Water Cooling the Macbook 2015 - Increased performance or dead Macbook!?

The video opens by noting a well known behavior of the 2015 MacBook Retina where Apple employs thermal throttling to cap performance under heavy load, despite its sleek design. The host runs initial stress tests to establish a baseline thermal profile, showing the CPU hitting 70s to 90s Celsius and then throttling back to lower clock speeds as temperatures rise. They demonstrate how the system’s turbo capability interacts with heat, noting that under a synthetic stress test the CPU briefly hits two gigahertz before quickly downclocking to around one gigahertz as cores thermal throttle. The analysis then shifts to a real world workload using Cinebench to observe how performance can degrade over the course of a longer run, with the CPU fluctuating between higher and lower clocks and resulting scores. This sets up the central question of whether water cooling could improve sustained performance by keeping temperatures in check, potentially allowing the MacBook to maintain higher boost clocks for longer. The host clarifies that this is not a recommended or safe modification to try at home, but lays out the experiment to quantify any potential gains, acknowledging the risks and the non conventional approach. The discussion includes a plan to implement a bottom cooling method due to the MacBook’s passive cooling design, and a candid acknowledgment that this is experimental and not a longterm solution.

Topics · technology · hardware · experiments · performance