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Heat Sink for Macbook Air

Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 8:38 pm
by geb
I have a 1st gen Macbook Air, I've owned it since the Air first came out, and it's been a great machine, but I'm now using for more than just a few hours at a time and the noise is really starting to get to me. For the first few hours it's as silent as I would hope for, but as the day wears on the fan slowly starts getting louder and louder. I think I've done about as much as I can do in software, I have javascript and flash turned off for the most part (via noscript) and I don't really do much except for write code in emacs and occasionally search the web.

Does anyone have any suggestions for cooling the machine? I've tried an active laptop cooler but it's even louder than the Air's fan. Do any of the passive cooler's work well enough?

Part of me wants to just buy a big block of aluminum to place the machine on. :-)

Re: Heat Sink for Macbook Air

Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2009 10:01 am
by MikeC
geb wrote:Part of me wants to just buy a big block of aluminum to place the machine on. :-)
It will probably work, but you should try just increasing the air gap between the laotop and the desktop first. Raise it a cm with some little blocks -- anything. See if that helps. The aluminum block may only work if it transfers heat elsewhere faster than just the laptop alone, so it might have to be bigger than the area of the laptop -- to allow convection to air as well as conduction to the desktop.

Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 3:30 pm
by cloneman
Replace the thermal paste they used with your own premium one, and do a good job putting it on.

Then undervolt the fan with a custom made inline resistor :)


Voids warranty though, maybe.

Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 4:52 am
by Redzo
cloneman wrote:Replace the thermal paste they used with your own premium one, and do a good job putting it on.

Then undervolt the fan with a custom made inline resistor :)


Voids warranty though, maybe.
You could do that for some other laptop but OP has Macbook Air. Very hard to open without messing upp its chassi.
I would go with MikeC advice. And I would also buy some compressed air in a can and do some cleaning. Just make sure you stress that it has to be air for cleaning electronics otherwise there is a chans that you buy air with oils in it...:-)