didn't compared to
last time instead of 8056 thousand three hundred and thirty on
that run so we're on our eighth run now and a lot of people did three four runs
we're on our eighth run it's been about 15 minutes
and the performance is still doing great uh it's doing
similar to what a lot of people got just out of the box so it's very impressive
with very little drop so if some people got for example luke i know he got 8200
at its best from a cold start first run and we're still at 8056
after 15 minutes of hammering the cpu that is awesome all right bam we got
7738 we did dip below
uh the 8 000 which would have been amazing but that was actually the run
that got the lowest score previously in our series 7 295 and then it went up by
a little bit so it seems like after about 15 minutes or so
that's when it finally gets saturated and when you get the first big dip in
performance compared to before where we would see a dip like that even on the
second run so we're almost done with our very extended testing
and it looks like we're getting 47 degrees celsius right here now that was
the peak that i saw previously but this time it just looks like it's
more spread out along the chassis even up here to the corner top left so
we are getting a lot more spread of that heat uh compared to before and then
let's take a look at the bottom here 47 degrees celsius as well
so what i heard is that 50 is kind of the legal limit because you can get
burned uh so thankfully we're not at that 50 yet and the macbook does start
to throttle itself we ended up with 2.65 gigahertz
on that last run just like we did the first time and our final run was 7619
compared to 7302 so that is when the macbook is
completely heat soaked those pads are heat soaked the actual chassis is as
well but if you didn't count those last couple of rounds that brought us closer
to 20 minutes of testing the first 15 were phenomenal we stayed above 8 000
compared to before that it was like three four minutes and we're already
just crashing in performance so very very good results way better than i
expected so that was testing the cpu what about the graphics well now we're
going to run 3d marks wildlife extreme stress test this is going to take 20
minutes and it's going to map out the results and we can directly compare
to not having this thermal pad how high our scores are and how long it takes to
drop off and then get heat soaked so let's go ahead and get started all right
we are done and the results are fascinating now right out of the gate
our stability is actually lower than it was before
and that is because we had high scores and then after it got heat soaked at the
end it dropped down but when we look at this actual chart
look how stable it is for the first seven minutes it didn't go down at all
and our seventh run was 5618 whereas before we were at 4473
a massive difference now here is a screenshot of our run before and what
you see is that on our fourth run it starts going down and our fifth run was
a huge nose dive in performance down to 4329
here on our fifth run we're still at 5631
and then if we scroll all the way over here we had a little bit of weirdness
going to the 10th run we actually didn't notice but our battery is getting really
low and then on the 10th run or 10th or 11th round we plugged it in you see bam
the score starts shooting up again and it was running great so here
realistically we only see a big dip in performance close to 4 000
when we were running or at a4 about 16 or so minutes whereas before the four to
five minute mark we saw a huge dip which means that
one we can maintain 100 graphics performance for a lot longer and
realistically before you get heat soaked and lose a lot of performance you
literally instead of doing that the four to five minute mark it's about this 15
16 minute mark so you get an extra 10 minutes or basically what does that mean
three times longer of 100 gp performance before you just fall through with
thermal throttling so yes it definitely helps graphics as well so what do we
figure out overall well this really not only helps you get
slightly better performance and even m2 macbook pro in some cases it helps real
world tasks like photo editing that was incredible
and it just allows your system to have much better performance when you're
really hammering it for a longer period of time and so as long as you're not
doing like 20 30 an hour long renders an m2 macbook air with a thermal fix can do
just as good of a job compared to the m2 macbook pro that actually has a fan but
you guys let us know your thoughts down below make sure you guys comment if you
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those great videos right over there that's been max and i'll see you in the
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