If you want to crank tons more gaming performance out of the Apple MacBook Neo, apparently a custom water cooling loop works

Although it's not designed for it, the MacBook Neo user might naturally wonder: Is there a way to crank even more performance out of the laptop for gaming? To that end, tech YouTubers Jakkuh and Zip Tie Tech are here to help. Happy birthday, Apple.

After noticing the cheap and cheerful Apple MacBook's GPU tends to run at 105 °C "under basically any load", Jakkuh enlisted tech YouTuber Zip Tie Tech to help him set up some water cooling with the Neo.

One reason the Apple MacBook Neo has garnered so much attention, even from non-Apple folk, is undoubtedly because the PC market is so expensive right now. At just $599, the Neo is a bit of a breath of fresh air considering the usual price for Apple laptops. However, it's not got the best specs, and while it does run standard MacOS apps very well, and our Ian's review shows that it's not the worst at gaming, it's certainly far from being the best.

By default, the laptop only has what looks like a thin graphene pad to keep its six-core A18 Pro cool. Before getting things set up for the full water-cooled solution, the duo swapped out this thin pad with a spare M.2 thermal pad. The results were already impressive with just that change, moving from a 1257 to a 1430 score in 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme (14% higher).

The solution they ultimately end up cooking up involves a copper plate and acrylic water block sitting on top of the chip, with tubing connecting things up to a smart home plant watering pump and a Hayden Automotive 1011 power steering oil cooler that's designed for, umm, a steering wheel.

To start with, though, the waters were tested (pun intended) with a 3D printed plate rather than a copper one, which was then fitted to a 3D printed water block, later to be replaced with an acrylic one. The latter required some complicated and expensive measuring and CNC milling to replicate the 3D print design. This was not just to make the overall design and the holes, but even the threads for the holes, which is obviously a very precise and intricate task.

The CNC mill was also used to fashion the copper plate, including some fins: "We don't even need fins, but we're gonna make them anyway... We're gonna try." After thinning down the wrong bit because it wasn't making proper contact with the processor, the rest had to be thinned, too, and thankfully, "minty contact" was eventually achieved.

I'd probably not be too intimidated by the thought of setting stuff up in software and getting it machining, but there's also tons of finicky stuff you have to actually use your steady hands for. Including making a custom o-ring to fit between the plate and the block.

Then, of course, there are the last big pieces of the puzzle: hooking the plate-block combo up with tubes for the semi-custom loop (a water block to tube to power steering cooler).

The two DIY-ers then milled a hole in the MacBook Neo's chassis backplate for the water block to fit through. Finally, thermal paste was lathered on the processor, and after a little more filing to get the backplate cut-out to the correct size, it was all put together. This obviously added some significant thickness to the Neo, meaning a (3D printed) laptop stand was required.

The final touch was getting it set up with the tilted laptop stand, fitting the pump to one side of it and the water block to the back of the Neo's display. After some more fiddling with the tubing, the water cooling setup finally worked, though it did make the weight distribution of the laptop a little unbalanced, even on the counter-tilted stand.

Difficult though it may have been and cumbersome though the final product may be to hold and use, the results are impressive. The first benchmark result shown scores 1938 for the water-cooled MacBook Neo, which beats the base Neo's 1567, the thermal-padded Neo's 1819, and even the MacBook Air M1's 1836.

Well, on a multi-core Cinebench test, that is. 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme, on the other hand, showed a rise to 1450 from 1257 (base) and 1430 (thermal padded), setting a new world record for the A18 Pro's GPU in the process.

Still, none of this is likely to make it a very good gaming machine. For one, you're still only dealing with 8 GB of memory, and that's unified, meaning it's shared between both CPU and GPU.

And despite it beating some x86 chips in some respects (in single-core performance on its two P-cores), the laptop's A18 Pro is still just a phone chip that's running desktop apps. Not to mention the obvious limitations of the MacOS system for game compatibility, which might have improved a lot, but still isn't ideal.