Liquid cooled MacBook Neo performs 18% better in Geekbench 6 versus stock

Apple's MacBook Neo is a raging success and has helped the company bring in a record number of new users into the Apple ecosystem. However, one area where the Neo's designers cut corners is with the cooling solution, which allows the A18 Pro inside to thermal throttle under heavy workloads. YouTuber ETA Prime modded a MacBook Neo with a Peltier-based liquid cooling solution and found the chip performs significantly better without thermal throttling, especially in games.

The YouTuber used multiple cooling mods to make the liquid cooling mod possible. First, he applied a copper cooling mod to the Neo's A18 Pro inside, replacing the stock graphene pad with a copper shim sandwiched between the A18 Pro and thermal paste on the bottom and a thermal pad on top, connecting the copper pad to the bottom cover of the Neo. We will explain why this mod was necessary further below.

The liquid cooling system ETA Prime is using is designed for smartphones and uses a combination of electricity and coolant to cool the temperature of whatever device the system is connected to. The cooler uses a magnetic puck to attach itself to a smartphone and cool the internal components from the device's back cover. In the Neo's case, the YouTuber attached the puck right over the SoC and the copper shim above it. Using the liquid cooler this way likely wouldn't have been possible without the copper shim mod, the MacBook Neo's stock graphene pad doesn't connect to anything but the A18 Pro itself; which is why the chip thermal throttles.

ETA Prime ran a few benchmarks and found the A18 Pro was able to achieve a 15.2% better single-core score and a 9.7% higher multi-core score in Geekbench 6 with just the copper mod applied. Pairing the laptop to the liquid cooler resulted in an even greater 18.6% higher single-core result and 17.52% greater multi-core result compared to stock.

Gaming performance was massively better, ETA Prime tested No Man's Sky and found the game runs almost three times better with the liquid cooler. With the stock pad, the game achieves around 30 FPS, but with the liquid cooler, the game was capable of hitting 80 FPS average.

This mod won't be practical for the vast majority of MacBook Neo owners, and the A18 Pro already provides enough performance for tasks the Neo was designed for. However, ETA Prime's liquid cooling mod shows the true capabilities of the chip and what it can do when cooling is a non-issue. For those who need a bit of extra performance, the copper cooling mod alone can provide a decent performance uplift, as ETA Prime demonstrated.