15-Inch M3 MacBook Air's Heat Levels Under Scrutiny: Stress Test Reveals Surprising Results

The heat levels of Apple‘s 15-inch M3 MacBook Air were put to a stress test — and the results are surprising.

What Happened: Earlier this week, YouTube channel Max Tech shared a video on the platform, in which they conducted a stress test on the 15-inch M3 MacBook Air. The test revealed that the device reached a peak temperature of 46 degrees Celsius or 114.8 degrees Fahrenheit at the keyboard.

This temperature is higher than the 43 degrees Celsius or 109.4 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded for the 2023 version of the device. The test also showed that the M3 MacBook Air’s performance was not significantly impacted by the absence of a fan.

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Max Tech, in the video, expressed his surprise at the M3 MacBook Air’s performance, especially in comparison to the M3 14-inch MacBook Pro, which has a single fan. The M3 MacBook Air outperformed the MacBook Pro in both single-core and multi-core performance tests.

“How in the world is a fanless MacBook Air actually outperforming it. That is crazy,” he said.  

Despite the impressive performance, the M3 MacBook Air did experience thermal throttling during the stress test, with the temperature reaching 46 degrees Celsius.

When the YouTube ran the Meta test, the difference between the two was of “just a smidge.”

Max Tech channel also did an extreme stress test which runs for 20 minutes and records “any sort of throttling.” Here are the results:

“Now we have a 33% difference but we saw that the wattage was half and sometimes even less than half the wattage. So it means that it’s still maintaining performance and being more efficient when it throttles down, but there’s still a big difference here: 98.1% stability compared to 73.2%. So, if you care about long Graphics tasks this might not be the machine for you.”

To gauge the CPU performance, the YouTuber conducted a Cinebench test and the results once again favored a 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro.

While concluding, he stated, “This machine (15-inch MacBook Air) through all these tests used way less power because of its throttling. So it looks like in terms of graphics performance if you really need it, you definitely want something with a fan if you’re doing long runs. For short little bursts of stuff even like video editing you’ll be just fine here. And then on the CPU end or if it’s a blend of both graphics and CPU the difference of 8% is so small but if it does heat up your battery life lasts a long time because of the throttling.”

Watch the complete video here:

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

Photo: Apple