Mobile devices generally have one Achilles’ heel when it comes to computing power: thermal throttling. Outside of bulky desktop and server systems, chips have to run at a fraction of their true potential to keep from cooking themselves to death. The MacBook Neo, with its iPhone-derived A18 processor, is no exception. Since Apple’s budget offering first came out, though, there’s been an arms race on the benchmark sites to see just how far you can push it, and [Salem Techsperts] briefly claimed the accolade of ‘fastest MacBook Neo’, and of course provided a video showing how it’s done.
It’s hardly rocket science: you cool the chip. Outdoing Apple’s cost-cutting design in that regard is not difficult; you can evidently get notable performance increases just with decent thermal paste. [Techsperts] goes further than that, combining PTM7950 phase-change thermal paste with a peltier cooler to actively suck watts of heat out of the SOC, heatsinks that likely weigh more than the laptop itself, and an industrial air blower to serve as the highest CFM air cooler we’ve probably ever seen.
By this point it’s hardly a laptop anymore, with the logic board removed to sit inside a cooling sandwhich– water cooled with the peltier on one side, and air-cooled by the blower on the other–but the point wasn’t to have a light, practical daily-driver here. Apple already covered that. The point was to go fast. With 41.47% higher Cinebench scores than the stock laptop, and a power draw of 11W compared to the stock 4W, we can say he’s succeeded in that. Interestingly enough, [Techsperts] could not best the top 3DMark score, in spite of his Cinebench success. It’s possible he just lost the silicon lottery when it comes to the GPU section of this particular A18 chip, but if you have another theory, be sure to let us know in the comments.
Of course you could go colder. For all the absurd impracticality of this setup, it’s not liquid nitrogen cooling, which means there are still gains to be made-– we saw a Pi 5 clocked at 3.6GHz that way last year— and that just means the crown is laying in the gutter, waiting for anyone to pick it up. Unless they already have by the time this prints. In which case, all hail the cryogenic king, and please send us a tip so we can hail their glory.
Continue reading “Unlocking The True Power Of A MacBook Neo By Cooling It”
