2013 Macbook air 11 inch and Thermal compound.

[Zer0n1nja]

So I am contemplating picking up the 11 inch air as a secondary computer which will do a little bit of light gaming/photo editing (im fine with the screen res) and I noticed that anandtech's review of the macbook air said that it may have some thermal issues and the computer is throttling itself back a bit.

I was inspecting the teardown on the 11 inch air and noticed that on the gpu (I found out this is not the GPU but a controller) there was no thermal compound on either models. This photo shows that the gpu appears to be completely dry.

With some google searching I found out a lot of people have redone the thermal compound with some higher end stuff and got some nice drops in temperature.

Do you guys think it would be worth while to give this a shot by applying some better stuff, especially to the gpu?

 

[mentaluproar]

I'm not sure why they didn't use thermal paste on the GPU, but I doubt applying some would help. It's so cheap there is no reason Apple would skip it.

 

[Jazwire]

Interesting, considering they used enough paste on the CPU , they had plenty for the GPU. Looks too think to me, if anything might be able to lower CPU temp by doing it properly.

But not sure I want to tear into my new machine either.

 

[swordfish5736]

That's not the GPU that's the platform controller hub...

It almost looks like the heatsink is raised there to not sit on the chip. Which would explain the lack of paste.

On older models the PCH is a separate chip with no heatsink.

 

[ntrigue]

Since the beginning of time we could reduce temperatures by reapplying thermal paste.

The question: will you risk voiding warranty to get a small uptick in performance?