Here is how (NOT) to water cool your 12 inch MacBook Retina

YouTuber, and certifiable “Macniac” LinusTechTips, has decided to put his 2015 12 inch MacBook Retina, through what most Apple MacBook owners would (and should) never put their prized possession. A tray of icy water.

The tech enthusiast/daredevil’s plan was simple: use BlueTack to cover every accessible hole and crevice on the laptop, and dunk the unit in cold water, just long enough to monitor performance.

Being that Linus is not entirely insane, he carried through the experiment by filling the tray with water, only up to a level touching the very bottom of the laptop, also to ensure that the cold liquid would be in near-direct contact with the CPU.

In theory, since the new MacBook’s unibody is designed to function as a heatsink, cooling one part of the case would cause the entire laptop to benefit from the lower temperature.

While testing the theory, Linus has actually observed a substantial boost in processing speed, due to the laptop not switching to lower speeds when reaching higher temperatures. In most fanless laptops, CPUs are designed to switch to a slower clock speed during intensive tasks in which higher speeds are reached.

How common folks should cool their laptops

While dunking a laptop in icy water might sound like tons of fun, there are ways to lower the temperature on devices like the MacBook Retina, while at the same time keeping the laptop dry, and safe.

Laptop cooling pads sold at retail are a very common and safe way to keep a laptop down to a reasonable temperature, and even keep the speed up during intensive tasks, in those cases when temperature sensors cause the CPU to switch to lower gears.

Less conventional methods could include the use of small radiators connected to naturally cold gases like freon, for the most industrious types, or even a professional liquid cooling kit, normally designed for desktop computers, which can be rigged to a laptop stand or similar stationary setup.