Intel MacBook Pro Owner Adds Water Cooling To Silence Noisy Fans, Boost Performance (macrumors.com) 48
An inventive MacRumors forums member has successfully retrofitted a water-cooling system to their 15-inch Intel-based MacBook Pro, thereby eliminating fan noise and boosting performance. From the report: MacRumors forums member "theodric" explained that the noise of their MacBook Pro's fans had become disruptive during conference calls, so amid ordering an M1 MacBook Air, they decided to fit a water cooling system to their machine. theodric used inexpensive parts such as Bitcoin ASIC miner blocks from AliExpress, an Aquastream XT Ultra water pump, and a Zalman radiator and reservoir from 2005 to create the system.
High-transmissivity thermal pads were added between the case shell and various motherboard components to conduct heat away from the MacBook Pro and into the water cooling system. The thermal shielding from the bottom of the case was also removed, as well as the feet, to ensure full contact with the new cooling plates. The pump, which requires Windows software to operate, was run via a virtual machine, and a Raspberry Pi was used for monitoring. theodric says that they have "hardly heard the fan since I started using it" and have seen benchmark scores significantly improve under the system. See theodric's full post for more information about the ambitious project.
High-transmissivity thermal pads were added between the case shell and various motherboard components to conduct heat away from the MacBook Pro and into the water cooling system. The thermal shielding from the bottom of the case was also removed, as well as the feet, to ensure full contact with the new cooling plates. The pump, which requires Windows software to operate, was run via a virtual machine, and a Raspberry Pi was used for monitoring. theodric says that they have "hardly heard the fan since I started using it" and have seen benchmark scores significantly improve under the system. See theodric's full post for more information about the ambitious project.
Or, maybe. (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, bigger fans are far quieter (Score:5, Informative)
> Fans won't be in you lap/face anymore but instead under the desk or in a closet.
Also, have you ever noticed 4,000 CFM ceiling fan is silent, while a 40 CFM laptop fan screams? The big fan moves 100 times as much air without making any noise at all. The same principle applies to desktop fans vs laptop. For the same cooling airflow, the larger desktop fan will make much less noise.
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The lack of ventilation slots means the fan has to work much harder to pull in air through the much smaller side vents, and the air encounters much more drag as it has to pass over all the internal components.. Resulting in more fan noise for less cooling. That's why the Macbook Pros have been hamstrung with low-end to mid-gra
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Yes, and not only that, their side vents are silly and small for looks: they like to hide them near the hinge and curve up the edges of the laptop at the sides. Compare to a thinkpad: the edges are basically flat, and they have a full height vent hole in the side where you can see the copper heatsink fins. This is also why the thinkpad can manage a full sized HDMI port, despite being a comparable thickness.
The thinkpad is not silent by any means with everything maxed out, but it doesn't sound like it's atte
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While thin portables look great, the lack of space creates thermal tradeoffs. My 2016 MacBook Pro, while practically silent, would throttle far less if there were a bit more space for cooling. I have long hoped they'd create a Pro Pro version that could be a bit thicker.
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A lot of the issue is their obsession with being thin. A millimetre or two more would allow for more copper and thus more surface area to radiate heat from. There are plenty of thin and light laptops on the market that manage to not thermal throttle their CPU in under 1 second at full load.
Re: Or, maybe. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Unfortunately, nowadays you cannot get a decently priced desktop from the church of Holy Jobbs and his prophet on Earth Tim Cook. The mini does not count. Same issues as with the laptop when you push it - fans spin up.
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Buy a desktop.
Implying I have a choice in what device my work gives me for use in conference calls?
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A bit difficult to carry around - if you have the monitor under the other arm. Don't you think so?
This project is totally worth it (Score:3, Funny)
Next thing you know they will be adding keyboards to iPads
Re: This project is totally worth it (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s basically what the M1 line isâ¦
And? (Score:3)
Watercooling mods are a dime a dozen on the internet. Seriously, they have entire forums dedicated to computer modding. I really don't see how this counts as news.
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Water-cooling mods are often done to improve performance above the ordinary, for instance to enable overclocking.
This story hints that maybe the cooling performance of the stock MacBook could have been sub-par to begin with.
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Slashdot became a noob site for appliance users. (Score:3)
Most people aren't techies, they are "appliance users" who view tech as magic. Some smaller number are curious and need to learn the basics, a better use for Dicedot than turning into Yahoo with a green theme. There are so few genuinely techy sites because there are so few techies. Techies tend to forget this...
Articles for noobs are appropriate since Slashdot was deliberately de-techified when it became Dicedot. The editors want it that way so until they cease to work for Dice it is what it is. They imagi
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Watercooling mods are a dime a dozen on the internet.
Then I'm sure you can link to me where people watercooled Macbooks Pros before, specifically because the Macbook Pro has been getting in the way of professional work like video conferencing?
Or are you talking about people who buy water cooling components and watercool their PCs to overclock them? In which case why do we ever talk about Telsa, even I own a car!
For the record next time I highly recommend simply skipping over the article. That you don't want to read. No one is forcing you. Or are they... Post
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The so called watercooling of the Macbook Pro is simply a watercooled deck where you put the laptop.
If you were hoping for a "I've opened the chassis, removed all heat sinks and fans and installed instead a watercooling setup with waterpump and tubing and so on - all into the same chassis", you'll be sorely disappointed.
For a tenth (or maybe hundredth) of the money he spent, he could have bought a laptop support with a single large fan and get almost all the way there.
The only "modding" appears to be remova
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Watercooling mods are a dime a dozen on the internet.
Then I'm sure you can link to me where people watercooled Macbooks Pros before
from 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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need a Macbook Pro specifically? here's a year ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/macbo... [reddit.com]
seriously this just only took a simple web search.
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Because it is in a Laptop?
I was expecting it to be portable (Score:2)
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I still own the laptop cooling pads that I used to make gaming on a laptop viable even while lying on a hotel bed.
Sure, the good ones are $30+ but with a 200mm or 230mm fan you get a lot of cooling for very little noise and for something like a macbook it requires minimal effort.
Plug in power in the right (Score:3)
What I discovered (and yes this is as stupid as it sounds). The MacBook pro has poor thermal management if you plug the usb-c charging cable in the left. Youâ(TM)ll get slow performance and fan noise. Plug in the right side and itâ(TM)ll be fine.
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The left side seems to charge faster than the right side.
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Ah, we haven't been using it right!
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No surprise here. The fan intake is on the left, incidentally there are also no internal heatpipes bringing the heat anywhere near this nice cool airflow, instead the CPU just has a standard heatsink on it and relies on the fact that air will travel through the case (picking up heat from things like the USB-C power converters) along the way.
It's an incredibly dumb form over function design. I sometimes wonder if they intentionally thermally gimped the previous gen MacBook Pros just so their M1 could look be
Two kinds of people (Score:5, Funny)
Some buy cheap products and spend a fortune to make it work, others pay more and don't have to worry. And there are Mac users... Actually, three kinds of people!
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From 2004:
New Powermac uses liquid cooling on high end model [computerworld.com]
The intel machines are pretty noisy compared to an m1. On a new arm based mac, you'll barely hear the SSD being thrashed.
External GPU to the rescue (Score:3)
The fan noise on my 2015 Macbook Pro was getting unbearable, to the point where I bought a few ice-packs to sit the laptop on. I could get about 45 minutes to an hour of relative quiet before it would start howling at full bore again, and I'd make a trip to the freezer and swap the pack out for a cold one. /significantly/. I'd highly recommend that move for anyone who's trying to get another year or two out of their machine, but can't stand the noise. It was a USB3 Sonnet enclosure, but the lightning to USB3 adapter + a driver hack has been super stable for the better part of a year now.
Shortly thereafter, I bought an external GPU to help speed up a few things (3D drafting, mostly), and much to my surprise and joy, the fan noise on the laptop dropped
Re: External GPU to the rescue (Score:2)
Or ... You could just blow the shit out of the heatsink and fan and replace the thermal paste
Re: External GPU to the rescue (Score:2)
If youâ(TM)re doing something thatâ(TM)s CPU or GPU limited, itâ(TM)s going to be relatively noisy no matter what.
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Also your posts are full of apple-generated hieroglyphics because "it just works" where "it" is cartoon quotation marks and cartoon apostrophes, an option you've had a decade to figure out, but still havent.
But lets keep listening to you, yeah? In spite of how wrong you are?
My system is very quiet when "cpu limited" because I built it to be quiet under load. There is no "no matter what" about it. You are just flat out fucking wrong, as in you are just saying random shit that
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replace the thermal paste
This must be the famed Apple build quality, eh?
Also, brand new macbooks are noisy AF under full load. One presumes they are sold with fresh thermal paste and clean vents.
Too complicated (Score:2)
Why go through all that trouble? Use another pump that doesn't need all this stupidly over-complicated setup.
Surely you can run a pump and do the monitoring from something much smaller like an Arduino Pro Mini or similar.
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Bad Fan? (Score:2)
WoW (Score:1)