Due to throttling, MacBook Air is 33% slower than MacBook Pro on the same SoC
A test of the new MacBook Air based on the Apple M3 single-chip system has appeared, and there is little positive in it: lacking active cooling, the laptop gets very hot under load, which causes throttling and a significant drop in performance.
By load we mean not the rather simple Geekbench, but 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress. Yes, this is a stress test, yes, it is used to test the system rather than to simulate real-life performance (unless the user will be using the MacBook Air as a rendering machine), but still, there is a big difference in how This test is passed by the new MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, also built on the SoC M3.
MacBook Air scored 5916 points in the test, MacBook Pro — 7933 (SoC versions were tested in the same configuration — 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU). The difference is very large, and it is precisely due to the cooling system: the MacBook Pro has at least one fan, and the MacBook Air is cooled exclusively in a passive way.
In CPU tests, the MacBook Air heated up to 114 °C, GPU — up to 102.9 °C. At a certain point, throttling occurs, and the system reduces performance in order to protect components from overheating.
But this is not the only problem: the aluminum case heats up to 45-46 °C under such loads, which makes the laptop uncomfortable to hold in your hands or on your knees. However, the same YouTuber found a way to reduce the heating of a laptop, and it involves installing thermal pads. But this half-measure is not capable of replacing a full-fledged fan, since the temperature drops by only 10 °C.