Apple continues to employ a fan-less cooling design for 13-inch and 15-inch M3 MacBook Air models, and while that means users will be pleased about the completely silent operation, they will lose out on a ton of performance. The M3 MacBook Pro, which sports a single fan, can offer significantly improved sustained performance while touting the same SoC, as demonstrated in a series of tests. It is also worth mentioning that the M3 MacBook Air gets uncomfortably toasty, which we hope Apple can address in future iterations.
For quick performance bursts, the M3 MacBook Air can perform faster than the M3 MacBook Pro
The 15-inch M3 MacBook Air was in the possession of the YouTube channel Max Tech, who immediately pointed out that Apple incorporated the same fan-less heatsink design as before, but there was a possibility that the power efficiency of the latest M3 would mean that the machine would throttle less than those sporting the M2. Unfortunately, we were incorrect in our assumption because even though the latest MacBook Air impresses in Geekbench 6’s single-core, multi-core, and Metal benchmarks, the M3’s true colors can be seen in sustained workloads, especially when 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme Stress test is run.
Somehow, the M3 MacBook Air continues to chug along, even with the highest CPU temperature reaching 114 degrees Celsius and the GPU touching 102.9 degrees Celsius. Those high temperatures also mean that the chipset’s total power draw starts to decline dramatically to prevent the MacBook Air from getting any hotter, and as you can see in the comparison, it ends up being 33 percent slower than the MacBook Pro, even though both models feature the same M3 with the 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU.
Another drawback to these high temperatures is that since the latest MacBook Air is made entirely of aluminum, it can conduct heat well. As those temperatures start to climb, Max Tech shows that the exterior chassis temperature can reach between 45 and 46 degrees Celsius, which can become highly uncomfortable if you have to keep the M3 MacBook Air on your laptop while running those taxing workloads. Remember that Apple has yet to change this internal design, as the M2 MacBook Air would reach unbearably high temperatures too, losing out on a ton of performance compared to the MacBook Pro with the same SoC.
Thankfully, the same YouTube channel brought down those high temperatures to a certain degree by modding the heatsink with $15 thermal pads. Even though the thermals were exactly the same as the last time the M2 MacBook Air was stressed, on this occasion, it could sustain that performance for much more extended periods. Those well-versed in this area can purchase the same thermal pads from Amazon for a fairly low price and get more performance from their M3 MacBook Air. You can also check out Max Tech’s video above and see the tests conducted.
News Source: Max Tech
