 There's no denying the MacBook Air 2020 is a pretty sleek little machine, except for one small flaw. Instead of doing what every other laptop manufacturer ever does and put a fan right next to the CPU where the majority of the heat is generated, Apple opted to put the fan day over yonder somewhere, leaving the CPU with only about 10 watts of cooling capacity to work with. How much performance did they leave on the table? To find out the answer to that, we have collected this bin of cooling apparatus with everything from upside down air things to water cooling pumps to this tray, which you guys might recognize from our video from several years back, water cooling the original MacBook 2015 by actually submerging it in water. Yes, my friends, today is gonna be a lot of fun. And it's brought to you by Ting. Why pay for what you're not going to use? With Ting, you only pay for the mobile data that you use, and you can learn more at the link in the video description. ["Skyrim Theme Song"] To tell if our wacky cooling solutions are doing anything, we will first need to establish a performance baseline, running our MacBook Air, which is a quad core eight thread CPU with no aids whatsoever. Just gonna fire up Intel power gadget here. And you can also see we've got a quad core eight thread MacBook Pro 13 inch running right next to it. Now it does run a different CPU, but it should give us some idea of what we might strive for with a properly cooled chip. Looking at the power draw of these CPUs, our MacBook Pro starts by shooting up to about 40, 45 watts, and then dips down closer to 30, 35, and finishes out the test there. So there's no way that a 25 watt peak CPU is going to be able to match that in terms of performance. But you can see that over time, we fall down as low as 10 watts. So I think we should be able to close the gap a fair bit here. 100 degrees. That seems perfectly reasonable. Actually, they both run at 100 degrees, just this one doesn't have a fan attached to it. 1,016 points. Darn it. About half the speed. Let's try and close that gap. Cooling method number one. A stand. Well, and a fan. Oh, and we're gonna add a fan to it. Put that there. Yeah, that's what the rubber chummies are on it. That's pretty cheesy. So between 40 and 45, we'll consider that baseline before we start each test. Yeah, sounds good. Is that reasonable? Okay. So here we go. 1,016. So score to beat. Conspiracy theory time. Tell me I'm wrong here. Apple has been sandbagging the performance of their Intel-based MacBooks for years now, so that when they announce the ARM-based MacBooks, they can be like, bam, it runs at like half the temperature. No, no applause? Nothing? All right. It is amazing how quickly this thing shoots up to 100 degrees, isn't it? It's pretty much instant. How can it not love itself if itself is so hot? Hey, got it on lttstore.com. Okay, you told me this was gonna work. I don't think this is working. We're down to like 11.6 watts already. So tell me, Brandon, where do you think the CPU is? I don't know, I just, in the middle of the PC. Could it be here? No. Or here? No. 1034. All right. Well, so much for this idea working. Hey, that's a 2% increase. 2%. All right, we're gonna have to get more extreme. What's test number two? Fan with no bottom. So this is kind of the test where like, if they just put a fan in there, this is how good it would perform. All right. With the unit open, we've got a great look at what we were talking about before. So here's the CPU right under this tiny little sort of a heat sink. So it's got some little folded metal fins over it. It's like, it's a heat sink. And then here's the fan. That they went and they put it in the laptop. So like it has a fan. They just didn't bother to have the fan draw air over the heat sink to cool the CPU before exhausting it. I don't think anyone has yet offered up a clear and believable explanation for why they would have done this. They went and they put the heat sink and the fan in there. They just didn't bring them together, you know? Run number three. Definitely going slower. It's making its way to a hundred degrees slower. Now we're having a look at the heart of the system here. That is almost 10 degrees lower. I'm not 10, but more than five for sure. Dang MacBook, you fly. Our package power consumption is higher than last time, which means I'm expecting better performance, but our utilization is only about 87%. And of course we did hit a hundred degrees here. So it looks like, it looks like anyway, that we are thermally limited right now. Why is it asking for 3.4 gigahertz? It's got to know it's not going to get that. There it is, 1088. Whoa, what's that? Another 4%, but we can do better. So far we've got about an 8% uplift in performance over our stock configuration, but that's without changing out our thermal compound. So that's going to be the next leg of our journey. We're going to go with Noctua NTH2 thermal compound. See, I'm pushing that down flat. It seems like it's not actually designed to sit right against the die. That makes no sense. I mean, it makes sense if you want the thermal performance to not be as good as it could be. Do you want to just put it back on and like give it a wiggle? It's not going to do anything because it doesn't go down far enough. See? So I can, I can wiggle it all I want, but it's, it can't go down any farther. See? Oh shoot. Are we taking a trip to the milling machine? I think we have to. That's fun. I knew you'd like that. Recess those a little bit. Please don't ruin it. That's the plan. I'm stressed out, Alex. You and me both. They don't exactly sell this replacement part on apple.com. Have you tried getting the Apple card? Maybe they have it then. Now it's touching. I want to take this nut right here that controls the depth. It's nice and snug there. We're going to back it off just that much. I'm uncomfortable. Yeah. I, I was not thinking we'd be doing this here today. Well, I guess I can't look, but I can't look away. Okay. That's lots. That's enough. Oh, I think that's more than we needed. I hate this. Why did I buy you this? You know what sucks though, Alex, is while we might be getting better contact, we now have what I would consider to be a significant amount less copper on the heat sink. Like we didn't remove much, but compared to what's there. The worst part is this was supposed to be the like reasonable do it at home option. We had no way of knowing that they were going to have such a boneheaded. I mean, I don't want to call it a flaw cause it's clearly intentional, but design decision. We use thermal pads because they allow for greater tolerances and things like surface mount components, like, like a memory chip to do it with a die like this, where the manufacturing tolerances are so tight. There's no reason for it that I'm aware of other than just not wanting it to perform well. I don't get it. Well, I'd say it's just cheaper for them to make. All they had to do was put a spring on each one of those screws and do a spring mount like everyone else ever. Give it a little wiggle wobble. Let's have a look here. Oh yeah. That is way better. Now we just need to be careful not to accidentally over tighten these. Cause that is a definite possibility. If it's not immediately at a hundred degrees, then it's way better. We're still at 17 Watts package power. Huh? And only 90 degrees. Really? Okay. So that actually is worse than before with the fan, but the temps were definitely better. So I feel like it might just be the turbo profile, but that's better than our first run, isn't it? Yeah. That's 3% better. Even if I'm not sure exactly what to make of that, the show must go on. So let's move on to our next idea, which is expanding the amount of cooling surface area that the machine has by putting a thermal pad in between this heat sink here and the chassis. It actually seems like Apple's using like a thermal insulator in order to keep the bottom of the computer cooler. So I guess we're going to have to pull that off first. Yeah. That goes for it. To be clear, the inclusion of this insulator here is not something that I actually oppose. The difference between, you know, something being comfortable against your skin and being literally burned by it is actually a surprisingly small amount. Yeah. Like 43 degrees is what you shower at and 46.7 will burn you in 35 minutes. 50 degrees will burn you in one minute. Okay. How many layers thick should we go here, boys? Sure. Why not? If we're going to wing it, we might as well wing it hard. These kinds of pads are hardly the most thermally conductive material, but they're obviously better than an insulator if we're trying to cool the CPU at the cost of the user. So if the bottom of the chassis gets above 46 degrees, then we're bad. If it stays below that, then we're all good. 40 degrees. Now that's a hot bottom. No, that's actually fine. Well, it's also not done yet. Yeah. But like 40 degrees is totally comfortable. Well, let's see how comfortable it is. 43 degrees is like a bit uncomfortable. 46 is different. That's not too bad yet. We are still under 75 degrees. What the hell? Well, you got so little heat sink area and then you go and spread all that heat out over this giant piece of aluminum. Yeah, it makes sense. It would do a little better. It did so much better when you just had the heat sink mounted properly and it probably has a tiny bit more mounting pressure now. 43.9. It's getting hot. It's getting hot. It's a hot bottom. Results coming in. Alex, you ready? 1155. We never cracked 80 degrees. That's a 14% improvement above stock. That is freaking nuts. Hold on, I'm gonna start it running again just so that it doesn't really get a chance to cool down too much. I wanna see what our hot bottom temperatures ended up at. 46. Yeah, you're in getting burned territory now. Yeah, that's too hot. That's not comfortable. Now like lots of gaming laptops will be hotter than that on the bottom. Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be like that. They could have put a fan on it. Yeah. That was an option. So much performance left on the table though. It's clear that to reach our next performance tier, we need to do something about the cooling of the chassis itself. That is where this comes in. Yes, my friends. Not that. I would like to do a recreation of our 2015 experiment immersing the laptop in water. I don't think we should do that at all. Well, what's your brilliant idea? We water cool it. So I got this little thing right here off of Amazon. It was $17. Amazon? Lies. Yes. You've been shopping on AliExpress again. It was $17 and it says laptop water cooling. That's it. No documentation. This is all that came in the box. I think you can do the job way better than that cookie sheet right there. Okay, I'm gonna go get water for this. Look, it's not like the thing died last time. Yeah, but like you can fall off your motorcycle on the highway and not die. That doesn't mean you want to do it again. That is a false equivalency. It wasn't even damaged. You could just, you know, slide along the road and be like, oh, it's fine. Next time I definitely won't turn into jam. So there's that. Really? Yeah. Huh. You know what? I think you might be right. This might actually perform better than putting it in non-frozen water. But we could also put it directly in frozen water. And maybe kill it. Big brain time. That's what the kids say, right? Big brain? Let's just, you know, have some safety here. Safety. I see. You didn't even catch my pun. Safety. I see. Oh, no. Oh, that's chilly boys. Is it zero degrees, give or take? It's hard to tell because of like emissivity issues or whatever. Are you able to see like a cold spot on the MacBook now? It's chilly. Nope. It's still hot. Huh. I mean, I'm sure the bottom is a bit of a different, ooh yeah. The bottom's a different story. What's the CPU temperature right now? 17, 16. We're sub ambient. Here we go, boys. What's it at? It still hits 70 degrees, 16. Really? Oh, well, it also spiked to 35 watts. Damn, that's way faster than before. Temps are 51 and our package power is over 16 watts still. Wow. It really is a shame how aggressively this thing gets power limited. Cause even though we're at 41 and a half degrees right now, it's still all the way down to about 13 watts package power. I'm disappointed. I thought keeping the thermals under control would net us significantly better performance. It's just power limited. Yeah. Did our pump just stop? Nope. It ain't flowing fast though. I was really hoping it would stay up in the like 15 to 18 watts neighborhood and we were gonna see like a really big performance jump. Yeah. Cause it's at what, like 48 degrees now? Definitely not thermally limited. Oh yeah. Like the top of this thing is 24 degrees. It's cool to the touch. So you can see this. Look, Alex's hand is actually warmer than the surface of the laptop. Hey, do you have less blood flow in your pinky? I mean, we learned a lot of things today. Just, I didn't expect this. I think that none of the things that we learned today we expected. The score is 1155. So there was no real benefit from going from just putting a thermal pad on the CPU that helps the bottom of the chassis dissipate heat to putting an ice cold water block on the bottom of it. That's disappointing. We didn't get the result that we expected or wanted but we still learned a lot today. One is that the MacBook Air is gonna be in a completely different performance class from the MacBook Pro, no matter what kind of cooling you put on it because A, even though they've both got four cores and eight threads, it is a different model of CPU and B, because the MacBook Air just doesn't have the power delivery robustness to keep up with allowing that CPU to really stretch its legs. Number two is that the cooling solution on the MacBook Air is even worse than we thought to the point where even just removing a little bit of material from the already minuscule heat sink gave us a 20 plus degree improvement in temperatures while under sustained load. Unfortunately, like I said, we didn't get the performance improvement that we wanted from that, but that's how she goes. Just like she goes into our sponsor, Ting. There's no contracts, no overage fees and no other carrier tricks. You just pay a fair price for the talk, text and data that you use each month. It's especially great if you happen to be at home a lot or on an irregular schedule, because that way you're not paying for mobile data that you're not gonna use because you're gonna be on wifi all the time. Ting gives you complete control over your account. You can set alerts and caps for every device on your account. And they've got nationwide LTE coverage on T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon. So they've got great coverage from coast to coast. Almost any phone will work with Ting, but you can check your phone's compatibility at linus.ting.com. We're gonna have that link below. And if you use our link, you'll also get $25 in free credit. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. If you like these kinds of wacky laptop cooling experiments, maybe you'd enjoy our five gigahertz laptop with like blowymatrons hooked up to a shroud, blowing through the bottom of it. It's a gaming notebook, it's pretty crazy. It's definitely worth a watch. Man, I really wanted to post some crazy performance numbers today, but we just couldn't do it. But it is cool. Yeah, it's a 10 degrees right now. Get it? It's cool.