Do you think XPS pricing had an impact on price drop of Air?
4/256 is $999 for XPS though (even though it has a touch screen)
$1099 for 8/256 XPS so that makes Air a better value, especially when you incorporate education discount
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2020 Air Heatsink Modification Thread
- Thread starter ilikewhey
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Do you think XPS pricing had an impact on price drop of Air?
4/256 is $999 for XPS though (even though it has a touch screen)
$1099 for 8/256 XPS so that makes Air a better value, especially when you incorporate education discount
I cannot believe that you guys are still talking about heat problem. There is no heat problem or performance issues with this model. TDP is 10 watt. I have this machine, it is a perfect machine for day to day checking up on thing and I don't even notice a different between work given i9 16 inch macbook pro and MBA when doing light task but heat and battery is miles apart between the 2 machine. MBP is alot hotter and drains the battery a lot quicker than the MBA when doing light task.
I though we established there was a slight heat problem, although not a huge one?
There was a video that showed benchmarks did increase with better cooling. But with further cooling there were no improvements despite about 20°C of thermal headroom which suggested some firmware limitations put in place by Apple.
There was a video that showed benchmarks did increase with better cooling. But with further cooling there were no improvements despite about 20°C of thermal headroom which suggested some firmware limitations put in place by Apple.
It's more a limitation by intel (and apple complying with intel's spec). This is a 10 watt CPU. the major differences between this and the i7-1065G7 (which will no doubt be in the coming 13" Pro) are packaging and watt rating (and the 1065 has DDR4 support of higher capacity DIMMS not just LPDDR4). That's it, the architecture is pretty much the same.
If the 13" MBP(2 thunderbolt) model is updated with new keyboard, new processors and the updated storage(and considering it has better performance and battery life), it will be weird to have the Air and that in the same lineup. I mean why will people get the Air? Just for the form factor? No touch bar? It starts at $1299 like the stock i5 Air.
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Do you have the base Air?
I suppose it depends on your definition of "slight."
Apple is using the same cooling design, but with a hotter CPU. The new MBA's i5 CPU is a 10W chip, but it can draw over 32W to turbo boost. The older models with 7W chips drew less than 15W to turbo boost. Even though Apple increased the size of the CPU heat sink in the new MBA, this leads to the CPU temperature quickly rising. It will go up to 100 degrees C, which is the maximum Intel allows. However, Apple also lets it sustain that temperature. To my knowledge, no other laptop on the market lets the CPU stay at 100 degrees C, not even the older models and not even the fan-less MacBook.
Then, Apple delays using the fan much until CPU temperatures stay high for a while. Sometimes, even when the CPU reaches 100 degrees C, the fan will be almost inaudible. If the CPU temperature remains high for some period of time, then the fan will run hard to try to maintain that temperature.
I think Apple does its best to test products. However, I am not sure Apple has tested this level of heat in this chassis over the course of many years. So, what this does in the long run to the other components, like the battery, logic board and case, we are about to find out. It might be fine, or it might not.
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Oh don't get me wrong, I firmly agree with you. Just trying to appease the "intended market" side
It is possible Apple does not have access to firmware that turbo boost resides in..
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Actually, the i5 model
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Apple is using a bigger heat sink which is .05 lb more, so not the same design...
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I have the 2020 Air and the 2019 13” MacBook Pro. When running processor-intensive applications, the Pro draws about 25-30W, while the Air draws about 12W. Apple doesn’t let the Air processor sustain the top turbo boost speeds because those chips are not binned to sustain those high speeds for very long.
Intel rates the chips to run to 105C.
How does these two machines compare in daily activities? Which has better battery and heat/noise emission?
That can’t be good to run it at that temp constantly, so use as prescribed for light use only
Intel chips while tend to be behind TSMC’s curve at this point, at least have a reputation for reliability. I’m looking at you Nvidia/AMD with horrible poor macbook gpu long term reliability.
I have fairly light usage. Both typically operate without the fan, or at a low speed. When pushed, the 13“ Pro is significantly faster, but also noisier, since it has better thermals and can sustain the higher boost speeds, albeit with the fans spinning.
Hey Thro, how's it been going since you received it? Acceptably quiet or annoyingly loud?
So, now that Apple listened to customers by changing the keyboard, lowering the price, increasing the storage, and providing quad core processors, is the next thing for people to wait for an ARM MBA that solves the heat sink issue?
Always moving the bar. Meanwhile, I'll just keep using and enjoying my 2019 MBA.
Always moving the bar. Meanwhile, I'll just keep using and enjoying my 2019 MBA.
It's on par with my 2015 Pro. Performance is significantly better (mine's the i7). It feels less warm on my lap (makes sense, 10 watt cpu vs. 28 watt cpu in the older machine).
I.e., if you have had a 13" MacBook Pro or MacBook Air before, I suspect you know exactly what to expect (despite the horror stories, this is in my experience, a typical apple 13" machine):
- mostly silent during normal use
- occasional fan spin up but not really audible when under a bit of load that isn't 100% cpu bound
- 100% cpu bound workload will spin the fan up and be quite audible
This, in my experience is pretty much the same behaviour as my previous MacBook Pro 15 (2011) and MacBook Pro 13 (2015) in terms of "general use". The noise is approximately the same, maybe the 2020 machine is bit less annoying (I hear apple did stuff with the fan blades in recent machines), but imho it's a wash.
If you've owned MacBooks before - you know the deal, imho. If your workload makes the fan spin on previous machines, it will on this one. If your machines are usually silent, this will be usually silent as well.
Of course if you run cinebench or whatever and stress the CPU for long periods of time you get fan noise. This is true of every portable Mac I have ever owned, and also true of every desktop PC I've built (to a lesser degree).
Be aware: as others have repeatedly posted - the first couple of days will result in the machine indexing your drive, processing your photos imported from iCloud, doing your first large time machine backup, etc. Even so, most of the time doing that the machine was what I would deem acceptably quiet.
Now that is finished, playing YouTube, etc. fan is silent or off (may be spinning, but I can't hear it).
The worst fan noise I've had so far was when MS Outlook was doing my first mailbox sync (which was also during photo analysis, spotlight indexing, etc.). But now that is complete, it's silent again.
Sure, a 13" pro will be faster. It's also about $1000 AUD more expensive for a worse keyboard (worst MacBook keyboard I've ever tried in the 13" pro at the moment, vs the best keyboard I've used on a Mac with the 2020 air - and I mean that, I love it) and older GPU - if I was to spec with 1TB SSD and 16 GB of RAM to match what I ordered the 2020 air with.
I did play sonic team racing on it as a bit of a lightweight gaming test. It defaulted to "ultra" settings (lol, graphics are pretty light weight) and ran fine for a few races without unacceptable fan noise. I didn't buy it as a gaming machine, but it did ok with Apple Arcade as far as that goes.
I have no regrets.
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no temp, fan speed or clock speed measurements above because I've been trying it "as shipped" without introducing third party diagnostic software which may in itself have caused issues that don't exist in a fresh machine. I'll install istatmenus later, if I feel the need.
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Thanks man - I've owned the 2013, 2015 and 2018 MBA, so as long as it's roughly similar to them I'll be well satisfied.
My i5 2020 MBA (8gb RAM, 256 storage) is arriving on Wednesday. Unlike most people I tend to run Windows as my main OS on my Macbook Airs (I know, I know, please don't throw rocks at me), so if anyone's interested in thermals/performance on Bootcamp I can let them know of my experience.
From my experience, the 2018 MBA runs cooler and quieter on Windows 10 and has been a dream in terms of thermals, noise emissions and battery life (particuarly after undervolting with Throttlestop - each core can be undervolted by 120mv, which made a big difference). 9 hours battery life web browsing, 8 hours battery life using a work virtual machine and word processing/excel/Outlook etc, 10-11 hours watching videos.
As long as the 2020 version is in the same ballpark I'll be pretty satisfied.
Thanks Thro! Happy quarantining and hope you managed to get your hands on some hot cross buns.
Can you check one thing for me, i have the 2020 MacBook Air with i5, but when i play a 4k 60fps video in chrome, i get dropped frames. Can you see if the same occurs on your Macbook Pro? For instance, the following video is what i used to test.
I have a Surface Pro with a mediocre m3 process with only 4gb of ram, and the same video performs a little better on that machine than the new 2020 Macbook Air. Still get dropped frames, but not as many.
Thanks!
I just played that video just fine on my i7 HOWEVER - be aware it is currently in 1080p max (at least where I am) no doubt due to coronavirus bandwidth caps various services have put in place. it wouldn't let me select 4k (and I've got my MBA 2020 plugged into a 4k monitor).
So for anyone testing - check to make sure if you're doing a 4k test with it, that it is actually running in 4k (as YouTube at least where I am is capping the max res at 1080p during this crisis)!
In Safari it will max out at 1080p, due to codec support on Youtube. You will need to use Google Chrome to watch it in 4k. If you dont mind, can you try it on Google Chrome and right click on the video, then click on stats for nerds, it will show you bunch of stats and if any frames are dropped. Thanks!
Ah fair enough, didn't realise that. Was sure I'd played 4k in Safari before but maybe not.
Will download Brave (chrome based) and give it a shot in that, I don't do chrome now brave exists.
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Yeah, I'm getting dropped frames, but fan not spinning up. I'd say its a software issue in Chrome/brave.
Does anyone know if macOS even supports vp9 hardware acceleration on any platform yet? That video tries to play in vp9 on brave, and I don't think apple support it - they only expose h.265 (unless someone can confirm otherwise)?
Will download Brave (chrome based) and give it a shot in that, I don't do chrome now brave exists.
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Yeah, I'm getting dropped frames, but fan not spinning up. I'd say its a software issue in Chrome/brave.
Does anyone know if macOS even supports vp9 hardware acceleration on any platform yet? That video tries to play in vp9 on brave, and I don't think apple support it - they only expose h.265 (unless someone can confirm otherwise)?
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Ah fair enough, didn't realise that. Was sure I'd played 4k in Safari before but maybe not.
Will download Brave (chrome based) and give it a shot in that, I don't do chrome now brave exists.
Sounds good, thanks for checking!