Gadgetory

now some of you will already know this but for those of you who don't a Polly let x if they deem it necessary from a form factor or design perspective actually design their products to thermal throttle that is to say not run at full speed under intensive loads we observe this with the iMac retina 5k and this is a fairly well known characteristic of the MacBook 2015 retina which I have here in front of me of course our HX 1200 i power supply delivers 80 plus platinum efficiency for quiet performance and corsair link digital advanced monitoring and control click now to learn more it actually features no active cooling fans so when we start up a stress test you can actually see is what happens is the CPU goes to 2 gigahertz so that is full on turbo mode for 2 cores 4 threads CPU temperatures ramped up very dramatically so we're all the way at 74 degrees now and we're going to continue rising boom 80 degrees on that CPU within a matter of seconds and then what you're gonna see is within a couple moments here this baby's gonna go ahead and crank all the way back down to its stock speed of about 1 gigahertz and the temperatures are gonna come back down to match so there she goes we're seeing a little bit of thermal throttling detected just a little spike there 4% now we're at 95 degrees on the hottest core 21% thermal throttling ok there we go so that's the behavior that we are looking for after a short while she'll throttle down to about 1.1 gigahertz and then she's gonna go a little bit lower down to about 1 gigahertz and the throttling disappears so you can see we're no longer throttling and temperatures drop dramatically but next let's have a look at a real world load since the I 264 stress test is not exactly representative of a well real world use case scenario okay so now we're running Cinebench and here we saw some really interesting behavior so we were able to observe that same two gigahertz turbo at the beginning of our run here if you check this out which then slowed down to as low as 800 to 900 megahertz by the end of the run and then what was interesting after that is that a subsequent run so a second run actually stayed at 800 to 900 megahertz the whole time and gave us a lower overall score which led me to believe that if we were to cool down the MacBook 2015 retina maybe through water cooling means we could actually get better performance out of it let's find out so the first thing we want to establish here is a baseline for our worst case scenario temperatures for the device we can see that the CPU is somewhere towards the back center because that's where it is actually hottest somewhere in this territory but since we're not going to be able to water cool the top of it we're more concerned about knowing whether it is on the bottom or the top and it looks like it's right about here so we've come up with a solution maximum 41 point one degrees it's a good baseline we've come up with a solution that will allow us to water cool the MacBook are we doing it properly is this something I would recommend no if you guys are afraid to cringe maybe the time to tune out is now but if you want to see us find out if improving the thermal performance of the new MacBook 2015 will help it's also performance performance then stay tuned seconds all right so we're gonna be using kneaded eraser oh let's hope that yep that seems to be working we're gonna be using kneaded eraser to plug up all the ports that we don't want to damage here is this a good long-term solution the answer is no we are not planning to run the MacBook water-cooled for a very extended period of time just enough to run benchmarks now my camera operator pointed out that the MacBook 2015 has no fans and I kind of went yes that is a good observation but more importantly the fact that it has no fans is what's going to allow us to liquid cool it at all because most laptops and here I have a demonstrate I can show you guys most laptops would have some kind of an intake where airflow comes in and then it cools a heating element like a heatsink inside but because the MacBook 2015 retina only has passive cooling from its chassis by liquid cooling the bottom of it we should be able to cool effectively the internals of the device as well so for the hinge at the back I mean really a silicone or something would have been a much better solution for this I know this is not ideal for the hinge at the back we're just gonna make a snake out of our kneaded eraser and we're gonna kind of jam it in there and hope that the water doesn't doesn't get around it or anything I mean we're not gonna be fully submerging the notebook or anything like that I just want to give it the best possible chance of survival that it can have given what we're doing to it so I've had a bit of a bit of trouble with the hinge here I need to make sure I hold the MacBook still while not disrupting any of my other kneaded eraser and see if I can get that pretty much sealed here okay so I think that's good now I don't want the hinge to move at all Oh which kind of means we're stuck with it in that position so now we're gonna build ourselves a little platform to sit this puppy on the USB type-c port is the one I'm most worried about it's the most likely to short in the event of a problem and it's the one that I'm having the most trouble getting what I would consider to be a trustworthy seal around let's just go ahead and take on more hoping for the best every day because we don't have another way right now I can't put it down luck Oh Oh gross that's gross I'll do it four times so we're getting water out of the fridge I'm going for the lowest temperatures that I can get on the MacBook over there and now it's time for the poor oh well more poor now we want a fairly good volume of water in the pan I could have put it lower down and then we'd have been able to we'd been able to cool the MacBook a little bit sooner but the reason we want that is we don't want the water to heat up right away so we want a fairly high thermal capacity for our water oh oh you can see the surface tension of the water has actually let it make contact with the bottom of the macbook now now we're gonna have to move fast because we're not gonna have long here but check this out our memory has fallen all the way down to 28 degrees our CPU temperatures have fallen although the individual core is curiously are still reasonably high that's interesting that means this thermal sensor is somewhere else and our SSD has also dropped down to about 24 degrees so now and check this out we are turbo at the maximum 2 gigahertz in spite of the fact that we still have a stability test running so let's stop that and let's fire up Cinebench so our CPU temps are way down now - like 32 degrees that is much lower than our idle temperatures before we started here this is what we're gonna want to watch here core speed as well as our CPU temperatures so we're quite a ways through our test we're still running at 2 gigahertz we haven't seen this before air cooled so it looks like that is definitely a thermal limit as opposed to a power delivery limit on the the Broadwell processor inside the MacBook 2015 look at it go it's not throttling at all it's staying max turbo thanks to better cooling now this will tell us something about the way the chassis itself is being cooled by what we're doing so you can see our max time on the top is almost 13 degrees cooler than our max temperature on the top of the notebook last time so it's not just the bottom of the notebook that's being cooled thanks to Apple's unibody design that's intended to be used as a heat spreader that cooling is actually occurring over the entire body of the macbook and there we go we have our score Wow look at that double the score from water cooling your MacBook right there suckers so in conclusion would I recommend water cooling the MacBook 2015 retina no don't be an idiot would it make it perform better if we actually had like it waterproofed and then if we had like tubes going in and out like if we had a coolant like a water-cooled cooling pad for it with like direct contact or something would it make it perform better the answer is a resounding yes I'm actually blown away by how much better that performed so I guess all that's left now is to throw a shout out to our Bros over at D brand Canadian company they make vinyl skins and wraps for foams devices like this you may have actually noticed this one sports a carbon fiber D brand skin on the bottom and a kind of leather finish deep brand skin on the top game consoles all kinds of good stuff like that they're reasonably priced and precision-cut absolutely gorgeously beautiful if you want to check out anymore like really nice glam close-up footage of D brand skin on this particular macbook 2015 then you can check out our macbook 2015 review right around here but guys go check it out they've got a link in the video description thanks to D brand for making this video possible thanks to you guys for making this video possible by watching it like the video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it just plain suck leave a comment if your feelings are a little more complicated than that and I have a feeling some of you are gonna have complicated feelings about water cooling the MacBook and as always don't forget to also check out the link in the video description to our community forum where you can join and discuss stuff you can also buy a cool t-shirt like this one change Ramazan bookmarks one with our affiliate code that kind of thing helps us out a lot and as always don't forget to subscribe and follow in all of that good stuff I can't believe this worked I can't believe it's not dead oh is it dead no it's not dead oh wow the touch pads like chili 17 degree touchpad suckas 17 degrees that does