i added a fan to the m2 macbook air, and it worked way better than we expected. So good that the base a graphic score macbook air beat out the 10 graphics core m2 macbook pro that comes with a factory fan. It is just insane. Now in this video, I'm going to show you the methods that we tested in five different scenarios for what you can do based on what you're comfortable with and how that performs in CPU tasks, graphics tasks, and then our crazy tough test that combines both. Now when I started this out, I was just wondering, man, there's this gap in the M2 macbook air where Apple did not put a fan. It's covered with a little heat shield, but there's an empty spot. They could at least put a block there. And then I wondered, what if we can add a fan? Now it's hard to build anything, and this thing is so thin, but we previously added

thermal pads, and that did make a good difference. So then we came up with Vadim using this Razer Phone cooler that has MagSafe to be able to have it magnetically attach and detach whenever you need it, and also cover right where that M2 chip is, which is the hottest spot drawing the hot temps right from that chip and blowing it away. Now, in order to mount the system, I thought maybe I'll buy one of these old-school, uh, laptop stands that have fans built in, just to cut out a hole and maybe have it sit flush because it does sit at an angle when you have it attached. But then I was like, you know what, let me just try it out and see how well it works by itself because it's probably me junk, and at least I'll just try it out. But then I was really surprised that it actually did a very good job, and you guys are going to be

very surprised by the results. Now, in our first throttling test, the m2 air reached 108 degrees Celsius in just 28 seconds of cinebench. And then we showed you guys how you can spend 15 bucks and add some thermal pads to transfer the heat to the bottom case, and that allowed the system to reach only 96 degrees in that same 28 seconds. Well, in this video, we are gonna have five different scenarios: those first two, and then we're gonna add on just using one of these laptop stands that have dual fans in it. I bought this one at Best Buy for about 38 bucks. They have them online for about 24 on Amazon. We'll have a link down below. And then we are going to be combining the laptop cooler with those thermal pads if you're willing to open up the cover and add those. And then our final one is using the Razer cooler. Now, for this one, since it doesn't attach by itself, uh, without

you doing anything. What we did is we took a little ring for MagSafe so you can add that to cases. And then we cut out the thermal pad so that it would sit flush instead of making an air gap on top of the thermal pad. And then we close down the case. Now this allowed us to have contact with the thermal pads to the bottom and have it spread out while at the same time giving us a nice easy magnetic connection for this razor cooler. Now this lightweight laptop cooler only uses just over one watt of power so I had it directly plugged into the MacBook. For example, if you're doing like a portable setup and you toss this into your bag. Now the Razer fan on the other hand, this thing uses over 8 watts of power and it is very fast. It moves a lot of air. We'll have a link to this in the description as well. Now when we added the thermal pads instead of

reaching 108 degrees Celsius after 28 seconds. It only hit 97 degrees Celsius. Now, when we used the laptop cooler and the thermal pads together, it only reached 93 degrees Celsius, so even better than the thermal pads by themselves. And then when we used the Razer cooler, it only reached 89 degrees Celsius. That blew my mind. That's cooler than the M2 MacBook Pro. Getting into the CPU test, I used Cinebench, and I did 10 runs, which equals about 20 minutes. Now, if you're doing something that maxes out the CPU for more than 20 minutes, well, you probably should get the 14-inch Pro. But you'll be very surprised by what we get here. Now, right out of the gate, our run with the stock machine gave us 851 points, which is not bad. But even in the first run, it hit 108 Celsius, and it started throttling our thermopad mod.

helped a lot with a score of 8684, because as soon as that heat is there, it can spread out into the pad itself and the case. Now, using just the laptop cooler by itself did barely any better than just the stock machine, but combining that with the pad and the laptop cooler gave us 8661, and the razer surprisingly gave a slightly lower 8640. Looking at the second run, the stock m2 air as well as just the cooler without pads went down a bit to 8350 or so, whereas the others performed great still. Using the laptop cooler and the pads, even at the end of the run, it did not throttle whatsoever, which was really impressive. Looking at the third run, this is where we start to get a big separation of performance. The base one went down to 7792, whereas even just adding the laptop cooler by itself (24 bucks) it got 8001, so it's already gaining our thermal pads by.

themselves were starting to get heat
soaked, so we started throttling a bit. We got
8240, and the razor cooler still was above 8600,
and even at the end of the fourth run, it didn't reach 108 degrees Celsius yet, and
it had not throttled, which was crazy. Run five, the stock air took a big hit in
performance while the razor was still above
8600, which is shocking, and the thermal pads with the laptop cooler still
performed great at 8422. So the razer is performing better
after about 10 minutes of 100% CPU load than the machine did out
of the box, even its first run ever. That is crazy. Now looking at run number six,
this is where stuff starts to drop down. Now the thermal pad and just the laptop
cooler, they're staying very consistent, which shows that it's working because
the numbers are also very similar for the next run as well. Now on the ninth
run, two very interesting things happen.

First off, the thermal pad mod was actually slower than just the laptop cooler by itself, without anything you literally buy and put the MacBook on it, by over 200 points. Meaning that that's after about roughly 15 or so minutes, those thermal pads are heat soaked and they can't do much at all. Now the other one was that their razor was now slightly slower than the thermal pads with our laptop cooler, which is a lot easier and cheaper to do. And looking at the next one, the difference was even greater. First off, it looks like the stock M.2 MacBook Air settles in right around 70-300 or so as far as the test after it gets heated up and the wattage drops, whereas the laptop cooler by itself runs at a high 7700, whereas the cooler with the thermal pads has been maintaining 8300 for about four runs now, which is very impressive.

and beating out the razer cooler by
about 200 points. Now then looking at our last run, which I think is actually the
11th run, I think I added it in. We basically got things to stabilize, so
why would the razor do so well at first but then slow down later? Well, that is
because it is mainly focusing on the one point where our chip is, and the rest of
the system. We're still getting transfer of heat across, but having the thermal
pads with the laptop cooler not only allows for fast transfer of heat from
the chip and from that metal heat sink, and to the bottom, but then these fans
spin up and blow a decent amount of air, even though it's still quiet on the
bottom, just like a heatsink, and dissipate all the heat away from the
chassis, which was crazy because the end result from our very first run of 8661,
we ended up just going down.

by less than 300 points for that 11th run, a very very tiny difference. The M2 air out of the factory loses about 17 performance, which is about two hundred and fifty points, so that's a big drop off. What's even more shocking is when I tested out graphics. I use 3D marks stress test, which runs for 20 minutes. Now the stock machine, it performed really bad. The frame drops were really big after the first four minutes or so. It dived straight down and slowed down a lot. When we added the thermal pads, instead of heat soaking after about four or so minutes, it could last about 15, which definitely could help for heavy graphics tasks. But when we added these two modifications, the results were crazy. Instead of the M2 air slowing down to 5 watts towards the end of this gaming test, the Razer allowed it to stay at 9 watts compared to the factory 11 watts.

At the start, we got a stability of 95.1 percent with the razer cooler, instead of 77.8, meaning that we are only losing less than five percent of the performance. After 20 minutes, you guys can see the best score, the lowest score, and then at this chart right here, we had really good consistent performance all the way through around 12-13. Only after about 13-14 minutes, we got a small dip in performance, and then it stayed pretty consistent. But what really blew my mind was the laptop cooler with the thermal pads. This is insane. We have a stability of 99.3 percent, meaning we had a variance of less than one percent throughout 20 minutes. This is better stability than the M2 MacBook Pro with a fan, and our worst score wasn't even the last run. It was loop number nine, 5609, whereas the rest of the runs, they're all higher, which means this is

not going to slow down anymore, even if
you game for hours. It is consistent. This cooling system is enough to keep it
running at full performance all the time, and to prove that, at the end of this
20-minute test, we were averaging 11
watts of GPU usage, which is full performance compared to 9 watts with the
Razer, or just 5 watts if you have the system just by itself stock out of the
factory. That is absolutely crazy. And finally,
let's get to the craziest thing of them all:
exporting video. Now with our M2 MacBook
Pro, we compared it to the 14-inch, and we exported 8K Canon RAW video. Now we
didn't do that to mess with the system. We did that because we want to show in
what situation the 14-inch will actually be a lot faster, because for standard 4K,
the results were practically the same, and when we did that, that system and
that fan that Apple used, it struggled.

because this is pushing both the CPU and the GPU at the same time even though not both of them are completely maxed out. Now with the stock system, it took 26 minutes and 52 seconds to export this five-minute project. Adding just the thermal pads took 25 minutes and two seconds, so almost two minutes faster, even though they did end up getting heat soaked. Now the laptop cooler by itself, that was 24 minutes and 30 seconds, so about 30 seconds faster. That's without thermal pads, just that already a benefit, but combining both the thermal pads and the cooler gave us 21 minutes and 51 seconds. That is very impressive and a good gain, but what shocked me the most was the Razer cooler. Under this situation where we're doing both the CPU and the GPU, it did it in 19 minutes and 39 seconds compared to 26:52 stock. That is a huge improvement. Now before I say the other thing, why did it work better than the

thermal pads with the cooler. Well, maybe it's just too much heat at that point from both the CPU and the GPU. This system is throttling just like the M2 MacBook Pro was throttling under that test. It couldn't keep up, even the fan running at 7,200 rpm. And in this case, maybe there's just so much heat concentrated from the CPU and the GPU that this thing can, you know, get a lot more of it out. And yes, the chassis is hot, but in the other case with the laptop cooler, it's still hot and it's slowing it down because of the chassis temps. Now that 1939 is crazy, but what's crazier is that the M2 MacBook Pro did it in 19 minutes and 40 seconds. Yes, the M2 MacBook Air, like I said at the start with the A-core processor, this is the base 1200 model, beat out the MacBook Pro that comes with the fan and the 10-core graphics option.

now i would say even though this razer
cooler did better for this ak exporting, it is very unrealistic, um, unless you
have something else that could use both the cpu and gpu, maybe blender or maybe
some other kind of thing, but in this case it did better. But for
everything else, we saw that adding those thermal pads in the laptop cooler made a
dramatic difference, and even better than the razer. It's cheaper, it's easier, it's
safer to do that. So if you're somebody that's going to do long renders,
seriously keep this in mind. Pick one of these up, we have it linked
below or best buy, but it's a lot more expensive there. Even this cooler by itself can give you
much better performance than the stock system, but if you add those thermal pads,
it is such a great solution. And then if you're on the go, you have the thermal
pads with you, you can leave this at home.

if you want, it will give you better sustained performance. Like, I don't know, three, four times longer sustained performance than stock. So, with any of this, it shows that the M1 MacBook Air could have performed a lot better if Apple wanted it to, and they made the most out of it. So, you guys, let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below. Let us know if you want us to compare modded M1 MacBook Air against the M1 MacBook Pro to see how it works in real-life scenarios with real productivity apps. Thank you for watching. Click that circle above to subscribe. Check out one of those great videos right over there. The spinach, and I'll see you in the next video. [Music]

I Added a FAN to the M2 MacBook Air - Was it Worth it?

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