MacBook Neo With Liquid Cooling Mod Sees Massive Temp Drop And Huge FPS Boost
YouTuber ETA PRIME decided to find out just how much performance the A18 Pro had on tap, by modding the MacBook Neo's cooling. The machine is incredibly easy to get into, and teardowns have shown that Apple is only using a paltry sheet of graphene on the SoC that covers the mainboard, which explains why it thermally throttles during more challenging workloads.
ETA PRIME replaced the graphene pad with a piece of copper adhered to the chip with thermal paste, and a thermal pad on the backside ensured contact with the aluminum chassis. The best part is that after this upgrade, the computer closed right up with no sign of any modification having taken place and performance shot up by about 10% - 15%.
The he took things even further using a combination Peltier, liquid cooler that magnetically attaches to the bottom of the chassis. With this cooling solution fully in place there was a significant decrease in temperatures. At stock, the chip would hit over 100°C during a session of No Man’s Sky, but with the power of Peltier, max temperatures with the same workload came in at about 74°C.
So, what is the A18 Pro capable of when properly cooled? Framerates in No Man’s Sky jumped up from about 33 FPS at stock to about 59 FPS with the cooling mod. Other benchmarks give a more complete picture of the performance gains. Geekbench 6 shows an increase of 17.52% in single-core performance and an 18.6% boost to multi-core performance. Meanwhile, Cinebench shows a 23.5% bump to single-core performance and a 19.08% uplift in multi-core performance.
These are excellent results, but more intriguing is the increase in performance seen from simply switching out the graphene sheet with some copper. It’s a more modest gain than the full-blown active, liquid-cooled solution, but because it requires no changes to the chassis or extra equipment, it’s a more appealing option for those looking to squeeze extra performance out of the Neo.
It’s surprising to see just how much more can be squeezed out of the A18 Pro, and it’s awesome that with a simple mod users can get even more value from an already value-packed machine.
