So I water-cooled my MacBook Pro

[theodric]

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:

 

[velocityg4]

That's some serious dedication. I wonder how it would do if you could mount water blocks directly on the CPU and GPU. I assume it's still going through the case.

How's the portability?

 

[ZZ9pluralZalpha]

He may the One: the maniac who fulfills the prophecy and brings us the PowerBook G5 ?

 

[MBAir2010]

this is a-mazing, i need to look over this again!
good for you!

 

[theodric]

That's some serious dedication. I wonder how it would do if you could mount water blocks directly on the CPU and GPU. I assume it's still going through the case.

How's the portability?

You just unplug it and pick it up! As 1096bimu said, 'in fact you can cool the laptop with your blood and circulatory system' I tested: it runs warm on a lap, and I would recommend wearing pants. But in fact with the whole-case radiator mod it spins up the fans less and weathers moderate spikes of high load better than the unmodified laptop. Once the chassis gets heated up, well, you won't get cold, and eventually it throttles like it always did. I don't use this machine off desk, and I kinda don't care what happens to it, so this absurdity works out pretty well.

 

[Christopher Kim]

This is a fantastic project to do, kudos! I was an overclocker way back in the day (late-90s to mid-2000s) when I would build gaming PC’s, when there weren’t nice watercooling kits and we‘d use high-end aquarium Eheim pumps! ? Feels like a lifetime ago, as i’ve been all-on Apple ecosystem for ~ decade now. But both the old and current me loves and appreciates this!

 

[theodric]

This is a fantastic project to do, kudos! I was an overclocker way back in the day (late-90s to mid-2000s) when I would build gaming PC’s, when there weren’t nice watercooling kits and we‘d use high-end aquarium Eheim pumps! ? Feels like a lifetime ago, as i’ve been all-on Apple ecosystem for ~ decade now. But both the old and current me loves and appreciates this!

That Aquastream XT is nothing but an Eheim 1046 with a microcontroller and sensor array bolted to the back, and a slightly-different impeller specified by Aquacomputer. The new ways only build on the old

 

[ksloth]

Wow, this is so cool! I am impressed/horrified by your drive and determination to see this through at any cost! ?

 

[xraydoc]

So... a laptop turned into a desktop?
Maybe Apple should build a battery-operated water cooling system in to a backpack and sell it along with the 16" MBP. lol.

But congrats to the OP for an impressive work of garage engineering.

 

[cakeloverpro]

or he could got 2 macbook airs m1 and stuck them together for that price. I am seriously thinking about daisy chaining 2 M1s and find a way to share the cores.

maybe if i cast a magical spell... wish me luck

 

[arn]

Story about it: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/02/intel-macbook-pro-owner-adds-water-cooling/

 

[nikhsub1]

OP by chance were you a procooling forum member back in the day? I was super into water cooling 20 years ago and had a lot of fun with it, only desktops though. I love seeing this!

 

[ChoMomma]

Have you noticed if Safari is snappier?

 

[SuperTango]

BWAHAHA. This is awesome. I might actually try this. My 2019 MBP16 w/64GB memory is always in thermal throttle. I'm a dev so have xcode, simulators, appcode, and some other stuff running almost 100% of the time, so the workload is pretty high.

Sometimes, I stick it on an icepack and it helps for about 20 minutes.

I was wondering though, I'm not keen to open the case and make internal mods. How much do you think the internal heat pads and removing the thermal plate helped?

 

[seanners]

This makes me SOOOO happy ?

I use a cooling pad and disable Intel Turbo Boost on my MacBook Pro, because the fan noise is so terrible otherwise. Hopefully Apple sees your post too ?

 

[Christopher Kim]

I was wondering though, I'm not keen to open the case and make internal mods. How much do you think the internal heat pads and removing the thermal plate helped?

This occurred to me too, as I thought about whether I would ever do something like this. I think it's one thing if you're water-cooling (usually for overclocking purposes) a desktop that's made to be built part-by-part, opened up, etc. It's another thing to do it with a laptop (especially one as notorious as Apple's in terms of poor DIY/self-repairability).

I would think it's a bit different for OP given this looks like a 2014/2015 generation MBP (and no longer in warranty), vs your 2019 16" MBP, which still is in-warranty. Not the only factor, but I think it would make a difference to me.

 

[Jupeman]

You had me at "because racecar". Now show us your garage.

 

[Mr Dobey]

He may the One: the maniac who fulfills the prophecy and brings us the PowerBook G5 ?

Best quote of 2021

 

[Phil77354]

Good grief.

 

[theodric]

OP by chance were you a procooling forum member back in the day? I was super into water cooling 20 years ago and had a lot of fun with it, only desktops though. I love seeing this!

Alas, nope!

 

[theodric]

You had me at "because racecar". Now show us your garage.

It's just three pre-2000 BMWs in various states of function...for now

 

[Charles50]

Hey what's that in the last frame? Thermoelectric cooling Peltier plates? I vaguely recall my Powermac 8100/110 used a Peltier device for extra cooling.

 

[theodric]

Hey what's that in the last frame? Thermoelectric cooling Peltier plates? I vaguely recall my Powermac 8100/110 used a Peltier device for extra cooling.

Yep. Everything old is new again!

 

[theodric]

How much do you think the internal heat pads and removing the thermal plate helped?

The added thermal pads make a big difference to this mod, because the thermal design of the laptop prioritizes getting the heat out of the chassis before it can soak in, and the thermal pads counteract that and send the heat through the pad into the chassis where it can bleed into the cooling plate. There are limits for max safe skin contact temperature over time, and this almost certainly exceeds them in edge cases, even while it's OK most of the time when you're not beating up the GPU and CPU simultaneously.

Because this is an older device (despite still being absolutely fine for what I do with it, which is not only remote work, but also includes some FL/OSS development, running VMs, emulation, etc.) I'm not shy about hacking up parts of it. However, the mods to the laptop are largely reversible:

Feet - $3 on AliExpress
Thermal pads - you just peel them off

The thermal shielding is not fixable, but it's maybe ~€20 to get a new bottom lid online, if I should ever feel to need to return this 2014 MacBook Pro to retail condition in order to achieve Max Resale Value™® rather than putting it on a shelf and forgetting about it.

If you want to do a similar mod yourself without porking your warranty, you will get acceptable performance without removing the thermal shielding. Add the thermal pads over CPU, GPU, heat pipes - 2-3mm should be thick enough, but play with it - go with two rather than three of the plates so that the bottom of the laptop can sit flat without needing to punch the feet out of the bottom case. Put a Y splitter from pump output to the two innermost pipes to send the coldest water over the hottest points on the bottom case, exhaust out the outermost pipes with another Y back to radiator. Or run twin radiators :-D I ran with two plates from late November until March, when my third plate finally made it from China, and performance was not noticeably worse.

 

[darthdrinker]

It's just three pre-2000 BMWs in various states of function...for now

Just the best BMW's in that case then, e39 owner here.

That water cooling setup is just awesome. I have a MBA M1 and thinking of combining this with the MBA M1 heatpad upgrade and see where we can get that thing, thanks for sharing!