Hey welcome to another Flarecorp Media Tech Video.
On today's video, I have a dbrand skin in this.
The question that I had in my mind was, does a skin on your ultra thin laptop cause thermal
issues?
I looked online to see if anyone had done any tests.
There were lots of questions asked.
I saw one test, a video, and he used a thermal camera to measure the heat output along the
hottest part here, with and without the skin.
And that's fine, but my question was, maybe the internals are thermal throttling to compensate.
So maybe the exterior isn't changing at all, but your performance is slightly different.
Apparently this is a stupid question based on the internet, aside from that, because
every other place I looked, they said you know what, it's so small, it's not going to
make a difference and they are probably right.
I even went out so far as to reach out to dbrand themselves to see if they had anything
on it and if I pull up their email here real fast, it says "Hey Human", they always act
like they're robots but anyway.
"Hey Human, thanks for reaching out.
We can confirm that there would be no difference between a skinned device and a naked one in
terms of heat displacement.
You can rest assured no issue will come of applying it to a device.
Furthermore, the material itself is only .23 mm thin, meaning there is simply not enough
material thickness to retain heat."
In all honesty, we're probably, my guess if this actually was a thing, would just be a
tiny, tiny bit of performance.
But, that's what I'm curious about.
Is there that tiny bit of thermal throttling or not.
So you guys are probably at home saying 'Jason, you're an idiot.
Of course there's not going to be'.
But, I couldn't find an official test out there so let's do it.
I've already ran the tests.
I did 10 tests each and we're going to do an average.
I did a test of Cinebench, both the CPU and the OpenGL test.
I did Geekbench and Unigine Heaven.
So now there's nothing left to do, but put on the dbrand skin.
I suck at putting on these type of things.
I hate it putting the screen protector on phones.
It just drives me bonkers because if it's not perfect it just irritates me.
Now I don't have to worry about there being a fleck of dust under this that I will be
able to see, but I did get the one with the Apple cutout and so if that's not lined up
correctly I'm going to probably freak out.
So, alright, here we go.
So we get this.
So I went with, oh, just a little Styrofoam, just one peanut.
Ok, so, I went with a top and bottom.
I didn't do the track pad.
So on the bottom I went with the titanium, I think it is.
So it kind of has a brushed metal finish.
And then on the top I went with the dark grey carbon fiber texture.
So I have my cleaning cloth here.
So they say to remove all the dust and fingerprints cause it will affect how it sticks down.
The thing that prompted me to get a skin is I got one little scratch here from the zipper
of my bag and of course 'oh it's not perfect anymore and I don't want to see anymore scratches'.
My old light grey MacBook, you couldn't see scratches at all, but this space grey, the
darker one, really shows them.
So, it says to completely take the whole thing off.
And I've already, *tsk* I've already dented it.
Good god.
God I hate this.
So why am I doing it?
I don't know.
So it says to reapply showing just the top so that way I can come around here...
Boy that looks like crap.
Look what I did!
Just taking the paper off.
So it says to align it perfectly straight along the top.
Okay.
It says to peel it off again, slide the paper down and just work on the side.
So the right side down here.
So make sure that that's good.
That looks pretty good there.
Boy that looks like crap.
Heh, I'm sweating.
*laughing* Now it says to just.. to slide the paper down bit by bit working my way down,
working out bubbles as you go.
Get that straight.
Ok, there that piece finally has some adhesion.
*tsk* That's going to bug the crap out of me.
I wonder if they have like a money back guarantee.
'If you bend your dbrand skin while taking the paper off, we'll send you a new one'.
Constantly focusing on the edges.
There's a big ol' bubble.
Ok, that went away.
Boy that looks like crap.
Arg.
Ok, I want to see this Apple logo.
I'm tired of waiting.
Ok, I guess that went on okay.
These type of procedures are not for OCD individuals.
I don't have that much OCD, but if you have to stare at something for the next year plus,
you want it to look good right?
We'll just get rid of that.
Alright!
They didn't lie when they said it's a custom cut fit.
So now I just kind of smooth it out.
Let me show you that scratch there.
I don't know if you can see it.
So that right there is where I bent it while pulling the paper off and it is going to drive
me nuts.
Alright, so for the bottom piece, clean it off.
Not all MacBooks have this, but there's a little edge piece here, a hinge piece I guess
they call it.
So that goes on first.
Peel that off.
There, I think that was the hard part getting the first lip down.
Personally, I'm not sure this is necessary, but oh well.
Oh, it overhangs just a tiny bit, but it shouldn't matter.
Oh, it does! *laughing* I'm just going to nip that piece off.
There.
Ok, it says to do it, same thing.
Let's not damage it this time.
Peel a little more gently.
Place it below the holes.
It has an interesting smell, really.
I think I had a nightmare about this.
So we push in the middle and not those corners.
We're going to need the blow drier to get those corners down.
Slide down, covering the feet.
Make sure that's still lined up.
Alright, now I'm going to pull it all the way out and make sure it lines up over those
feet.
Ok, so we can go ahead and do the middle, again leaving those corner edges free.
So now it says, picking a corner, we're going to heat the edge and curl it around the slight
curve here.
So we'll heat it up.
Oops.
Ok, let's try that again.
*laughing* Boy it really, yeah, it starts shrink wrapping.
Eek.
Eek, eek, eek, eek!
Yeah, there you go.
You can see it really curves around that pretty nicely.
Now there's nothing left to do but run those tests again and let you know the results.
Alright, well the tests are in and as you can see from the numbers showing on the screen
right now, yeah, there's no difference at all.
Any differences showing are margin of error.
If I had ran it 10 different times with the temperature in the room just a little bit
different, I would have gotten different numbers, but they're so close that, no, as many of
you have said online and are probably thinking as you watch this, putting a skin on your
laptop does not affect the thermals.
But hey, we needed to check you know because that's just what science is.
You have a question and you need to go find the answers.
So hopefully if any of you were curious like I was, we got your question answered.
No, it's ok to put a skin on there.
You're not going to see any thermals affected because of it.
I do a variety of videos on this channel.
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Thanks for watching.