MacBook Neo received a liquid cooler, and now its performance in No Man’s Sky has doubled

Experiment with the MacBook Neo and the A18 Pro processor

Blogger ETA Prime conducted a series of tests on the new MacBook Neo to determine how the cooling system affects gaming performance.

1. Original configuration – Cooler – passive, with a thin graphene pad over the A18 Pro.

- In *No Man’s Sky* the CPU quickly heats up to ~105 °C → throttling activates.
- FPS dropped to 30–31 frames per second.

2. First improvement – Copper plate
ETA Prime replaced the standard cooler with a self‑made copper plate, thermal paste, and an additional heat spreader. Heat from the chip is now transferred to the lower part of the aluminum chassis, which acts as a radiator.

Results:

- The average temperature of the A18 Pro dropped to ~83–84 °C.
- In *No Man’s Sky* FPS nearly doubled – up to 58 fps.

> Result: overall performance increased by about 10 %.

3. Second stage – Thermoelectric block with liquid cooling
ETA Prime mounted a TE‑block (thermoelectric) and a liquid cooling system, attaching it to the lower part of the chassis.

New figures:

- In *No Man’s Sky* FPS exceeded 60 frames per second.
- Performance gains compared to the standard system: +17.52 % (Geekbench single‑core), +18.60 % (Geekbench multi‑core), +23.51 % (Cinebench single‑core) and +19.08 % (Cinebench multi‑core).

4. What this means
Throttling is a typical phenomenon for smartphone‑class SoCs, where temperature limits are strict. In the case of the MacBook Neo, the main bottleneck is not the chip itself but its cooling.

The experiments show that Apple could invest more in a more efficient thermal management system to unlock the full potential of the A18 Pro without requiring user modifications.

Detailed review of the MacBook Neo unchanged

If you want to see how the laptop performs “out of the box,” read our detailed test covering games and other workloads in the standard configuration.