ETA Prime Answers the Question: What if the MacBook Neo Had Thermo-Electric Cooling?

By all accounts, the MacBook Neo is a great budget laptop. However, because it has no active cooling system, the A18 Pro thermally throttles pretty quickly, degrading performance of games and other applications.

Thanks to how easy it is to take the Neo apart, you’ve probably already seen videos of users adding a thermal pad to transfer some of the heat from the Neo’s chip to its aluminum chassis. The result is a meaningful boost in performance.

ETA Prime decided to take things further with an external liquid-cooled solution that attaches magnetically to the Neo to see if even more performance could be squeezed out of the computer. The first step was to add a custom copper plate and thermal pad layer that transfers heat from the A18 Pro to the Neo’s case, which like other thermal pad solutions made a meaningful difference in game performance. Next, ETA Prime attached a thermal-electric cooling device typically used for gaming on mobile phones to the bottom of the Neo to push the A18 Pro’s operating temperature consistently below the throttling temperature.

The results were substantial. It’s worth watching the full video, but a game like No Man’s Sky, which throttled quickly and ran at around 30fps on the Neo, ran at around 60fps with ETA Prime’s mod. While a thermal-electric cooling device goes beyond what a typical user would be willing to do, it does make you wonder what the Neo would be capable of with a more robust built-in cooling system.