If you have bought a new MacBook Air, equipped with the Apple M2 chip, you may be interested in knowing a quick, simple and economical way to solve the cooling problems that this equipment presents, which, unlike the MacBook Pro M2, this model does not have with no fans, so all the thermal load falls on a single heatsink.
This is especially noticeable in heavy applications such as Lightroom, where it reached a temperature of 100ºC, or of course, a demanding benchmark such as Cinebench R23, where the throttling is even more pronounced until it generates a notable loss of performance. But luckily, the YouTuber Max Tech gives the solution to correct the problem: you will only need a screwdriver, some thermal pads (Thermal Pad) and 5 minutes.
In essence, he removed the four screws that secure the bottom of the MacBook Air’s chassis and placed 1.5mm-thick Thermal Pads on the back of the cooling system itself. Everything was very fast, simple, clean, without losing the guarantee and of course, cheap, since the same pads used, 1.5 mm thick and with thermal conductivity of 12.8 w/mk, cost 13.59 euros, a price quite reasonable not only to lower temperatures but also to increase device performance.
After installing the pads, on the Lightroom Classic, and exporting 50 42MP images, the computer went from taking 2 minutes 55 seconds to 1 minute 56 seconds, even less than the MacBook Pro M2 (2 minutes), thanks to being kept at a temperature between 70 – 80ºC compared to 100ºC that generated throttling problems and the consequent loss of performance.
We saw another example in Cinebench R23, and it is that from reaching 108ºC in 28 seconds, at least now it took 1 minute and 23 seconds to reach the same temperature. The problem is not solved, but it is minimized, allowing it to generate higher performance: 8684 points vs. 8551 points without the thermal pad. After passing the benchmark 6 times in a row, we are talking about 8072 vs 7454 points. This is already an extreme case of the use of the chip.