Apple M3 MacBook Air hits 114 degrees Celsius under full load

[Lew Zealand]

Why specify modern? Any fanless device, any time in history, has limited heat output. Difference being modern hardware can still do quite a lot when throttled down. Nobody fondly remembers those awful atom chips.

Akasa has some passive cooling cases for NUCs that don't throttle the 28W CPU but of course there's a lot of metal and dissipation area to make that work.

 

[ZedRM]

As many here know, I'm not a fan of Apple, refined garbage IMO, but this was unexpected. Kinda goes along with my previous idea. Never expected that this kind of thing would ever be an issue for an Apple product. Oh well, garbage is as garbage does..

 

[MSIGamer]

So just as useless as Intel. Very fast if you use it for less than 5 minutes. After that your system takes damage and will be unstable. Great value.

 

[BabaYaga]

" After all, the MacBook Air is designed for light computing tasks and is ill-suited for heavy workstation-like loads" Why does a light task laptop cost $1400?

Starts at $750 for M1, $950 for M2, and $1,050 for M3. You're paying for quality components. Screen, materials, and iOS. If I was a teen who gamed on laptops, I would get a gaming laptop. As a professional, one just doesn't show up with a thick hunk of plastic with a dragon logo. Most of the screens are terrible 1080p to boot. Lasts 60min on battery because all come with a video card I don't want.

The entire test is testing a laptop for something it wasn't designed to do. If you want a sustained workload, Apple has the Pro version for that with active cooling.

I don't own one yet but will probably pick up a M3 Pro based one for productivity. I looked very hard and there is no competition on the windows side. Nothing beats the battery life, screen resolution, metal build, and professional look.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Seems like solder and silicon are disobeying thermodynamics, yikes.

But wait: The zeroth law states that if two thermodynamic systems are both in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then the two systems are in thermal equilibrium with each other.

I'm just telling you it's not the same. Thermo is a branch of physics.

 

[hahahanoobs]

I'm genuinely intrigued but unfortunately I'm no better off after your explanation

Not my explanation....

 

[gmorita]

Temperature is measured in degrees Kelvin, Centigrade, or Fahrenheit depending on which system you use. Heat is measured in Watts or BTUs (British Thermal Units) again, depending on whether you are using metric or English units.

The efficiency of a heatsink is determined by it's thermal resistance and is measured in Degrees C/Watt. To determine the temperature of the die, you multiply the thermal resistance by the watts being dissipated.

In the case of the Xbox and M3 CPUs stated above, the Xbox has a thermal resistance of 100C/200W or 0.5C/W whereas the M3 is 114C/14W or 8C/W. Not a surprise since the MacBook has no active cooling. Even a small amount of moving air could reduce the thermal resistance signfificantly

Temperature and heat ARE NOT equivalent but most lay people conflate the two.

 

[hwertz]

That's crazy. Maybe not the "no fan", but the ineffective thermal throttling. If it's going to thermal throttle to 100C, it should thermal throttle to 100C, not hit 114C first. I'd be very concerned about component heating -- I had a Chromebook where the CPU (a Nvidia Tegra K1, quad-core ARM with a roughly GTX650-speed GPU) would hit 90C (barely, it'd shave about 10% off peak performance, IF you ran it under full load with the lid shut...running Ubuntu off an SDCard I would remote into it and have it encoding videos since it was actually faster at it than my desktop.) But it was only a 10W TDP chip so it would barely warm the system up at all (like room temperature is 20C? It might have hit 25C. With the lid shut, maybe 21C with the lid open.). With 46C being measured at the chassis (... and probably not running with the lid shut) this is clearly not the case on the Apple product.

I would be VERY concerned about component life! Your RAM and SSD are after all soldered on, so if you cook them you are screwed. CPUs are usually speced for (at least) 90C max temp, but M.2 SSDs it's typically 70C max (and the SSD makes it's own heat, to the point that newer ones are requiring heat sinks), RAM has a lower max temp like that (and also generates it's own heat). Capacitors and like the electronics to run the backlight it's the cooler the better, running caps at 70C is begging for your motherboard to blow some caps. If they have this set up somehow so the insides are 46C like the hot spots on the case, no problem. But it seems unlikely that a 114C CPU can be right next to some components on the motherboard without them getting well over 70C.