Apple uses a fan-less cooling design for the 13-inch and 15-inch M3 MacBook Air models, and while users will be happy with the completely silent operation, they'll be missing out on a ton of performance. The M3 MacBook Pro, featuring a single fan and boasting the same SoC, can deliver significantly improved sustained performance as proven in consistent tests. It's also worth noting that the M3 MacBook Air is uncomfortably tasty, something we hope Apple addresses in the future.
For quick bursts of performance, the M3 MacBook Air performs faster than the M3 MacBook Pro
The 15-inch M3 MacBook Air was in the possession of YouTube channel Max Tech, who was quick to point out that Apple has incorporated the same fan-less heatsink design as before, but the power efficiency of the latest M3 would indicate that. That engine will throttle less than the M2 Sport. Unfortunately, we were wrong in our assumption, because while the latest MacBook Air impressed in Geekbench 6's single-core, multi-core, and metal benchmarks, the M3's true colors were seen in sustained workloads, especially running 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme Stress test.
Somehow, even with the highest CPU temperature hitting 114°C and the GPU hitting 102.9°C, the M3 MacBook Air keeps up. The chipset's total power draw begins to drop dramatically to prevent the MacBook Air from overheating, and those higher temperatures mean that in comparison, both models finish 33 percent slower than the MacBook Pro. It has the same M3 with an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU.
Another drawback of these high temperatures is that since the latest MacBook Air is made entirely of aluminum, it conducts heat well. As those temperatures start to climb, MaxTech shows that the external chassis temperature can reach 45 to 46 degrees Celsius, which can be quite uncomfortable if you need to keep the M3 MacBook Air on your laptop while running those taxing workloads. Keep in mind that Apple hasn't changed this internal design yet, as the M2 MacBook Air loses a ton of performance and reaches unbearably high temperatures compared to a MacBook Pro with the same SoC.
Fortunately, the same YouTube channel managed to reduce those high temperatures to a certain extent by replacing the heatsink with $15 thermal pads. Despite the same thermal conditions as the last time the M2 MacBook Air was stressed, this time around, it can maintain that performance for a longer period of time. People who are well versed in this area can buy Heat pads from Amazon Get great performance at a very low price and with their M3 MacBook Air. You can also watch Max Tech's video above and see the tests conducted.
News Source: Max Tech
