MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise

I was ready to send laptop to the service and deleted partition, recreated it and installed Catalina on it.

Somehow for some reason macbook reacting to external display different way now. It's still noisy, it's still limiting cpu performance once it's getting hot, but it is not that bad as it was before.

I reinstalled system before without deleting partition and I still had issues just after 3 minutes.

Not sure what kind of fix was provided in the recent Catalina, but obviously something was patched.

But this is 5th disappointment with 🍏 .

Never ever again any apple product.

Not a defect.

Different resolutions require driving the VRAM at different clock rates to avoid flicker, AMD said as much.

AMD cares more about providing the best visuals to the user than power draw per se.

Different display resolutions require different memory TIMING for row-time (time allotted to fetching an entire ROW of pixels for display on the screen). If the lower resolution does not fit inside the low-power memory TIMING, then it has to run at higher speed. If it has to run faster, that requires the about 12 Watts draw that dozens of users have already reported.

It is not the graphics CHIP that uses up that 12 Watts, it's the graphics RAM.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

Different display resolutions require different memory TIMING for row-time (time allotted to fetching an entire ROW of pixels for display on the screen). If the lower resolution does not fit inside the low-power memory TIMING, then it has to run at higher speed. If it has to run faster, that requires the about 12 Watts draw that dozens of users have already reported.

It is not the graphics CHIP that uses up that 12 Watts, it's the graphics RAM.

Why does 2 x 3008 horizontal pixels fits the low-power timing but 2 x 2560 or even 2 x 1920 does not?

Do you mean the low-power timing is actually a window and the mode was only designed with high resolutions in mind?

Then why does a single 1920 horizontal pixels fits the low-power row timing?

It's not a matter of lower vs higher resolution, it's how the resolution fits within the VRAM timing window.

You don't get to design things for a particular resolution per se, but rather a particular resolution has a particular timing requirement at a particular refresh rate, and how does that coincide with VRAM clock rates?

AMD has also stated on several forums that if they think there is even a chance that flicker may occur, they will "maintain memory frequency to ensure an optimal user experience" - that goes for drivers for various GPUs across a variety of product categories.

I can understand and recommend to try one without GPU to avoid getting in touch with the defect. The intel iris will not produce that much heat therefore should work. I'd recommend try out the 13" MBP if two external displays work for your. Otherwise a USB to HDMI graphics adapter which also avoids the GPU thermal defect comes up.

itunestux wrote:

The intel iris will not produce that much heat therefore should work. I'd recommend try out the 13" MBP if two external displays work for you.

The newer optional 5600M GPU uses HBM2 VRAM and, accordingly, likely uses much less power than the GDDR6 VRAM used with the 5300M and 5500M GPUs (that's why HBM2 exists; it uses less power but is about twice as expensive as GDDR6.)

Certainly if you are shopping for a new MBP and are worried about this issue, you may as well take advantage of Apple's 14 day full return policy and give one a try.

iTech23 wrote:

After 11 months (almost a year), AMD today released new drivers for Bootcamp including the AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB, I will install them tonight and check if they finally fixed this issue.

I've already tried new Bootcamp drivers, but no changes at all. VRAM clock is still stuck at maximum frequency even if I use "only projector" mode with my 1440p DELL 2720DC! When I use only 3072×1920 Macbook screen, VRAM clock goes to normal, dynamically allocated frequency. So the higher resolution is less heavy on GPU? Where is the logic? AMD is a joke.

If you "just" upgraded and don't like how it's operating, take advantage of the 14 day return period and return it.

No one can say if AMD and Apple are working on modifying the behavior or not, but you should never keep a new product of any kind with the promise that it will work substantially differently "someday."

legutekk wrote:

I've already tried new Bootcamp drivers, but no changes at all. VRAM clock is still stuck at maximum frequency even if I use "only projector" mode with my 1440p DELL 2720DC! When I use only 3072×1920 Macbook screen, VRAM clock goes to normal, dynamically allocated frequency. So the higher resolution is less heavy on GPU? Where is the logic? AMD is a joke.

AMD is not a joke, you're just completely unwilling to understand the actual technical issues as has been explained several times in just the last few posts.

This isn't just an "oops," AMD feels the clock must be kept high to provide the user experience they designed the GPU to give.

That is the logic behind their decision, you can accept it or not.

For example, for a slightly different GPU on which people also complained about the heat and power used, AMD's response was:

I checked with the product team and their feedback is that depending on specific display configurations (resolution and refresh rate combinations) and background tasks, RX 5000 Series GPUs may maintain memory frequency to ensure an optimal user experience. This behavior is expected and does not impact the RX 5000 GPU in any way.

https://community.amd.com/thread/251357#comment-2980117

It's not a stretch to believe they feel the same regarding the Radeon Pro 5300M and 5500M.

Working in a such way isn't an optimal user experience. It's a non-optimal power-consuming way to drive an external monitor with no heavy GPU-related tasks while having a less-power integrated GPU which power could be enough for this.

There is another possible "issue" going on in these Macs, that may be under-appreciated.

The SSD drive is really fast. Maybe too fast. Read speeds of over 2500 M Bytes/sec, and write speeds of over 2800 M Bytes/sec.

There are many add-ons that users casually add, possibly without thinking about their potential impact when run with a really fast drive. The most egregious is Third-party Virus scanners. These are designed to read your files looking for suspicious patterns. They do so incessantly. In older Macs, that was merely annoying, but with a drive this fast, and no built-in self-throttling, it won't take long for these add-ons to generate excessive heat.

The next group of add-ons that perform in a similar way are file-syncers that are Ported from another OS. Utilities that are not Mac-native do not take advantage of the File System Event Store, a data structure that keeps track of recently changed folders. These ported sync-ers simply read and re-read your files, looking for changes. That means they punish performance and run up the temperatures as well. My initial candidates for this category are:

DropBox

OneDrive

Google Drive

BackBlaze

and there are many more.

Especially when these are launched at startup as login items, rather that run ONLY when requested, these add-ons may be quietly running full tilt against your very fast drive and generating enormous amounts of heat, yet staying hidden from real scrutiny..

KUKURUZNIG wrote:

Working in a such way isn't an optimal user experience. It's a non-optimal power-consuming way to drive an external monitor with no heavy GPU-related tasks while having a less-power integrated GPU which power could be enough for this.

AMD feels differently, and one would hope they have a better handle on their customer base than you do.

You are also completely ignoring the technical data provided here telling you why they do it in favor of your feeling that it can be done.

It's not about workload on the GPU, it's that the VRAM needs to be driven at full clock speed to provide flicker-free data to that monitor at that frequency via that interface.

customers are not happy with this; there's alot of other forums with posts like this too.

"Working as intended" - is what apple is currently saying about this from what I've been told.

Its a shame since the current 16" has slow (pixel response) of 43ms grey to grey or so, which makes being stuck on just the display painful. Hopefully AMD revise their drivers, but after almost a year -- I think it's best we voice our concerns here so their addressed properly.

It's getting quite distracting when I try to use an HDMI connection to project PowerPoint and the system fan is at 4800rpms it's extremely unprofessional.

Hi,

if I load my Mbp 16 (i9, 32gb ram, 5500 8 gb) with no ext monitor, I can make standard work (antivirus, Dropbox, office, chrome ecc) at about 1700 rpm. If I attach external monitor (tried different monitor with different connector and cable) same work at 2400 rpm (noise). Please note that without external monitor I’ve forced my mac to work with amd 5500 so to test same hardware with and without external monitor attached.

best regards