Last month I reported on tech YouTubers Jakkuh and Zip Tie Tech modding an Apple MacBook Neo with external custom water loop cooling to achieve world record benchmark scores on the budget laptop. Now, YouTuber Salem Techsperts has outdone them in at least some benchmarks with the help of dual-sided chip cooling and a giant industrial air blower.
The previous record-holders said “come at me bro” with a 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme score of 1,450 and Salem Techsperts apparently beat that score the very next day, but only by one point. He then set out to break that record: “I am determined to have the fastest MacBook Neo in the world, and no one is going to beat it after today. (I really hope JayzTwoCents doesn’t do a liquid nitrogen build.)”
The Apple MacBook Neo has garnered attention thanks to its cheap price tag in an increasingly inflated market. And while its six-core A18 Pro chip is little more than an iPhone processor, it runs surprisingly well, especially using Apple’s optimised software. But there’s always more headroom that can be cranked out of a chip with enough effort, as Salem Techsperts finds out.
He sets about achieving this with “PTM 7950, 30-degree air, an industrial air blower, a heat sink, a Peltier cooler… and Upsiren thermal putty.”
The PTM 7950 is a phase change thermal pad, and the latter putty is designed to replace thermal pads, which is useful in the case of the MacBook Neo, because such a pad is exactly what is slapped on top of the chip by default. And finally, a Peltier cooler is a kind of thermoelectric cooler that uses an electric current to encourage heat transfer from one side to the other.
To begin, the YouTuber put the putty on top of the integrated circuits (ICs) on either side of the chip, laid the regular sticker on top, and had two copper shims sitting next to the chip with a heatsink on top of it, using a PTM 7950 thermal pad as the conductor between the two. However, he did eventually swap out the PTM 7950 for some Upsiren thermal putty to crank the score up as it ended up working better.
The final trick was to put the Peltier cooler underneath the chip to sandwich it, which involves disconnecting the logic board and removing the display. And then using the giant industrial air blower to churn a load of air from the window to cool the top-side of the chip down. The Peltier cooler underneath has to be blocked off from the flow of air, though, as that could interfere with the thermoelectric cooling process. The result is getting things down to a nice and chilly 10 °C at idle
After all this, the A18 Pro consistently hits 11 W of power consumption; by default it should max out at about 10 W and stay much lower than this over extended periods.
(Image credit: Salem Techsperts @ YouTube)
The chip managed to beat the previous-highest Cinebench scores, with a score of 2,076 in the multi-threaded test and 639 in the single-threaded one, which is only slightly below what an M4 Max chip scores. However, for some reason the chip in the modded setup wouldn’t beat the 3DMark (ie, the GPU) score, hitting different scores between 1,400 and 1,450; apparently the score was higher before all the modding.
With the sandwich cooling method, the Neo achieved 50 fps in Cyberpunk, although that was at 1080p on low settings with resolution scaling and FSR 3.1 frame gen turned on.
Salem Techsperts even gets pretty decent results putting the chip and board back into the case with just the pads and putty mods, achieving 28% higher multi-core and 25% higher single-core score. So although he notes the keyboard does get a little warmer, that might be a mod that’s worth actually trying at home, if you’re feeling adventurous.
