Hey ya'll. Been lurking on here for some time going over all of the different variations of mods that you guys have done and despite my MBA2020 i5/16/256 being less than a month old, I decided to open her up in the name of performance. Coming from the heyday of overclocking desktop rigs with antifreeze water-cooled CPU's and CCL lights, the keywords cooler and faster were all it took to convince me. I don't have any before/after pictures - just one before as I was way too excited to get started and finish but my list of parts purchased are as follows:
JIUWU 20x20x0.3 Copper Shim
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Thermal Paste, 1 gram
ARCTIC Thermal Pad 50 x 50 x 1 mm
3M 800, 1000, 1500 Grit Sandpaper
ArctiClean 1 & 2 Thermal Paste Compound Remover & Purifier
I sanded the shims mainly to get rid of any surface impurities with a dry sand, making sure not too remove too much Copper in the process. I eyeballed it but users have said that 20 mm was the better size, compared to the 15mm copper shims. My final shim was 2 pieces - roughly 17 mm x 15mm and a smaller piece on top measuring roughly 3 mm x 15mm. Not too sure of these dimensions but I ended up with a shim that fit in the i5 heatsink insert with roughly a 1~2 mm of space free on each size. I figured some empty space would help the extra heat that the heatsink wasn't absorbing would run off the sides, either into the heatsink or the thermal pad on top.
The Grizzy Paste was expensive but is advertised as having one of the best thermal shedding rating so I figured why not. I would be curious to have some data on those whom have done the same mods with the only difference being the choice of brand of thermal paste to see if it actually keeps temps down better than say - Arctic MX-4.
The Thermal Pad went on top and I trimmed a little bit off the top right hand side, by the gold washer/nut piece thingy as the i5 heatsink is not perfectly square. Someone suggested 1mm ought to do it as someone on one of these forums went with 1.5mm first and said the bottom of the case got way too hot. I left the stock rubber padding on the bottom of the case as well. From what I've read it seems members are rather divided on whether or not the bottom of the case should have a perfect seal with the heat pad, or not and I don't own an IR gun but even when running GC and Power Gadget at full settings, even with the core approaching 90 degrees, the bottom of the laptop never got unbearably hot.
So, the moment you've all been waiting for. Benchmark scores! Overall, very very satisfied with the performance bump given the relatively cheap cost of the materials used. I'm still torn about Apple deliberately limiting power on the new MBA's with the placement of the fan relative to the heatsink, but I'm reminded they are a billion dollar company and pricing and slotting of products is tantamount to their success.
P.S. During my research I came across these heatsinks used on Rasberry Pi devices and was wondering if anyone had successfully incorporated one of these heatsinks in their MBA2020 cooling systems. I think I saw a picture of someone who replaced the factory heatsink with one of these Rasberry Pi Copper heatsinks but he/she might have made some mention of it not working as effectively as predicted. Anyway, thanks for the DIY guides and the seemingly endless amount of information on this forum regarding these mods. Couldn't have done it without ya'll. Can't wait to see what you guys think of next.
