MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise

William Kucharski wrote:

dcristof wrote:

Plenty of apologists on this board who want to Jedi mind-trick the problem away, but it isn't working because those of us who have been using MBPs for the last 15 years with external monitors know that this isn't normal.

I still don’t understand why people think what any other MacBook Pro ever released in history did has anything to do with how this one operates.

It doesn’t matter what any previous MacBook Pro did, this is a new design with different characteristics using different processors and a different GPU.

If you don’t like the fans, that’s fine, your call, but complaining your last MBP with a completely different internal design operated differently is specious at best.

It makes sense thought Bill if you think about it; we form expectations about how a product should perform and behave based on our past experiences. When it is unplugged from an external monitor, it behaves as all have in my experience, and the consistency of performance is what brings me back to Apple.

When something like this happens, it is out of the norm. When I went to the website to investigate the new machine before buying it, there was nothing that said "it will run hotter and generate louder fan noise than past MacBook Pros, but it will perform better in benchmark tests, blah blah blah," than I would have known to expect what I received.

The worst part is, and many have already said this, there is no performance requirement for the bump in power usage. You get nothing more than just more heat overhead. The system is dumping all the power in the form of heat, because it isn't needed to run an external monitor.

I appreciate what you are trying to say, but this performance experience is very different, so much so that I can't believe that Apple meant it to be that way. They have never done it in the past, at least on purpose.

dcristof wrote:

Most of us have already tested this and see no benefit from switching cable types in this scenario.

I did say "Under certain conditions".

Since DisplayPort no longer uses the "heartbeat" refresh, it should be theoretically possible to reduce the RAM speed requirements. I agree that this is not a guarantee of relief.

One user suggested that, in addition to using DisplayPort, you use SwitchResX to allow the refresh rate to be further modified, and the combination of the two provided relief for them.

I had this exact spec and returned it — I took the RAM down to 32gb and added the 5600M and it's a completely different machine. Silent with 2 4K monitors and no issues whatsoever of shutting down etc that I had with the previous!

foxted wrote:

My previous MBP 13 2.9 i5 could at least handle both monitors, now I can’t use my external monitors, rendering my setup completely useless :( I sure hope the issue can solved or at least managed with a software patch, I saved for the entire year to get this! 😭

Why "can't you use them?"

If you are that annoyed by the fans, in all seriousness return it now and buy something else that fits your needs better, that's why there is a 14 day return policy.

Because temperatures clocking at 90°+ just for having two monitors. (None of them 4K) and 15% CPU usage is not normal? I get that using them to their potential would trigger the fans, but mostly idle it should not break a sweat, and the integrated GPU should be the default unless you need demanding graphics (which for mostly coding websites and apps, my job definitely isn’t graphic intensive)

Why do you say that?

Do you know the engineering parameters for the CPU, GPU, and the thermal load they create when connected to the resolution monitors at the refresh rate yours were?

If you have a 4K monitor being driven via HDMI, it still needs to repaint the screen regardless of whether the image is a static window of code, full motion video or just a completely black screen.

HI at All

Loud fans & less power: MacBooks can be loaded incorrectly

Image source: iFixit

The MacBook Pro can be charged on both sides via the USB-C ports. Reports suggest that the choice of page can affect the performance of Apple notebooks. It is therefore better to plug in the charging cable on the right.

With the MacBook Pro, the choice of port seems to make a difference

Apple's official recommendation is clear: the company writes in a support document that MacBook Pro models can be loaded on both sides. As Techspot now writes in its report, there have been user reports for months that contradict this reference. As a user of the StackExchange platform writes, he investigated the cause of an unusually high CPU load and the resulting heat development by the process "kernel_task" and found unusual results.

Apple itself states that the corresponding process is responsible, among other things, for controlling the fan control in connection with the CPU temperature, and the access options of programs to the performance of the processor are also determined here. The curious finding during a detailed examination: If the charging cable is connected together with other devices on the left, the temperature and system load increase significantly. A closer look at the values ​​of the sensors on the Thunderbolt connections confirms this observation, according to the user concerned.

Just load on the right

The solution to the problem is similarly curious: If only the right side is used for loading and the left side is used exclusively for peripherals, the heat problem does not occur and the kernel process is also ended. As a further investigation by another user shows, the measurable differences of up to 15 degrees are very clear. Currently, two models seem to be affected by the problem: the 15-inch MacBook Pro 2017 and the 16-inch MacBook Pro 2019. Apple has not confirmed the problems so far - but the company is happy to take a lot of time to make such statements. Apple, teardown, MacBook Pro, Ifixit, Apple MacBook ProiFixit

https://winfuture.de/news,115555.html

My MBP is really struggling now that the summer temps are about 30c - After a few hours of the unit being on I am experiencing slowness in apps and often the system will just hang it is unresponsive you can not click on anything but the mouse cursor still moves around the screen and it won't reboot.

As usual the fans are annoying during video calls. Work colleagues are just working fine with old cheap windows laptops...

It's basically embarrassing...

Yesterday I had some time and I was able to create a new partition and installed 10.15.6 and it worse than 10.15.4, so far I tried all the versions available (even the ones we can't talk about here) and 10.15.4 with a 144 herts refresh rate and a close lid is the only partial fix that I found, any other combination makes the machine almost impossible to use with an external monitor.

For example on 10.15.4 if I go to apple.com to the MacBook Pro 16-inch section and I play the Avengers video on 10.15.4 the Radeon GPU uses 21.3 watts but on 10.15.6 it uses 29.9 watts, another example is a program that I use to show live charts, on 10.15.4 it uses 13 to 16 watts and on 10.15.6 it uses 22 watts, if I manually move the charts pretty fast on 10.15.4 it uses up to 25 watts but on 10.15.6 it uses up to 44 watts!!

So it seems that I'm stuck using 10.15.4 for now.

Before 10.15.4 it was impossible for me to use the machine with an external monitor, so they definitely changed something on this version and then the change it again and all the other versions.

Still not a real fix because if I use a 60 hertz monitor the fans will go crazy.

ntompson wrote:

I also hate fans. Especially when they are loud even though nothing much is happening.

What you consider to be "nothing" is in fact very far from it, technically.

A blank 4K screen with a refresh rate of 60 Hz still means repainting 8,294,400 pixels with black 60 times per second.

I think you've nicely captured the reality gap William. Technology has moved on. Refreshing a 4k screen at 60 Hz really is "nothing" in 2020. To suggest otherwise is a bit like marvelling over how it is possible to move 100,000,000 bits from the US to Australia in a second. 15 years ago, I would have agreed with you. Today, it is "nothing". We would all be shocked if our computers (or our phones) started a loud fan every time we moved a large file around the world.

It is absolutely reasonable for us to expect a top end laptop to drive a 4k monitor in 2020 without loud fans. I expect it. Apple customers expect it. Steve Jobs absolutely would have expected it.

Guys,

The fans would kick in and increase power draw to 20 Watt no matter how many external monitors are connected or resolutions e.g. 1K,2K,3K or 4K. The problem is with how this system in drawing power inadequtly to number of connectect external monitors, their resolution and apps being used. This is the problem we're trying to resolve here. I would not expet system temperatures to rise causing fans to kick in and spin like **** with a single internet browser on a single external monitor connected with 1 or 2K resolution. I'm perfectly happy when it's doing it during some heavy stuff like video editing even on low resolution monitor(s) as these are intensive tasks but this is not what people are complaining about. If the system was correctly detecting how much power is needed for connected monitors and running tasks then we'd not be having this discussion right now.

You are making a lot of assumptions here.

Go back a few pages and you can see that though it does use 19w of power, I can watch an HD video full screen on an external monitor and read this forum on the internal screen of my MBP16 and the fans never rise above 2400 RPM.

That of course doesn’t mean that others don’t have the experience you do, but it also isn’t universal.

I gave a specific configuration that doesn’t seem to experience runaway fans, for whatever reason.

You say the system isn’t detecting how much power it “needs,” but it doesn’t work that way.

The external GPU does a specific amount of work, VRAM needs to be refreshed at a certain rate, and the monitor also needs to be refreshed at a certain rate.

What the specific parameters are, I couldn’t say, but high speed fans are not a consequence of connecting any external monitor and doing nothing.

I think it's fair to say that most users ARE experiencing heat and fan noise issues when connecting an external display. Your continued defence of Apple's "expected behaviour" line is, to be honest, a little tiresome. Your use case seems to be OK. I'm glad for you, really I am. For many others - certainly the majority on this thread - that is not the case.

I maintain that it is not reasonable to expect a premium laptop to suffer the level of heat and fan noise that the 16 inch MacBook Pro does when used with an external display with the lid open.

I've found a workaround that I'm happy with - clamshell, in a vertical stand with vents pointing up, Turbo Boost disabled. However I had to spend extra cash on external keyboard, mouse, microphone, webcam and speakers to achieve this and be able to work and do Teams video calls professionally. It now runs silently for me in this mode so I am sticking to it. However I should not have had to do any of this. My "expected behaviour" was that the laptop that cost me well over £2k would be able to handle connecting an external display while allowing me to use the features I bought it for - the excellent keyboard, speakers and mics. The fact it doesn't is not really acceptable.

I’m so glad you think it is so easy to produce a laptop as high performance as the MBP 16 without generating heat.

It’s not or others would do it; certainly Windows laptops with equivalent GPUs also generate heat and have similar power consumption curves - one big reason for the research resulting in the advance in VRAM in the 5600M GPU.