The MacBook Neo was never meant to be a powerful laptop for heavy workloads. It was built as a simple, affordable notebook that promises decent performance and solid battery life for everyday use. It is not supposed to need custom water cooling like a gaming PC.
And yet, that is exactly what happened.
A new modding project set out to fix one of the MacBook Neo’s biggest weaknesses, which is thermals. Under load, the laptop reportedly runs as hot as 105 degrees Celsius, making it a perfect candidate for someone with too much ambition and access to the right tools.
So how’d it start off?
Before going full mad scientist, jakkuh and Zip Tie Tech started with something much simpler. They first replaced the stock cooling material with a 2.5mm thermal pad. Just this small change alone made a real difference with performance numbers seeing a 14% hike. Meanwhile, temperatures also dropped slightly. But clearly, stopping there would have been too easy. The goal was to push the MacBook Neo to its limits, and that’s exactly what happened.
Then the project became gloriously unreasonable
To push things further, the duo designed a full custom water-cooling solution for the MacBook Neo.
They created a custom copper water block and an acrylic reservoir. The process wasn’t exactly smooth, and they had to deal with gummy copper, broken drill bits, and tricky threading work, which is about as fun as it sounds. But then came the point of no return, where they cut a hole into the bottom of the chassis of the MacBook Neo.
The final cooling setup used a small pump originally made for smart watering systems and paired it with a large power steering cooler acting as the radiator. At this point, the MacBook Neo was no longer the budget Apple laptop and basically became a desktop cooling experiment.
The results were impressive
The full liquid-cooling mod delivered an impressive 21.2% performance increase, which is enough to make this more than just a novelty project. In the 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme benchmark score, the modded Neo set the world record with the best performance. According to the benchmark results shown in the video, it truly outperformed the M1 MacBook Air.
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