Perhaps I’m still beholden to an “old wives tale” of thermal paste, but I thought the principle was “as little as possible to get complete coverage”?
Potentially, if there isn't a clamping mechanism you could apply more paste than the paste can transfer heat to the spreader.
Sorry for the confusion. The graphene spreader is attached to the metal shield which is thermal pasted to the SOC. The same thermal flux issues created by gaps or contamination on the SOC interface apply to the shield-to-pyrolytic carbon spreader. Compromising that interface disrupts the thermal flow, just as it does to the SOC interface.
This is the problem. It's hard to recommend the base M2 MBA when the base M1 MBA is so much cheaper (if you don't qualify for an educational discount) and will be faster for some workloads (though many MBA buyers probably wouldn't notice the difference). With 16gb of RAM and 512gb of SSD, the M2 MBA is almost as expensive as the base 14" MBP which is a much better laptop.
I have a Dell XPS 13 905 I bought last year, Black Friday for cheap 649.00.It has 8GIGs of ram, 256 SSD.If I run crystal disc bench mark on, the SSD speeds are fast around 4000 speeds. But, not the whole story. Because of windows bloatware, the stuff that Dell requires you to have, it is to comparison to my base Mac mini M1. Plus the battery life has gone down, it gets only maybe 4 hours with screen brightness to 60 percent, those old eyes bought because it had 400 nit screen. I'm not a power user by Far, just using chrome with a couple of tabs open, takes a while to load, not my Internet, my iPad Pro 12.9 M1 works instantly. Yes its a nice designed machine, but honestly I hardly use it anymore. I'm gonna put it up for sale, or give it to a family member. I'm weening myself off of windows, had a MacBook Air in 2011.
It shouldn’t throttle. This isn’t like the old, Intel Macs which would throttle and run the fans for almost any task. The M1/M2 stay cool and fast for most tasks. You have to execute tasks that use all of the CPU cores and all of the GPU cores to get the M2 to throttle. Even then, the M2 MBA is stable and only slows down by 10-20% while staying faster than the M1 MBA.
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Thank you for your response! I really appreciate it - didn't know about the return policy.It shouldn’t throttle. This isn’t like the old, Intel Macs which would throttle and run the fans for almost any task. The M1/M2 stay cool and fast for most tasks. You have to execute tasks that use all of the CPU cores and all of the GPU cores to get the M2 to throttle. Even then, the M2 MBA is stable and only slows down by 10-20% while staying faster than the M1 MBA.
This whole thread is because some people are affronted that when they run Final Cut Pro to render an 8K video with lots of filters, the M2 Air will hit a thermal limit and slow down to keep from overheating.
Apple has a fairly forgiving return policy, so you could get one, try it out, and if the performance won’t meet your needs, you can return it. i would recommend getting the 16GB RAM option and upgrade the storage to at least 512GB. The base model RAM and storage are pretty limited for what you are doing.
Here is a good review that goes over all the features of the MBA including performance.
M2 MacBook Air Review: A new era
The definitive Mac of the last decade was the 13-inch MacBook Air, introduced in 2010 and featuring a wedge-shaped design. It influenced all the Apple laptops (and let’s face it, a lot of PC …
Says who? From the tests I have seen, it appears that the M1 and M2 are very close to equal in that regard.
You don't need to run all core to get the M1 to throttle so I wouldn't expect that all core is needed to throttle the M2 either. You do need pretty intense CPU or GPU work but I can get an M1 MacBook Air to throttle on Cinebench and that is just all 8 CPU cores and no GPU cores. So it is more like "if you use a lot of the CPU cores or GPU cores for several minutes".It shouldn’t throttle. This isn’t like the old, Intel Macs which would throttle and run the fans for almost any task. The M1/M2 stay cool and fast for most tasks. You have to execute tasks that use all of the CPU cores and all of the GPU cores to get the M2 to throttle. Even then, the M2 MBA is stable and only slows down by 10-20% while staying faster than the M1 MBA.
This whole thread is because some people are affronted that when they run Final Cut Pro to render an 8K video with lots of filters, the M2 Air will hit a thermal limit and slow down to keep from overheating.
Apple has a fairly forgiving return policy, so you could get one, try it out, and if the performance won’t meet your needs, you can return it. i would recommend getting the 16GB RAM option and upgrade the storage to at least 512GB. The base model RAM and storage are pretty limited for what you are doing.
Here is a good review that goes over all the features of the MBA including performance.
M2 MacBook Air Review: A new era
The definitive Mac of the last decade was the 13-inch MacBook Air, introduced in 2010 and featuring a wedge-shaped design. It influenced all the Apple laptops (and let’s face it, a lot of PC …
If the 8GB is working now, that‘s great. A lot of the issues with RAM are when you are running a lot of simultaneous apps. If you are mainly doing your DJ app, that reduces the pressure.
So it seems to vary depending on which test you are using and which use case. sounds like it doesn’t matter much anyway since we are only talking about cases where it reaches throttling levels. I guess if you are just playing games you might care, but otherwise, probably not.
There’s no problem with their passive cooling and moving away from a fan was deliberate. This is a useless suggestion.
But the MBA and MBP are different products. If you care only about power, you shouldn't be looking at a MBA in the first place. People talking about "well it's only $300 or something more to get a 14" MBP at that point" are missing the fact that that MBP is almost a pound heavier and the MBA is under 70% of the larger machine's volume.
