MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise

Please APPLE !

Acknowledge this loud fan and heating issue that’s Plaguing the 16 inch MacBook pros.

Please release an official statement!

I have tried everything suggested by the Apple care and Genius Bar Depts .

Nothing is working.

The loud fan noise when running light

programs has made using this computer unbearable.

please address this issue!

thanks you !

Unacceptable to have to go through this

especially after paying $4,200.00 😞

Well every forum has dedicated moderators. They're only here to make sure we are abiding by the forum rules for posting. I understand what you think is going on but it's not the case. Apple engineers do not monitor this place. The moderators do not report issues to them. The Apple Support Community consists of posts for the iPhone, Apple TV, MacBooks, iMac, Mac mini, iPads, Apple Watch, MacOS, Apple softwares and more. The same people moderating this thread are also moderating other threads and the only time the moderators are active for the most part is when inappropriate posts are reported to them. You're incorrect if you think the moderators are watching us like "Big Brother" and are here to report product issues and posts to Apple.

Note that as the GPUs in the MBP 16 are all new, what past GPUs did or didn't do is of little consequence.

Unfortunately, they also seem to be unique to the MBP 16, so there is no direct comparison that can be done with another machine.

What we are looking for is an understanding of whether or not a machine that is 2 years old requires a quarter of the power to run its dGPU compared to a machine that is state of the art (the new MBP 16). It is not expected that a new machine, with a newer, more power efficient dGPU would require 4 times the energy to run its dGPU in comparison to the older one.

I appreciate your interest in tempering our expectations, but we are not trying to make an experimental comparison; we are trying to make an empirical comparison.

If that’s your standard, can you point me to the claim that the new MBPs would run their fans less than a prior generation did?

As far as the “prior generation” comment, the TDP for the Radeon 5xxx Pro series is indeed lower than that of the Radeon Vega Pro which was not used in previous MacBook Pros.

Everyone I know and everyone that I asked on Instagram, YouTube or Facebook that have a MacBook Pro 16-inch connected to an external monitor are experiencing this issue, the only ones that are not having this problem are the ones that don’t have a monitor connected, so that info doesn’t count, at least for this issue.

FWIW, I actually meant especially difficult for even the best hardware and software engineers to diagnose.

Basically when this happens the CPU has encountered an unrecoverable error, and can't even leave a register dump to indicate what went wrong where.

The diagnostic folks at the Apple Store are good, but I'm talking Apple and Intel's most senior hardware engineers would have to catch the issue in the act with CPU-specific debug hardware like JTAGs connected, and even then it would be hard to track down.

Yes, it’s imposible to use an external monitor at this time, 5 minutes after I turned on the machine it was running at 95 degrees and the fans were running at 5200 RPM, the noise was so loud that the people on the conference call complained about it so I had to cancel the conference call, when I disconnected the external monitor, the desk (I have a glass desk), was so hot that I think you

can actually cook a steak...

I attached a screenshot, this was taken 5 minutes ago while I was writing my previous message, as you can see the machine was at 92 degrees and the fans were at 4200 RPM, imagine if I decided to work on something else while I was writing that message (compile a program with Xcode for example.....)

I have issues even without an external monitor. I am a producer/engineer in music, having replaced a 6y/o iMac 5k at the first of the year with this MBP.

If the new MacBook Air could take 32GB Ram, I would seriously consider. I would gladly trade speed for silence. But to the point of this thread, it seems the GPU is responsible for things getting out of hand.

not sure if this is related, or if it has been brought up in this thread (I missed a few weeks), or perhaps it’s irrelevant, but iStat Menus reports maxing out GPU Memory way more than I would expect. Even after quitting everything it stayed at 100% until I toggled display scaling.

anyway, for now I’m working in sealed headphones more than I would like.

It's a real problem. And yes if the machine is not using any peripherals it's fine I think. As soon as you plug anything into it... not useable. Which, is insane for a fully loaded 5K machine. I use in an audio studio, it is useless.

I know many of you are having problems with your MBP. I really think there is a problem with some of these computers.

If you've read the thread you would know that my computer does not experience the issues that others are having. I have done some testing to help, but I don't think it has solved it for everyone.

There is certainly some that do not have the problems. Today I exported an hour long video from FCPx. I pushed the processors and fans as hard as I could for the entire export. It finished the 4k processing in less than 20 minutes. The max temperature half way through the export, when it was running the hardest was 78

The radeon high side stayed at 30Watts+ the entire time. The processors and fans worked properly with external display and dual 4k.

Within 1 minute of finishing exporting the video the temperature dropped to 52 degrees and then the fans quieted down to silent. The system went from 90watts+ down to 27W. Would you consider this normal? I would.

Is it possible there is something installed that's common between all of these computers with problems, causing the fans and trigger unexpectedly? Does this happen on absolutely clean system (no users, no software other than the OS, utilities, apps, etc.)?

If you are experiencing the spikes in the GPU history I think there is a defect on those machines and I think that proves it.

Thought: If it's software wouldn't they all experience this issue?

When you read through the thread from early on, you will see with screenshots (unless apple removed them) that my graphics NEVER spiked 0 to 100 between every action like I saw like from others from the very beginning (I got mine in mid November). I did have other problems - freeze when connecting to a TB3 dock in clamshell mode - but that was officially fixed in 10.15.3.

I hope that it is software related but I would also not think that Apple would fixed it for everyone and not for others. That's the only thing that makes me think it could be something else that is triggering this but you said it was a completely clean system (with all updates?) so that makes me think the only thing left is hardware. Hopefully not.

I honestly don't recommend people getting 10.15 if they don't have to. Even with all the fixes there are too many incompatibilities with DAW and permissions, 32bit problems, and not enough incentive from sidecar (which is the only thing I can think of that would is actually a + in Catalina) since there Duet and that allows you to go to higher resolutions..

Just that we aren't seeing any reports of machines reporting they are shutting down for thermal reasons.

I've mentioned that it was common to see that happen with the old MacBook (not Pro) when running apps like Photoshop on an external monitor, and though the power draw is higher than expected it appears the fans are indeed keeping the machine from reaching that heat threshold.

So while the fans may be spinning at a higher level than many would prefer, they do seem to be managing the thermal load.

I didn't say it wasn't a bug, my issue is with the word defective.

I haven't seen a report of anything that would prevent the machine from being used as advertised except that the fans are running louder/faster than expected.

I'm sure Apple is working on the issue with AMD; sadly there isn't enough information posted on AMD's web site to give a good feel as to whether the GPU's power draw falls within expected parameters or not, and no other laptop uses this exact GPU so there's no good basis for comparison with other implementations.

Thank you. Just curious, what was the max clock rate? Also could you show us the clock rate of the Intel Integrated Graphics if possible?

It's drawing 17W but clock rate was at 19MHz? 19MHz basically means the GPU core is disabled. This doesn't make much sense. Something's really broken.