The MacBook Neo was never supposed to become a serious gaming conversation, but a new mod is making it pretty clear that Apple’s cheapest modern Mac may be leaving more performance on the table than expected. A fresh test conducted by a YouTube channel shows that once the A18 Pro chip gets better cooling, both benchmark numbers and actual in-game results start moving in a much more interesting direction.
Better Cooling Appears To Unlock More Of The MacBook Neo’s Sustained Performance
YouTube channel ETA Prime added water cooling to the MacBook Neo and saw significant improvement in performance, including doubled graphics performance in some scenarios. The benchmark data already points in that direction.
In Geekbench 6, the stock MacBook Neo scored 3,094 in single-core and 7,921 in multi-core, but after adding a copper cooling mod, those figures jumped to 3,563 and 8,692, respectively. However, the Neo saw its peak after the YouTuber added a liquid cooling solution, which pushed the numbers up to 3,636 and 9,349, translating to about a 17.52 percent gain in single-core and 18.60 percent gain in multi-core performance over the stock setup.
The Cinebench numbers tell a similar story. Stock single-core performance sat at 502, then moved to 531 with copper cooling and 620 with liquid cooling, a 23.51 percent jump over the original setup. Multi-core scores went from 1,462 to 1,597 with copper cooling and then to 1,741 with the water-cooled solution, which is a 19.08 percent gain over stock.
What makes this more useful than a benchmark-only stunt is that there is actual gaming data behind it too. In No Man’s Sky, the MacBook Neo reportedly averaged 55 fps with the copper cooling setup and 59 fps with the liquid cooling solution. Temperatures also dropped in a meaningful way, from 102 degrees on the stock design to 83 degrees with copper cooling and 75 degrees with water cooling.
This adds a lot more weight to the idea that the MacBook Neo’s biggest bottleneck is not the A18 Pro silicon itself, but the limits of its fanless thermal design. We have also previously published a gaming test for the Neo, which shows its performance with 10 games from different genres, including Cyberpunk 2077, so be sure to check that out as well. Is the MacBook Neo a perfect laptop for casual, not-so-graphics-intensive games? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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