i added a fan to the m2 macbook air and it worked way better than we expected so
good that the base a graphic score macbook air beat out the 10 graphics
core m2 macbook pro that comes with a factory fan it is just insane now in
this video i'm going to show you the methods that we tested and
five different scenarios for what you can do based on what you're comfortable
with and how that performs in cpu tasks graphics tasks and then our crazy tough
test that combines both now when i started this out i was just wondering
man there's this gap in the mt macbook air where apple did not put a fan it's
covered with a little heat shield but there's an empty spot they could at
least put a block there and then i wondered what if we can add a fan now
it's hard to build anything and this thing is so thin but we previously added
thermal pads and that did make a good difference so then
we came up with with vadim using this razer phone cooler that has
magsafe to be able to have it magnetically attach and detach
whenever you need it
and also cover right where that m2 chip is which is the hottest spot drawing the
hot temps right from that chip and blowing it away now in order to mount
the system i thought maybe i'll buy one of these old-school uh laptop stands
that have fans built in just to cut out a hole and maybe have it sit flush
because it does sit at an angle when you have it attached but then i was like you
know what let me just try it out and see how well it works by itself because it's
probably me junk and at least i'll just try it out but then i was really
surprised that it actually did a very good job and you guys are going to be
very surprised by the results now in our first throttling test the m2 air reached
108 degrees celsius in just 28 seconds of cinebench and then we showed you guys
how you can spend 15 bucks and add some thermal pads to transfer the heat to the
bottom case and that allowed the system to reach only 96 degrees in that same 28
seconds well in this video we are gonna have five different scenarios those
first two and then we're gonna add on just using one of these laptop stands
that have dual fans in it i bought this one at best buy for about 38 bucks they
have them online for about 24 on amazon we'll have a link down below and then we
are going to be combining the laptop cooler with those thermal pads if you're
willing to open up the cover and add those and then our final one is using
the razer cooler now for this one since it doesn't attach by itself uh without
you doing anything what we did is we took a little ring for magsafe so you
can add that to cases and then we cut out the thermal pad so that it would sit
flush instead of making an air gap on top of the thermal pad and then we close
down the case now this allowed us to have contact with the thermal pads to
the bottom and have it spread out while at the same time giving us a nice easy
magnetic connection for this razor cooler now this lightweight laptop
cooler only uses just over one watt of power so i had it directly plugged into
the macbook for example if you're doing like a portable setup and you toss this
into your bag now the razer fan on the other hand this thing uses over 8 watts
of power and it is very fast it moves a lot of air we'll have a link to this in
the description as well now when we added the thermal pads instead of
reaching 108 degrees celsius after 28 seconds it only hit
97 degrees celsius now when we used the laptop cooler and the thermal pads
together it only reached 93 degrees celsius so even better than the thermal
pads by themselves and then when we used the razer cooler it only reached
89 degrees celsius that blew my mind that's cooler than the m2 macbook pro
getting into the cpu test i used cinebench and i did 10 runs which equals
about 20 minutes now if you're doing something that maxes out the cpu for
more than 20 minutes well you probably should get the 14 inch pro but you'll be
very surprised by what we get here now right out of the gate our run with the
stock machine gave us 8 51 points which is not bad but even in the
first run it hit 108 celsius and it started throttling our thermopad mod
helped a lot with a score of 8684 because as soon as that heat is
there it can spread out into the pad itself and the case now using just the
laptop cooler by itself did barely any better than just the stock machine but
combining that with the pad and the laptop cooler gave us 8661
and the razer surprisingly gave a slightly lower 8640.
looking at the second run the stock m2 air as well as just the cooler without
pads went down a bit to 8 350 or so whereas the others performed great still
and using the laptop cooler and the pads even at the end of the run it did not
throttle whatsoever which was really impressive looking at the third run this
is where we start to get a big separation of performance the base one
went down to 7792 whereas even just adding the laptop
cooler by itself 24 bucks it got 8001 so it's already gaining our thermal pads by
themselves were starting to get heat soaked so we started throttling a bit we
got 8240 and the razor cooler still was
above 8600 and even at the end of the fourth run it
didn't reach 108 degrees celsius yet and it had not throttled which was crazy run
five the stock air took a big hit in performance while the razor was still
above 8600 which is shocking and the thermal
pads with the laptop cooler still performed great at
8422. so the razer is performing better after about 10 minutes of 100
cpu load then the machine did base out of the box even its first run ever that
is crazy now looking at run number six this is where stuff starts to drop down
now the thermal pad and just the laptop cooler they're staying very consistent
which shows that it's working because the numbers are also very similar for
the next run as well now on the ninth run two very interesting things happen
first off the thermal pad mod was actually slower than just the laptop
cooler by itself without anything you literally buy and put the macbook on it
by over 200 points meaning that that's after about roughly 15 or so minutes
those thermal pads are heat soaked and they can't do much at all now the other
one was that their razor was now slightly slower than the thermal pads
with our laptop cooler which is a lot easier and cheaper to do
and looking at the next one the difference was even greater first off it
looks like the stock m2 macbook air it settles in right around 70 300 or so
as far as the test after it gets heated up and the wattage drops whereas the
laptop cooler by itself runs at a high 7700 whereas the cooler with the thermal
pads has been maintaining 8300 for about four runs now which is very impressive
and beating out the razer cooler by about 200 points now then looking at our
last run which i think is actually the 11th run i think i added it in
we basically got things to stabilize so why would the razor do so well at first
but then slow down later well that is because it is mainly focusing on the one
point where our chip is and the rest of the system we're still getting transfer
of heat across but having the thermal pads with the laptop cooler not only
allows for fast transfer of heat from the chip and from that metal heat sink
and to the bottom but then these fans spin up and blow a decent amount of air
even though it's still quiet on the bottom just like a heatsink and
dissipate all the heat away from the chassis which was crazy because the end
result from our very first run of 8661 we ended up just going down
by less than 300 points for that 11th run a
very very tiny difference the m2 air out of the factory loses about 17
performance which is about two hundred and fifty points so that's a
big drop off what's even more shocking is when i tested out graphics i use 3d
marks stress test which runs for 20 minutes now the stock machine it
performed really bad the frame drops were really big after the first four
minutes or so it dived straight down and slowed down a lot when we added the
thermal pads instead of heat soaking after about four or so minutes it could
last about 15 which definitely could help for heavy graphics tasks
but when we added these two modifications the results were crazy
instead of the m2 air slowing down to 5 watts towards the end of this gaming
test the razer allowed it to stay at 9 watts compared to the factory 11 watts
at the start we got a stability of 95.1 percent with the razer cooler instead of
77.8 meaning that we are only losing less than five percent of the
performance after 20 minutes you guys can see the best score the lowest score
and then at this chart right here we had really good consistent performance all
the way through around 12 13 only after about 13 14 minutes we got a small dip
in performance and then it stayed pretty consistent but what really blew my mind
was the laptop cooler with the thermal pads
this is insane we have a stability of 99.3
percent meaning we had a variance of less than one percent throughout 20
minutes this is better stability than the m2 macbook pro with a fan and our
worst score wasn't even the last run it was loop number nine
5609 whereas the rest of the runs they're all higher which means this is
not going to slow down anymore even if you game for hours it is consistent this
cooling system is enough to keep it running at full performance all the time
and to prove that at the end of this 20-minute test
we were averaging 11 watts of gpu usage which is full
performance compared to 9 watts with the razer or just 5 watts if you have the
system just by itself stock out of the factory
that is absolutely crazy and finally let's get to the craziest thing of them
all exporting
video now with our m2 macbook pro we compared it to the 14 inch and we
exported 8k canon raw video now we didn't do that to mess with the system
we did that because we want to show in what situation the 14 inch will actually
be a lot faster because for standard 4k the results were practically the same
and when we did that that system and that fan that apple used it struggled
because this is pushing both the cpu and the gpu at the same time even though not
both of them are completely maxed out now with the stock system it took 26
minutes and 52 seconds to export this five minute project adding just the
thermal pads took 25 minutes and two seconds so almost two minutes faster
even though they did end up getting heat soaked now the laptop cooler by itself
that was 24 minutes and 30 seconds so about 30 seconds faster that's without
thermal pads just that already a benefit but combining both the thermal pads and
the cooler gave us 21 minutes and 51 seconds
that is very impressive and a good gain but what shocked me the most was the
razer cooler under this situation where we're doing both the cpu and the gpu
it did it in 19 minutes and 39 seconds compared to 2652 stock that is a huge
improvement now before i say the other thing uh why did it work better than the
thermal pads with the cooler well maybe it's just too much heat at that point
from both the cpu and the gpu this system is throttling just like the m2
macbook pro was throttling under that test it couldn't keep up even the fan
running at 7 200 rpm and in this case maybe there's just so
much heat concentrated from the cpu and the gpu that this thing can you know get
a lot more of it out and yes the chassis is hot but in the other case with the
laptop cooler it's still hot and it's slowing it down because of the chassis
temps now that 1939 is crazy but what's crazier is that the m2 macbook pro did
it in 19 minutes in 40 seconds yes the m2 macbook air like i said at
the start with the a core processor this is the base 1200 model
beat out the macbook pro that comes with the fan and the 10 core graphics option
now i would say even though this razer cooler did better for this ak exporting
it is very unrealistic um unless you have something else that could use both
the cpu and gpu maybe blender or maybe some other kind of thing
but this case it did better but for everything else we saw that adding those
thermal pads in the laptop cooler made a dramatic difference and even better than
the razer it's cheaper it's easier it's safer to do that so if you're somebody
that's going to do long renders seriously keep this in mind
pick one of these up we have it linked below or best buy but it's a lot more
expensive there
even this cooler by itself can give you much better performance in the stock
system but if you add those thermal pads it is such a great solution and then if
you're on the go you have the thermal pads with you you can leave this at home
if you want it will give you better sustained performance like i don't know
three four times longer sustained performance than stock
so with any of this it shows that the mt macbook air could have performed a lot
better if apple wanted it to and they made the most out of it so you guys let
me know your thoughts down in the comment section below let us know if you
want us to compare modded m2 macbook air against the m2 macbook pro to see how it
works in real life scenarios with real productivity apps
thank you for watching click that circle above to subscribe check out one of
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