A new MacBook Neo mod test shows how much the fanless A18 Pro setup depends on better cooling when you push it with real workloads. In its stock form, the laptop uses a small graphite thermal pad over the chip, and during gaming, temperatures climb quickly and trigger throttling that cuts performance.
ETA Prime tested the laptop with No Man’s Sky and recorded temperatures hitting 105°C, which forced the system to drop to around 30 to 31 FPS. That drop shows how aggressively the chip slows down to stay within thermal limits, even when the workload stays consistent.
Simple cooling mod shows clear gains
ETA Prime replaced the stock thermal setup with a copper plate, thermal paste, and a thermal pad that transfers heat into the aluminum chassis. That simple change pushed performance to around 58 FPS in the same game while reducing average CPU temperatures to about 83 to 84°C.
Benchmark scores improved as well. Geekbench 6 rose from 3094 to 3563 in single-core and from 7921 to 8692 in multi-core. Cinebench increased from 502 to 531 in single-core and from 1462 to 1597 in multi-core. Across these tests, the mod delivered close to a 10 percent performance gain.
The test then added an external liquid-cooled thermoelectric unit attached to the bottom. That setup pushed Geekbench 6 to 3636 single-core and 9394 multi-core, while Cinebench reached 620 single-core and 1741 multi-core. Gains ranged from about 17 to 23 percent over stock.
These results show the MacBook Neo’s performance depends heavily on thermal limits, and better cooling allows the A18 Pro to sustain higher speeds for longer workloads.
