today I am taking matters into my own hands
with the new 2020 MacBook Air I personally really really like this new
laptop Apple did a great job they doubled the base storage as far as the
SSDs they lower the price by $100 they gave us a new keyboard
they put a new tenth generation Intel processors they have really good single
core performance in fact it actually beat out the rest of the MacBook lineup
everything is super snappy for regular tasks but when you start hitting it with
a heavier load both for CPU and for graphics it really starts to slow down
now that is because Apple still did not put a heat pipe between their cooler and
their fan so today I will be water cooling this MacBook Air and I'll be not
only testing on this solution which is not permanent more like just for fun to
see what we get but also much easier simpler solution to see what kind of
performance can we actually get or what could we have gone if Apple did a better
job with this laptop so let's go ahead and open up this box now I'll go ahead
and leave a link to the cooler that I'm using down in the video description it
is inexpensive gets good ratings and it's very slim over here compared to
other ones which is why I think it's going to be easier to test it out with
this setup here let's go ahead and slide this off perfect and let's go ahead and
connect the fan first and let me carefully see if I can place this and I
really hope I don't break this right now okay you got this place flat and we are
gonna need a way to power this cooler so here's my son's PC that he built with me
do you guys need a fun video to go watch if you guys are quarantine stuck at home
definitely go and check that out and now let's take off the bottom cover on the
MacBook Air thankfully this is easier than the pros but you do need a special
bit can leave a link for you guys to this awesome I fixed a tool kit alright
and here we go you guys see that little heatsink right there that is not
connected to the fan why not look there's some room here this ribbon cable
could be lifted or moved let's see here alright what kind of contact do we get
here we do have some contact actually yeah
not too bad and now is the time for me to tell you guys please don't do this at
home please don't risk your new MacBook Air this is just for fun I'm gonna put a
some thermal solution on here a little bit thermal paste probably shouldn't be
doing this but it's done no turning back now and I put a little bit too much on
so I am using my Apple card to get some of it off so what you get Apple for not
putting a proper cooling solution in here okay and now for the moment of
truth okay why is my heart pounding so so much is it cuz I've never done
anything I don't know either smart or as dumb as this let's go ahead and turn on
this PC take that off here how do I do this the right way I guess there is
really no right way to do this let's set the MacBook Air on top there try to get
a decent contact as I said before this is definitely not a permanent solution
and it's logging in is it really idling at 24 degree Celsius we haven't really
done anything yet but that idle is good no it is just kind of balancing on that
cooler okay well I think that's the best that we're gonna get it I have to just
put a little bit of weight on the laptop to make sure has good contact the first
question I guess is Geekbench v multi-core score oh it worked I didn't
see a temperature above I don't know 70 75 degrees and single core is pretty
close but as far as the multi-core score we just got an improvement of about 23
percent and it's slightly beating out the MacBook Pro now but of course this
test wasn't the one where it was just horribly sucking at Livanos where I'll
be sucking at it was cinema jar 20 which we put it where that's where we put a
full 100 percent load on the CPU and also gaming so let's take this a step
further all right let's hit CPU right there and
we just had 3.5 gigahertz going down a little bit
temps are going up okay 97 degrees Celsius okay
well now it's going down now that was almost 35 watts of power I don't think I
saw it go that high and we're running at 58 degrees Celsius
okay 62 typically literally as soon as it hit a hundred right there it would
stay at a hundred the whole time it would not go down the only thing that
would go down is the wattage and the CPU frequency so you guys might be let's see
we're actually running at 15 and a half watts right now and we typically would
be at around 13 or 12 in frequency it's running at 2.2 gigahertz where before at
this point it would be running at about 1.7 gigahertz now look at the
temperature right there guys 55 54 53 it looks like so the powers the wattage is
still going down we're at 12 watts now kind of like before it held the boost
longer but that couldn't be just power savings measures because our fan is
running at zero rpm it's shut off our temperature is basically a idle now this
is kind of what it runs at idle 50 degrees where before I'd be running at a
hundred and we're running at 1.8 gigahertz right now where previously
we'd be running at 1.5 that's kind of where it would stay up but at a hundred
degrees with the fans just going crazy now I wonder why it's not keeping the
boost higher it has so much thermal Headroom to be running much faster it's
just deciding not to let me do this let me plug in the power and don't do this
at home please let's see if it decides decides to kick up its wattage okay we
say you a little spike just to thirteen point two six spiked a little bit so
yeah if you have power I mean typically won't matter cuz it's gonna be running
at a hundred B Celsius but this time around it jumped up to 1.9 gigahertz
and back down one point eight okay so it doesn't care so basically this is just a
design of the MacBook Air and if the MacBook Air had proper cooling it would
be running at 1.8 gigahertz after your initial nice boost whereas now it's
running at 1.8 but completely silent and a 5th degree Celsius instead
and here's our score 1137 so about 20% faster than before keep in mind not only
is it 20% faster it's running at 50 degrees celcius compared to you a
hundred and in reality it actually could run out about 2.3 or 2.5 gigahertz
instead of 1.8 I think Apple just knew the things gonna get too hot and they
put in that hard limit because we're only hitting 50 degree Celsius has a lot
more room there to turbo boost and run faster but at least we know that if
Apple put in one slam heat pipe we could get 20% better performance and much
cooler temperatures which is good for long-term reliability and quiet fans but
they did not okay so now let's go ahead and run a gaming test this is Unigine
heaven using the extreme preset and in our last test it was really kind of
underwhelming even though the graphics card wasn't too hot the CPU was running
at a hundred resources and of course they're all in one chip so I'm guessing
how to kind of slow down so it's gonna be interesting to see how much faster
the graphics could run if the CPU isn't hitting 100 Celsius and so far been
running for about a minute and our graphics is at 33 degrees Celsius and
our CPU is at 44 degrees Celsius that is absolutely crazy okay in for some dumb
reason we look our graphics card usage is only at 71 percent 73 percent it's
not being maxed out like it is with other Macs and other Windows systems so
maybe there's another hard limit as far as the the CPU speed the frequency what
it can run at because it's not being maxed out and our memories not maxed out
either all right there we have it ten point three FPS so that's about a 15
percent improvement and once again the graphics card never run about above 75%
I have no idea why it doesn't make sense CPUs at 43 degrees Celsius graphics is
at 32 I didn't think it's just touching a heat sink to the bottom of the block
or just catching those two would make such a big difference but I mean it did
so okay well this has been a crazy experiment now let's get rid of
this let's put the back cover on and try a much more reasonable solution
I set the laptop right on top of that gel pack keep in mind I'm not telling
you guys to do this I really don't know if there's issues with condensation or
anything like that but we'll see what score we get here in Geekbench 5 we're
almost done here and okay 35 34 so single core still about the same for
single core test this thing is so fast multi-core we went from about 3200 to
3900 and now looks like we split somewhere right in the middle so yes
putting your laptop on something cold does help out it does kit help to keep
it cooler but not as good as actually taking it and water cooling it and let's
finish up with a quick test of Cinebench our 20 here okay 3.2 5 gigahertz right
now look at that spike and as soon as we start doing some actual work 3 gigahertz
the CPU is capable of you know staying there but we are getting some slowdowns
temps are staying decent now the whole chassis is actually cold from sitting on
this pad for maybe 5 minutes or so 82 degrees 83 84 still at 2.1 gigahertz
all the cores and now we're heating up 92 degrees 93 94 91 a little bit it's
going back down that's because our CPUs probably gonna be slowing down here so
we didn't hit a hundred we almost hit a hundred now it's down to 91 90 so we
went down to that 1.8 that we saw with actual liquid cooling we're going down
to 1.7 and I presume even lower and we are almost done here and basically the
laptop settled at that same 1.8 gigahertz as we had when it was
water-cooled but the temps are higher right now 95 but between 90 to 95
degrees and the laptop is running completely silent as well so it looks
like we got about a 10% higher score using this cooling gel packed with the
laptop instead of 20% higher when we actually had the water cooling block
hooked up and then we had about 5 to 10 Celsius cooler temperatures but on top
of that the laptop ran completely silent with this now I
probably still wouldn't suggest this may be because of condensation but it
definitely makes a difference in what I learned through all that through all of
this is that one the laptop wouldn't have gotten that much faster but it
definitely would have given you 15 to 25% better performance lower
temperatures which is a big deal especially for long-term and then also
quieter fan speeds as well so you guys let me know your thoughts down in the
comment section below is this a cool video for you guys to see did you get
any good insight from it and click that little circle above if you guys want to
see our full review of the macbook air if you want to see this compared to the
macbook pro in a ton of different tests we have some great videos for you guys
right over there this max and i will see you in the next video
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