The M3 MacBook Air's CPU temperature can reach 114°C, 33% slower than a MacBook Pro with the same chip due to the lack of a fan.

Apple continues to use a fanless cooling design for its 13-inch and 15-inch M3 MacBook Air models, and while that means users will be happy with completely silent operation, they will lose out on a lot of performance. The M3 MacBook Pro, which has a single fan, can deliver significantly improved sustained performance while promoting the same SoC, as shown in a series of tests. It's also worth noting that the M3 MacBook Air gets uncomfortably warm, which we hope Apple can address in future iterations.

For fast performance, the M3 MacBook Air can run faster than the M3 MacBook Pro

The 15-inch M3 MacBook Air was in the possession of YouTube channel Max Tech, who immediately pointed out that Apple had incorporated the same fanless heatsink design as before, but there was a possibility that the power efficiency of the latest M3 would mean the machine would throttle badly. Less than those using M2. Unfortunately, we were wrong in our assumption because although the latest MacBook Air impresses in the Geekbench 6 single-core, multi-core and metal benchmarks, the M3's true colors can only be seen in sustained workloads, especially when tested with 3DMark's extreme wilderness stress Being.

Somehow, the M3 MacBook Air continues to work, even with the highest CPU temperature hitting 114°C and the GPU touching 102.9°C. These higher temperatures also mean that the chipset's total power consumption starts to drop significantly to prevent the MacBook Air from overheating, 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 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 quite well. As temperatures start to rise, Max Tech explains that the temperature of the exterior can reach between 45 and 46 degrees Celsius, which can become very uncomfortable if you have to keep the M3 MacBook Air on your laptop while running workloads Exhausting. Remember, Apple hasn't changed this internal design yet, as the M2 MacBook Air will reach unbearably high temperatures as well, losing a lot of performance compared to a MacBook Pro with the same SoC.

Fortunately, the same YouTube channel brought down the high temperatures to a certain degree by modifying the heatsink with $15 thermal pads. Although temperatures were exactly the same as they were the last time the M2 MacBook Air was pressed, on this occasion, it was able to maintain that performance for much longer periods. Those who have good experience in this field can buy the same Thermal pads from Amazon For a fairly low price and get more performance from the M3 MacBook Air. You can also watch the Max Tech video above and see the tests performed.

News source: Max Tech