Intel MacBook Pro Owner Adds Water Cooling to Silence Noisy Fans and Boost Performance

[DummyFool]

Data crunching? Sounds like one of those meaningless phrases used by people who like to impress others with alleged IT knowledge. Virtually every benchmark out there shows Intel stomping on the M1 by as much as 6:1. Adding a letter to the name of the CPU won't do much to close that gap.

Intel did throw Apple a bone by admitting that the M1 beat it on battery performance... by 1%.

Then again, Apple has always been a master at marketing form over function, control-freak over freedom to use your hardware any way you want. Can't argue that. That must be why Intel-powered computers still hold a huge, galloping lead on market share over Apple computers.

Ok. Specifically, I am into chess. Using Stockfish 13 which is the strongest engine available. The M1 is about on par with a 1 year old base Intel I7 but gets beat easily by the most recent I9 (nowhere near 6 times tough, not for chess). Going from 8 to 16 cores would enable it to leap over Intel, at least until Intel's next cpu.

I thought it would be simpler to say data crunching which really is what a chess engine does.

 

[orthorim]

Perhaps Apple should hire him to design better cooling systems LOL

Apple has, it's called M1

These Intel chips are total garbage. My i9 16" gets hot all the time while not being significantly faster than my 9 year old i7.

 

[joecomo]

I should try your vertical approach. With an Apple Watch and Big Sur, I can authenticate most requests with the side button on my watch. Booting the machine from a cold start however, means fiddling with it & then putting it back in place. I wish there was a way around that.

Exactly, the booting is a pain in the a... and the Apple Watch usage for authentication is unfortunately not as universal as it could be. But the MacBook goes quiet and in that setup - there is even no need to use TGPro to fine tune the fan anymore, defaults are fine.

 

[MacBH928]

Apple solved this problem by designing energy efficient CPUs. A few mm won't save you if the cpu is running at 300watts.

yea..but it took them a loooooooong time to do so. The solution is not even implemented. Pros, iMacs, and Macbook Pros do not have these chips still.

 

[Td1970]

Thank you for your info Mr.Richguy!

Not everyone can afford new machine so calling this a "waste" is little insulting

Come on man. So much snark. I really dont think the post was said in that tone

 

[AppleFan78]

I was super impressed with the performance of my M1 MacBook Pro last night when I used it to DJ at a private club, complete with videos playing via HDMI to a TV. Virtual DJ is far from efficient, and my former 2019 13" MBP 1.4GHz would have its fan screaming not long after the music started. I was pushing it just as hard as ever, running VDJ, and a YouTube downloader app, plus Safari, Messages and Facebook Messenger all running, which would almost freeze up my 2019, and it didn't even break a sweat. The fan never ran the whole 5 hours it was running.

 

[darngooddesign]

yea..but it took them a loooooooong time to do so.

Apple was probably waiting for Intel chips to stop sucking.

The solution is not even implemented. Pros, iMacs, and Macbook Pros do not have these chips still.

Did you really expect them to migrate their entire line at once? That sounds like a QA nightmare.

 

[qoop]

The fan noise never really bothered me; it was the mid-work flights that were irritating.

View attachment 1752648

Eventually, the battery dies, and the thing comes back down.

And yet if we want to post something like that…

 

[DNichter]

It’s called COVID lockdown

Fair point haha

 

[pasamio]

Data crunching? Sounds like one of those meaningless phrases used by people who like to impress others with alleged IT knowledge. Virtually every benchmark out there shows Intel stomping on the M1 by as much as 6:1. Adding a letter to the name of the CPU won't do much to close that gap.

I'd love to see what you're comparing to get the 6:1 comparison, most comparisons I've seen for similar CPUs (approx clock speed and power usage) have found the M1 to be posting comparable numbers or beating out it's competition.

Intel did throw Apple a bone by admitting that the M1 beat it on battery performance... by 1%.

Intel seem to be in full panic mode with attack ads on the Apple M1 devices that in many cases point out limitations of the Apple devices that used Intel CPUs. A lot of what their campaign seems to focus on aren't even CPU related on the devices they talk about with some of the limitations shared by their own devices (USB-C only laptops for example). A lot of folk, including those generally sceptical of marketing like Linus Tech Tips, have actually found the M1 devices to be a solid competitor in their performance class.

Then again, Apple has always been a master at marketing form over function, control-freak over freedom to use your hardware any way you want. Can't argue that. That must be why Intel-powered computers still hold a huge, galloping lead on market share over Apple computers.

Starting with the move from PowerPC until the launch of M1, all of Apple's computers were powered by Intel's chips. Perhaps you meant "PC" rather than "Intel" since for the last 15 years every Apple Mac ran an Intel CPU. In the broader ecosystem, Intel has been the dominant CPU platform over AMD but even that has been changing in recent years with specialist computing builds leveraging AMD's CPUs more and more as well as increasing amounts of cloud and data centre usage of AMD's platforms. Google's Confidential VM functionality for example is powered by AMD's Epyc Rome CPUs. AMD have CPUs that are competitive or beating Intel in many situations when that wasn't the case. Apple's M1 is also similarly competitive in the space it's in.

 

[johncarync]

My fans come on so often, I bought a laptop cooling pad for home and work. It seems it just swaps the noise of the internal fans for the noise of the external fans, but it keeps the laptop cooler and faster over all.

 

[MacBH928]

Apple was probably waiting for Intel chips to stop sucking.


Did you really expect them to migrate their entire line at once? That sounds like a QA nightmare.

understandable, I am just saying we are not there yet

 

[edubfromktown]

Maybe just replace the logic board?

That has worked for at least some who have experienced chronic excessive heat issues (that Apple won't fess up has been a problem and probably another juicy lawsuit in the making).

I've owned the following MacBook Pros (plus other MacBook's):

2010 (pre-Retina) "high res matte screen dual core​

2012 Retina quad core​

2015 quad core​

2020 10th gen i5​

None of them have had any excessive heat issues and the fans rarely come on so: not "all Intel processors suck".

 

[darngooddesign]

I have a 2014 MBP and i can easily make the fans spool up and roar when I push it Even a little.

Your fans are likely on all the time, but you cant hear them, because mine idles at ~1300RPM. This was the case in both Catalina and Big Sur.

The M1BP i tested idled with its fans off and its fan rarely was loud enough to hear under the same workload.

 

[kazmac]

The fan noise never really bothered me; it was the mid-work flights that were irritating.

View attachment 1752648

Eventually, the battery dies, and the thing comes back down.

Since I cannot select laughing and loving your post choices at the same time, I quote and say: 😍😂🤣😂😍

Thank you -as always- for the much needed laughs.

As far as the water cooling...that’s an impressive rig.

 

[theodric]

But why

View attachment 1752644

 

[theodric]

Bag of dry ice would work just as well.

But that's directly desequestering CO2!

 

[theodric]

This.

If the fan is on at a very low speed at all times, it doesn’t need to ramp up as quickly when you open safari and 30 old pages load at once.

The MacBook Pro fan doesn't turn off. Its minimum idle speed is around maybe 1500RPM, which thanks to the very cool asymmetric design of the fans is essentially inaudible at normal operating distances (recall that decibels are air pressure variances over distance - you'll still hear the fans if you try to merge the laptop with your cochlea).

 

[Rochy Bay]

Nice idea, but not enough to wet my appetite for Intel chips

Except thats the only thing you’ve been running since the last two decades?🙄

 

[organisum]

delete

 

[organisum]

delete

 

[fishernomad]

I'm building a simpler solution consisting the thermal pad between heat-pipes and the lower case, peltier plates, water cooling setup. I ordered the parts, should be able to try it out soon.

 

[theodric]

When you say, "fan noise down" what RPMs are you indicating are causing too much noise? So far the fan noise is a matter of your perception without any solid audio measurements. I didn't notice any performance benchmarks for before and after. I'm curious as my customers are pleased with the iStatMenus fan control results. And can still move the laptop to other areas. That's for machines running AutoCAD in a Parallels Win10 VM.

Cool work, pun intended. But you've demonstrated the point when I promote an iMac instead of a laptop.

Re-read the post. The benchmarks (screenshots of Cinebench) are in there.

 

[theodric]

2 years later, my primary takeaway from having posted this build is that SO MANY people who can be arsed posting a response cannot be arsed actually reading and comprehending what was stated in the original article. Also in the German-language press comments, there was obliviousness.

-I did it because it's fun
-I do not care about the cost
-I do not care about practicality or efficiency
-The system remains perfectly usable and portable without the water-cooling setup. I am still using it. Holla @ OpenCore!
-It requires neither Windows VM nor Raspberry Pi to function:
-The pump literally has a USB port on it
-The VM sets parameters on the pump, then is shut down. I haven't booted the VM in over a year
-The Pi reads the pump's temperature sensors and flow meter over USB and barfs the data over MQTT to my HomeAssistant install
-I built, but never posted, the fully independent 1200W (IN WORDS: TWELVE HUNDRED WATT) thermoelectric cooling loop I attached to the hot side of this setup to chill the water to ambient levels. I used a relay, an N-channel MOSFET, and a big smoothing capacitor to harness the fan output that the pump switches on at a given temperature to switch a power strip with an ATX power supply hung off it that ran the whole Peltier setup. I used a cascade of Peltier modules clamped between two water blocks - one hot side, one cold side - to transmit the chill, with a 96% isopropanol loop on the cold side in case anything dropped below the freezing point of water. Sure, I could have used antifreeze, but I had a ******** of alcohol lying around, and it sounded fun.

My life advice: take yourself less seriously. I do. We only get one chance to have fun.