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M1 Air with Thermal Pad Mod
- Thread starter downshiftdre
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Hi timmillea, I've just passed my original M1 base Air with heatsink mod as detailed at the beginning of this thread to my wife. She in turn has passed on her Intel Air to our daughter for Uni work. I've just taken receipt of a 15" M2 Air 16gb 256 ( yes, I know ) via the refurb store. Main reason is I'm halfway through my 70's now and my eyes are sub par so I went for the larger display. I've only had it a day, but I'm sure that after a week or so I'll be glancing at my precision screwdriver set with increassing frequency. The M1 worked flawlessly and doing the mod was great fun. Good to see you still on the Forum👍
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My adventures modding the M1 MBA have sadly come to an end. I took the back panel off, removed the thermal pads, dissolved the bit of goo left with alcohol and traded it in at the Apple Store. Since I was restricted to off-the-shelf models at the store, I went with the M3 Pro Macbook Pro (so monikered by the Redundant Department of Redundancy.) That's the model with 18GB of RAM (wut?) and 512GB SSD - because any less won't do.
The experience has mostly been good, but I have noticed some recurring graphical anomalies. However most of the games I've been playing are indie or emulated, and it's hard to know whether to blame the hardware, the emulator or the game developer.
The experience has mostly been good, but I have noticed some recurring graphical anomalies. However most of the games I've been playing are indie or emulated, and it's hard to know whether to blame the hardware, the emulator or the game developer.
I have M3 Air but wondering if it's worth putting in a thermal pad between the board and case. I'm not having any overheating problems. In fact it's the opposite. The Air is so cold that it's actually bothering me. It's not a huge issue but when I first use it the body is FREEZING. It's so cold that using the trackpad is awkward due to condensation. After using it for a while it does warm up and become more comfortable to rest my hands on it and the trackpad feels smooth instead of sticky.
I guess I'm just wondering if I put a thermal pad on then it'd transfer some heat to the case at all times so it's not so cold. I don't turn off my Air unless I need to restart it for whatever reason. It's always "on" and connected to wifi so there must be some heat to transfer even in sleep mode.
I guess I'm just wondering if I put a thermal pad on then it'd transfer some heat to the case at all times so it's not so cold. I don't turn off my Air unless I need to restart it for whatever reason. It's always "on" and connected to wifi so there must be some heat to transfer even in sleep mode.
The MBA doesn't "generate cold". If it's freezing it's because the surrounding area is freezing. If you're getting condensation your environment might be changing temperature too fast.
By far the best thing to do is keep a more consistent and moderate temperature in your home.
Finally decided to try this mod on my base model M1 Macbook Air (8-core CPU, 7-core GPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD), the results so far have been very impressive.
For thermal pads I used "Thermalright Extreme Odyssey" with 1.5mm thickness, they have 12.8 w/mk thermal conductivity so I bought 2 of them and cut one in half and stacked the two halves together for the recessed part of the heatsink (I know I'll lose some thermal conductivity this way but this was the best value option). For the more elevated part I cut the second pad slightly to fit, and used one of the cut pieces to bridge the small gap between the recessed part. I did not cover the battery connector area because that's not part of the heatsink. I forgot to take a pic of the setup before putting all the screws back in, oh well.
Since I use this laptop for mostly school/work/gaming and no rendering at all, I didn't bother trying any CPU heavy benchmarks, only tried 3DMark WildLife Extreme Stress Test (20 min non-stop loop) since that fully loads the GPU and can more closely simulate what I might experience when gaming (see attachments for detailed before & after 3DMark results).
Here are my observations:
For reference my ambient room temperatures were around 20-22ºC and I used the laptop plugged in on a glass standing desk. To check temperatures I installed Stats (free open source software). As you can see, overall temperatures of the SoC and battery are lower for both light usage and heavy gaming, usually around 20-30ºC lower than before.
I've done quite a bit of research on this mod before attempting it and have seen quite a few comments about how this may affect the longevity of the laptop, but from what I observed so far most of these concerns can be put to rest:
As you can see most of these concerns are from people who have no idea what they're talking about and are not based in fact, it always takes less effort to write a negative comment instead of doing the homework and trying it yourself.
Anyway, I highly recommend everyone who owns a M1 MacBook Air to give this mod a try, it improves heat dissipation across the board thus boosting the overall lifespan of the laptop. It's relatively inexpensive to do and essentially turns the MacBook Air into a MacBook Pro at a fraction of the cost. Heck, I would say it's even better than the MacBook Pro since it is lighter and has zero moving parts and no annoying fan noise. I would assume this mod also works for M2 and M3 models as long as you get decent thermal pads and make sure all parts of the heatsink make contact with the back panel.
Update (2024-04-08): decided to push this mod to the limits and see how hot the MacBook Air can possibly get so I went and did a 30 mins HandBrake encoding stress test, which fully loads the CPU. SoC temps reached 85.7ºC max and battery temps peaked at 47.5ºC. After the test was finished, SoC temps dropped down to around 50ºC almost instantly, but it took a bit longer for the battery temps to drop to 40ºC. After about 10 minutes both SoC and battery temps stabilized at ~37ºC, it will probably take even more time for temps to return to idle ranges (25-30ºC).
Unfortunately I can't compare this to anything since I didn't run this test before the mod. What should I try next? Running HandBrake and 3DMark at the same time? Maybe that kind of crazy use case will finally push the system to reach the pre-modded 99ºC temps since nothing I throw at it so far can make it go past 90ºC.
For thermal pads I used "Thermalright Extreme Odyssey" with 1.5mm thickness, they have 12.8 w/mk thermal conductivity so I bought 2 of them and cut one in half and stacked the two halves together for the recessed part of the heatsink (I know I'll lose some thermal conductivity this way but this was the best value option). For the more elevated part I cut the second pad slightly to fit, and used one of the cut pieces to bridge the small gap between the recessed part. I did not cover the battery connector area because that's not part of the heatsink. I forgot to take a pic of the setup before putting all the screws back in, oh well.
Since I use this laptop for mostly school/work/gaming and no rendering at all, I didn't bother trying any CPU heavy benchmarks, only tried 3DMark WildLife Extreme Stress Test (20 min non-stop loop) since that fully loads the GPU and can more closely simulate what I might experience when gaming (see attachments for detailed before & after 3DMark results).
Here are my observations:
| Test type | Before mod | After mod |
|---|---|---|
| 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test stability | 92.6% stability | 99.8% stability |
| Peak SoC temperature during 3DMark Wild Life Stress Test | 99ºC | 70ºC |
| Peak SoC temperature during 1 hour of playing Death Stranding | 98ºC | 72ºC |
| Peak SoC temperature during 1 hour of Genshin Impact | 99ºC | 75ºC |
| Peak battery temperature during heavy loads (benchmarks/gaming) | 44ºC | 40ºC |
| Peak SoC temp during Idle/light web browsing | 35ºC | 30ºC |
I've done quite a bit of research on this mod before attempting it and have seen quite a few comments about how this may affect the longevity of the laptop, but from what I observed so far most of these concerns can be put to rest:
| Comment/concern | Reality |
|---|---|
| "Battery lifespan (capacity) will decrease since there's more heat transferred to the back panel." | False, the battery temperatures are slightly lower than before when under load, so its lifespan will increase. |
| "Battery runtime (discharge) will decrease since there's more heat transferred to the back panel." | False, with lower battery temperatures its runtime will increase ever so slightly or stay the same as before. |
| "Lifespan of other components will decrease due to more heat transferred to the back panel." | False, the heat from the back panel will always radiate onto the cooler table (2nd law of thermodynamics). |
| "Back panel will become discoloured due to more heat being transferred to it." | False, older Intel MacBooks have gotten way hotter than this and the back panel was fine. |
| "This will make the bottom of the laptop uncomfortably hot and could burn your legs." | I don't think anyone will be doing rendering or heavy gaming on their lap so this is not a problem. |
Anyway, I highly recommend everyone who owns a M1 MacBook Air to give this mod a try, it improves heat dissipation across the board thus boosting the overall lifespan of the laptop. It's relatively inexpensive to do and essentially turns the MacBook Air into a MacBook Pro at a fraction of the cost. Heck, I would say it's even better than the MacBook Pro since it is lighter and has zero moving parts and no annoying fan noise. I would assume this mod also works for M2 and M3 models as long as you get decent thermal pads and make sure all parts of the heatsink make contact with the back panel.
Update (2024-04-08): decided to push this mod to the limits and see how hot the MacBook Air can possibly get so I went and did a 30 mins HandBrake encoding stress test, which fully loads the CPU. SoC temps reached 85.7ºC max and battery temps peaked at 47.5ºC. After the test was finished, SoC temps dropped down to around 50ºC almost instantly, but it took a bit longer for the battery temps to drop to 40ºC. After about 10 minutes both SoC and battery temps stabilized at ~37ºC, it will probably take even more time for temps to return to idle ranges (25-30ºC).
Unfortunately I can't compare this to anything since I didn't run this test before the mod. What should I try next? Running HandBrake and 3DMark at the same time? Maybe that kind of crazy use case will finally push the system to reach the pre-modded 99ºC temps since nothing I throw at it so far can make it go past 90ºC.
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