Recently, a video went kind of viral to fix some thermal issues of the current generation of MacBook Airs. Are only MacBooks affected by rather poor thermal design? Oh hell no. A fundamental issue with many modern notebooks is that they are designed as thin as possible. Design seems to be more important than functionality. This is not necessarily a new thing but current generation of CPUs, especially those by Intel, are still getting super hot despite beginning throttled down quite a bit. To some degree this is an issue with “gaming notebooks” and even “workstation notebooks”. The latter seem to come with better vapor chambers and higher quality thermal paste used. It is really not understandable why someone should pay large amounts of money, with some of these notebooks we’re talking about USD3000+, and they can’t be fully utilized and run into some thermal issues and throttle down. And of course once we put some decent loads on ‘ultra thin notebooks’ that contains only a CPU with integrated graphics, then the situation is getting even worse. Even “high priced” notebook are designed so poorly with respect to thermal management and use super cheap thermal components that the device can’t handle the performance it could provide. This is not a big secret but it feels that this problem is getting bigger every year/new generation released.
A recent experience from myself. One of my notebooks with a rather recent generation of CPUs (Intel Tiger Lake) ran into extreme thermal after a while. While these external notebook coolers might make the situation as tiny bit better, the real deal is replacing the OEM provided thermal paste with something decent. Just replacing the thermal paste on a couple of notebooks with new and higher quality thermal paste caused a drop from 90 - 100 degrees Celsius down to 50-70 under max. load with lower fan rpms. Suddenly, the performance I payed for is available again. And don’t forget. The less a fan spins, the less energy is used and if they spin they might actually draw enough power to reduce battery life significantly.