After a year of working from home, I got sick of listening to my MacBook Pro's fans whine during afternoon conference calls.
I saw this thread in which a guy figured out that if he flipped his MacBook upside down and put a heatsink on it, he improved the performance. My idea was, "what if I ran my MacBook upside down with a heatsink on it, only the heatsink has water running through it, an external radiator to get rid of the heat, and also the upside-down MacBook is right-side-up, and I spend many hundreds of Swiss Francs to accomplish this using the worst materials that I can find which are still somehow fit for purpose?"
A more intelligent person would have simply ordered a fanless M1-powered MacBook Air and called it a day. Me, I ordered the M1, and then carried on with my build, Because Race Car.
And so:
The cooling plates are Bitcoin ASIC miner blocks from AliExpress.
Pump is an Aquastream XT Ultra
Radiator/reservoir is 2005's finest garbage from Zalman, the Reserator 1 v2
The hoses are the finest Italian braided hose I could get at Obi Schweiz
Assorted fittings and external temp sensor from teh intarweb.
There are fancy high-transmissivity thermal pads in between the case shell and various motherboard components. I also removed the thermal shielding from the case bottom, as well as the feet, to ensure a full metal-on-metal contact with the cooling plates. Incidentally, I did try huge thermal pads which cover the entire surface of the cooling plates, but it actually performed *worse* than without. I guess the MacBook is flat enough.
Milled aluminum profiles hold the plates securely together:
Yes, it works. I've hardly heard the fan since I started using it, even after nailing the governor to 'performance' using Volta!
Heat soak under normal desktop/Citrix working conditions raises the water temp from ~17-18ºC to 26ºC in about 6 hours, at which point I have the Aquastream kick on the retrofitted Noctua fan, mounted on top of the cooling tower, at about 700RPM, which runs until the water temp gets back down to 23ºC.
Since the pump requires Windows software to set parameters, I do this with a VM on the laptop. For normal monitoring, I use an SSH one-shot to a Raspberry Pi 0W on which I have acinfo, and I simply egrep for the values I want to extract and feed them to my central monitoring system. It's convenient that the pump is able to manage the fan on its own, since water-cooling-oriented software is non-existent for modern Macs.
Yes, it improves benchmark scores (indicated in red-- the highest score is when I threw it in a snowbank in -15ºC and eliminated any possibility of throttling).
Bonus snowbank proof:
Bonus M1 Air snowbank:
Oh, one more thing:
I saw this thread in which a guy figured out that if he flipped his MacBook upside down and put a heatsink on it, he improved the performance. My idea was, "what if I ran my MacBook upside down with a heatsink on it, only the heatsink has water running through it, an external radiator to get rid of the heat, and also the upside-down MacBook is right-side-up, and I spend many hundreds of Swiss Francs to accomplish this using the worst materials that I can find which are still somehow fit for purpose?"
A more intelligent person would have simply ordered a fanless M1-powered MacBook Air and called it a day. Me, I ordered the M1, and then carried on with my build, Because Race Car.
And so:
The cooling plates are Bitcoin ASIC miner blocks from AliExpress.
Pump is an Aquastream XT Ultra
Radiator/reservoir is 2005's finest garbage from Zalman, the Reserator 1 v2
The hoses are the finest Italian braided hose I could get at Obi Schweiz
Assorted fittings and external temp sensor from teh intarweb.
There are fancy high-transmissivity thermal pads in between the case shell and various motherboard components. I also removed the thermal shielding from the case bottom, as well as the feet, to ensure a full metal-on-metal contact with the cooling plates. Incidentally, I did try huge thermal pads which cover the entire surface of the cooling plates, but it actually performed *worse* than without. I guess the MacBook is flat enough.
Milled aluminum profiles hold the plates securely together:
Yes, it works. I've hardly heard the fan since I started using it, even after nailing the governor to 'performance' using Volta!
Heat soak under normal desktop/Citrix working conditions raises the water temp from ~17-18ºC to 26ºC in about 6 hours, at which point I have the Aquastream kick on the retrofitted Noctua fan, mounted on top of the cooling tower, at about 700RPM, which runs until the water temp gets back down to 23ºC.
Since the pump requires Windows software to set parameters, I do this with a VM on the laptop. For normal monitoring, I use an SSH one-shot to a Raspberry Pi 0W on which I have acinfo, and I simply egrep for the values I want to extract and feed them to my central monitoring system. It's convenient that the pump is able to manage the fan on its own, since water-cooling-oriented software is non-existent for modern Macs.
Yes, it improves benchmark scores (indicated in red-- the highest score is when I threw it in a snowbank in -15ºC and eliminated any possibility of throttling).
Bonus snowbank proof:
Bonus M1 Air snowbank:
Oh, one more thing:
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