Hello, an M1 mac would be my first macbook. I am deciding between the Air and the Pro. I live in a fairly hot country and the ambient temperature in my room in the summer reaches almost 30 degree celsius sometimes. I want to use the mac mostly for office work and also for some gaming. Would the Air throttle a lot more in those conditions than in colder climates? Has anyone run any tests regarding this? Thanks.
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Will high ambient temperature make the M1 air throttle much more?
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Gaming might particularly if plugged in while using.
During SoCal summer with broken AC (90-100F), my iPad Pros (A10X) were getting warmer than usual while charging. I always charged them when it was cooler (at the air conditioned office or overnight) and only used them on battery so no slowdowns during use.
I expect the M1s to behave more or less similarly.
During SoCal summer with broken AC (90-100F), my iPad Pros (A10X) were getting warmer than usual while charging. I always charged them when it was cooler (at the air conditioned office or overnight) and only used them on battery so no slowdowns during use.
I expect the M1s to behave more or less similarly.
It probably won't matter much since the MacBook Air runs its CPU at about 90° C under load. The differential between 90° C and 30° C is so much that it probably doesn't matter vs 22° C for what most people consider room temperature.
Edit: Apple says 35°C max operating temperature. I'm sure that is pretty conservative.
Nope. That means if the CPU normally runs at 90C at 22C ambient, it could go 100C or even higher when ambient temp is 30C. That's automatic shutdown temp for some Intel CPUs.
What? The normal thermal management will keep the SoC temperatures the same even with a slightly higher ambient temp.
I've seen it happen on Intel Ivy Bridge on a Windows desktop during SoCal heat waves. Fan runs at full blast at idle and with any CPU load, it just couldn't keep up with the heat.
Honestly though, I doubt that's going to happen on M1. These are based on the iPad SoCs and those run super cool.
90° die temp is the wrong measure, the real question how much energy can be transported via the various changes of material at a given temp gap.
Die->heat-spreader->thermalpaste(?)->heatsink->outercase->air
So +10° on that last gap can make a big differnce but also humidity or placement of the laptop (think sofa cushion vs metal table).
In all of the tests conducted in colder climates thus far, the Air has been shown to consistently lose about 15-20% performance after about 10 minutes of sustained load.
So if sustained high performance is important to you, I'd go for the Pro.
And I'll refrain from making any comment about ambient temp and the Air. I've been ridiculed for this multiple times now whenever I brought it up in the past. People who don't live in hot countries or haven't experienced the last California heat waves that came this year just don't "get it". Their response was "why don't you use air conditioning", but... I stand by my earlier statement: if a computer "requires" air conditioning just to be able to keep up, then it's not a good thermal design, or it's not built for that use case.
In this case, if the Air can't sustain your use case without air conditioning, then you simply need the Pro.