MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise

Who cares about power consumption except when on battery?

If the fans bother you, I get it, but who cares if the computer is using 5w or 50w, as long as everything runs as fast as possible?

As far as the fonts, I couldn't say, it may just be personal preference as most things are; I do know most people use external monitors at the default "retina" resolution.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

denizcan wrote:

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When using with internal monitor dimmed, MBP consumes 8W. However, when I attached external monitor, the baseline goes to 33W. 25W for what?

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When running ONLY the built-in display and not editing (or running Chrome, which thinks it is a high-powered graphics app) only the Intel Integrated graphics chip and system RAM are used.

When you connect an external display, the discrete AMD graphics ship is activated, regardless of whether you are doing high-powered graphics. But that in itself does not cause the large increase you are seeing.

<<25 Watts FOR WHAT?>>

to run the [private] display RAM, 4GB of smoking hot GDDR6 RAM, at full power, to support the those two displays (the built-in is a heartbeat-refresh display) at once.

Dimming the internal display does nothing for its incessant need to fetch the scan lines needed to refresh the display, changed or not, 60 time a second, on a very strict timing schedule. Readers have discovered if you shut off the built-in display, such as by closing the lid, the display RAM can sometimes run at half power, shaving 10 watts off the power consumption is some cases.

I think you missed the point.. 8W is with no external monitor, internal one is dimmed.. I take this as a baseline.. If I increase the brightness it goes above 20W..

With external, in clamshell mode, that means the system switched to eGPU, it adds 25W!!! However, in bootcamp, with exteral monitor or not it stays around 21W's.. This gives less than 4 hours battery life which is not acceptable as well..

With what you said. Smoking hot GGDR6 RAM, full powering eGPU, why does it consume less in Windows? The circuit is the same..

My 5 year old gaming laptop with nVidia eGPU consumes around 15W when idle.. When I forcefully activate nVidia it goes to 20W for some period, then it returns to 15W as well.. Unless I do something in the application that uses nVidia, it does not add extra to the power budget.

William Kucharski wrote:

As far as the fonts, I couldn't say, it may just be personal preference as most things are; I do know most people use external monitors at the default "retina" resolution.

Try using same monitor in bootcamp.. For instance try using 27" 1440p or 4K monitor.. You will see a dramatic increase in crispness of the text.. For "retina" you should use 4K @ 24" or 5K @ 27.. Even on that you will see thinning in the edges of the fonts.. Not all "t" will be the same.. Some will be thick, some will be thin.. If you start to see this you cannot undo..

In Apple you might find "retina" everywhere, however in real world you plug in the computer to 1080p, 4K etc.. If you manage to carry the dongle ofcourse... If the previous person was using a PC you will see a terrible degradation of the text quality..

I can't say I'm familiar as I can't stand to even look at a system running Windows let alone use it for anything. I've certainly never noticed issues when I've had my MBP 16 connected via TB3, but I don't have a 4K monitor.

Certainly fonts look fine on my 5K iMac.

denizcan wrote:

With what you said. Smoking hot GGDR6 RAM, full powering eGPU, why does it consume less in Windows? The circuit is the same.

The hardware may be the same, but how it programs the GPU may be entirely different. Windows may set a slower clock speed for the GPU, may not drive the GPU in the same way or a variety of other issues come into play.

My 5 year old gaming laptop with nVidia eGPU consumes around 15W when idle.. When I forcefully activate nVidia it goes to 20W for some period, then it returns to 15W as well.. Unless I do something in the application that uses nVidia, it does not add extra to the power budget.

You can't directly compare systems like this; your old gaming laptop used a different GPU architecture, had different VRAM, and so on.

@ahmedfromreservoir

You say your dGPU now uses 29W on idle since the 10.15.5 update, screenshots please?

I see no differences with the dGPU wattage / fans speed with my 3 monitors with the recent Mac OS update, always been 19W in Mac OS and 15W in Windows on idle.

I'm starting to understand why some people are defending Apple so much...

William, if you check the definition of overheating is not exactly what you think it is, this is the definition: "to (cause to) become hotter than necessary or wanted"

If a machine is overheating, it doesn't necessarily means it will reach termal shutdown, on previous computers we know there was a throttling issue but the machine never reached a thermal shutdown, after a while they agreed that they did that because of an overheating issue.

[Link Edited by Moderator]

>in that it is unchanged while MacOS is consuming all the power.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough, what I meant was that as the MacOS update did not change the Windows bootcamp behaviour so now it's clearly better than on MacOS which is now pushing higher power draw on the GPU and getting hotter much faster since the update

I can't really share a screenshot right now as I'm on bootcamp, you can just take my word for it or not, it's the internet after all :)

I'm happy for you that it hasn't gotten worse, clearly there are differences between devices - I know a small minority of people don't seem to have an issue at all with their MacBooks.

That is true, I installed 10.15.5 and the machine sometimes was using more than 30W, that's why I decided to keep my main partition using 10.15.4 that is only using10/13 watts (or 6.5watts when I'm just browsing the web).

Like I said before 10.15.5 is worse than 10.15.4 (at least for me).

Alright my bad, I'm just so hesitant right now of keeping this machine or not and was really tired of the useless fight between the two sides. (Come on guys, debating about the actual meaning of overheating now?)

Apple gave me 5 more days to test with the new firmware, still not resolved in my case, but I'm now confused as ever. You guys say it's now worse, I see no differences and now one person on the macrumors thread says the wattage is the same but the fans are lower.

This is so strange

I agree debating on the details is not a productive use of time, ultimately it depends on what you find acceptable - for me and the vast majority of people fans running at or near maximum simply because the laptop is connected to an external display is not acceptable, it's not really up for debate because that is the level of quality we expect of any laptop we buy but especially from Apple.

Other people have lower standards and don't care if their MacBook has worse thermal and noise performance than most if not all competitors in a similar and much lower price brackets - and that's fine.

On the topic of different reports you're seeing, it's likely this issue is being caused by differing configurations of monitors and cables being used to connect them, I know someone on another forum (or this one) posted that using an LG Ultrafine display has no issues with the laptop for example, some people with higher refresh rate monitors also have less issue (unlike me, I still have an issue with my high refresh monitor).

Heck, I can make my issue go away by running one external and internal display at 1920x1200 in bootcamp or 2180x1024 but at other seemingly arbitrary resolutions the power draw goes up, 1920x1080 drawers 19W for example but somehow 1920x1200 draws just 5 (I could be iffy on the numbers, been a while since I tested this).

There's a lot of moving parts but currently it all points at buggy and poor implementation of drivers - something AMD is known for.

iTech23 wrote:

William, if you check the definition of overheating is not exactly what you think it is, this is the definition: "to (cause to) become hotter than necessary or wanted"

When a car proceeds up a long mountain road, the engine works harder, and it will produce more heat.

If you have a temperature gauge in your vehicle and notice the gauge rises ever so slightly going up the hill, then take it to your mechanic and tell them your engine is "overheating," they won't ever find anything wrong - because it is working as designed.

The key is that "necessary or wanted" is a function not of the user, but of the specs to which the device was designed, and you and I don't have access to those.

Throttling does not mean a device is overheating, but rather the processor is slowed to reduce the rate at which heat is being produced, but the device slows itself as part of its thermal design.

As far as the power usage compared to Windows, I'd like to see some test results showing that the GPU is running just as fast under Windows as it is under macOS but it uses more power for some reason under macOS.

I suspect you'd find there is some functional reason - GPU speed, memory speed - that power usage is higher under macOS.

Now if your purchasing parameters require your laptop be silent, or nearly silent, I suspect you're shopping for the wrong device and you should be looking at MacBook Airs.

MacBook Pros have always been designed to deliver the maximum possible performance and speed, and the GPUs used in the 16" MBP were selected for just that reason.

If it's a matter of fans becoming audible vs. higher graphics performance, I'd rather have the fans on full blast with the GPU drawing its full TGP of 50w from the moment you hit the power button if graphics performance increased as a result.

I understand for others, the calculation is different, and as such different purchasing decisions might be made.

if you want to talk about cars, go to a Ford or Dodge forum.

Here you have another definition for you:

Dynamic frequency scaling (also known as CPU throttling) helps preserve battery and decrease cooling cost and noise on quiet computing settings, or can be useful as a security measure for overheated systems.

I have no problem with audible fans under load, I'm actually glad it's running hot and loud on my lap while compiling my code. The complaining I have is when using external monitors while browsing or watching a movie, which I think it's fair to expect to run cool.

No, the machine I want is not a Macbook Air. I find 13" too small to type on, and actually want performance (+noise +heat) when I need to get work done. I also want portability, so my only option for a new Mac laptop is the Macbook Pro 16".

Nor should you be expected to purchase a laptop made for an entirely differet purpose to what you need it for just because the one that is supposed to be built for purpose does not meet your needs.

It's like saying you should buy a Kia because your Rolls Royce is idling at red line.

William, what is the point to keep persuading people if people just don't get persuaded that way?

You just keep repeating what you have already said and keep going like that.

We get your argument from the very beginning, it's just that we don't agree. That is it. Simple.

You are welcomed to bring any new thoughts here but please don't keep repeating your arguments. It is really annoying to see these posts again and again.

People come here because of a problem and they need to get the problem addressed.

If people don't find it an issue, this thread will die down naturally.