MacBooks have their CPUs soldered on? That doesn’t stop everyone from equipping an old MacBook with a faster processor.

Upgrading a Late-2008 Aluminum Unibody MacBook CPU

In this case Collin is the brilliant mind that accelerates such an old MacBook. Collin, better known to many as dosdude1, has already allowed us to install macOS Mojave 10.14 on older Macs with his software patch. It’s always nice to see older hardware being used longer.

macbook 2008 3.06ghz
macbook 2008 t9900

To replace the slow CPU with the best Core 2 Duo model T9900 at 3.06 GHz, you need to desolder one from a donor board, re-tin the contacts, and then re-solder in the target MacBook. Quite a lot of effort and probably not for everyone to imitate but very entertaining. It’s also interesting to see that the performance of the more than ten-year-old MacBook can increase significantly by 600 points in single-core and 900 points in multi-core geekbench.

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