MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise

The only solution currently is to buy the 5600m version of the MBP 16" the 5500m and 5300m have a power issue with the gpu causing a high gpu load thus high fan speeds.

We've gone into technical detail on the MacRumors forums on this.

The information gathered points to a hardware issue with the AMD GPU, and Apple not allowing the onboard Igpu to drive low video out loads as the 930 UHD can drive 3 4K monitors.

Best thing to do is disregard the censorship on this forum (Apple deletes posts) and call apple and complain. Overwhelm them to do something.

Yep confirmed — I'm returning my 5500m and sticking with the 5600m. It's far better. Wakes up the monitors quicker, is silent, smoother, cooler. Can't believe how much of a difference it makes. But Apple must have known this, as it was a pretty random and last minute addition to the upgrades available.

The 5600 is on an HBM module instead of using discrete DDR6 RAM chips. It has just become available, so no conspiracy here.

A lot of the problems users are lumping into the "GPU" category are caused by having to run the DDR6 Display RAM at full speed, and its using more than 10 more Watts to run that way.

Random in the sense that Apple have never just added a GPU upgrade at £700.00 without also updating the outdated 9th gen processors or anything else on the machine... and random in the sense that people were expecting an actual mid-life upgrade after WWDC :)

"Random in the sense that Apple have never just added a GPU upgrade at £700.00 without also updating the outdated 9th gen processors or anything else on the machine."

Not true. They added the AMD Vega 20 buy option in the middle of the 2018 MBP's product cycle with no additional changes to the MacBook.

William didn't you say there's a concrete way to stop receiving emails from this thread? I'm so done with the constant emails from replies from angry Apple people and their conspiracy theories. If you know a concrete way for me to stop receiving emails from THIS this thread I would appreciate you sharing the trick.

TailsDog wrote:

It sounds like a lot of us have been ripped off >_<

How?

If you are unhappy about the fan issue, I get it, but releasing a new GPU doesn't obviate your original purchasing decision; your MBP 16 still does everything you bought it to do.

They did that with the 2018 model 15" MacBook Pros too. It's not that unusual, especially since, in the 2016-2020 portion of the Intel MacBook Pro era, Apple's refresh cycle for the MacBook Pro is longer than its previous norm of 8-10 months.

Hi,

Further to the frustratingly large amount of noise coming from my Mac, I keep running into issues where kernel_task will come along and chomp all my CPU (around 1300% on a bad day) whenever I try and do anything moderately CPU intensive with both displays connected. Unplugging one of the displays usually resolves the issue quickly.

I ran Intel Power Gadget and it seems I'm seeing some form of throttling. CPU pegged at 1GHz when running a CPU intensive process but CPU is still at 65c/10W. If the system is idle, it has no issue bursting to 3.8GHz+ and 40W draw.

Has anyone observed the GPU power usage and heat production interfering with CPU power delivery?

After playing around with an awful lot of 3rd party apps & wasting a lot of time, the combination of the following worked for me to drop the power of the dGPU from around 18/19W down to around 5W and thus avoiding the fans to go off with tasks like browsing/emailing.

Install SWITCHRES X - set the refresh rate from the monitor from 60HZ down to 55HZ (in my case) and leave the macbook closed in clamshell mode.

I really hope that apple comes up with a fix, super annoying and clearly not well done from their side as I can't imagine that a drop of 5HZ will also drop the dGPUs power usage by 75% :-/

That drop in the refresh rate may drop the memory-speed requirements.

When the Display memory can be run at low speed, it drops power consumption by about 10 watts or more.

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This is a really GREAT tip, because the difference to your eyes of 55 versus 60 is not much, but the 10 Watts is golden.

What resolution is your display, and what interface ? {HDMI or DisplayPort family}

The MacBook Pro 16-in is the "Muscle Car" of MacBooks.

Users who turned OFF Turbo Boost with Turbo Boost Switcher report the wonky spikes in CPU power are eliminated.

This should result in only negligible performance difference, but some users grumble it is noticeable, (but not deadly) in single-threaded operations such as software development.

In my case is the opposite, I partially fixed the issue by changing the refresh rate to 144 hertz, this is on 10.15.4, on other versions it doesn't work like it does on this version, for example on 10.15.5 if I watch a YouTube video the watts will go over 30 watts and the machine will get crazy, on the other hand on 10.15.4 will stay between 10 to 18 watts and the fans never go over 2000 RPM.

This machine is indeed a nightmare... I'm SO disappointed. As a composer, I can't write music with such a noisy machine connected to my monitor. Even when doing simple things, CPU at 5%! Noise like a vacuum. And this used to be completely doable with the Late 2013 Macbook Pro I sold! There is something clearly wrong with this product and Apple needs to do something. Perhaps the AMD GPU needs to be replaced. Now. It's causing such distress.... and this is the most expensive mac I've ever bought...

Can someone assure me that the 5600m option is silent? It's an expensive option on top of an already expensive machine....

Strange that Apple does not do anything about the problem. My machine got new inmate, but as I assumed, no difference.

I have now spend more money on external pad and keyboard. But it is only sad, because the internal keyboard and pad is great, and I am loosing my mic, speekers, camera and a lovely 16" screen 😥