MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise

I just got off the phone with Apple. This time I had to repeat everything to a new person. I called them. But I gave them the old case number.

We tried it in secure boot and with a new user but the temps were still higher with the external monitor (60°C instead of 40°C in idle).

A new machine will arrive in January and I will test again. When temps go down okay, otherwise I'll return the machine and get my money back. Never had noisy fans with all the Macbooks I used.

The USB-C dongle worked fine with the 12" Macbook, the 13" Macbook Pro and my last 15" Macbook Pro.

YMMV, but I have now been running a couple of days with the lid closed and no application running in full-screen mode. Using two external 4K monitors hooked up (one USB-C and one Moshi DisplayPort adapter). The system has behaved much better! Fans are silently running at around 1400 rpm and temperatures have dropped at least 15°C across the system.

WindowServer process is no longer running GPU time like crazy.

Happy camper for the moment, but keeping fingers crossed.

(My MBP 16" specs for reference: processor: 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, memory: 64GB, Storage: 2TB SSD, Graphics: AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB and Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB)

In my case, it was totally random. It had nothing to do with connecting external display or not; whether the lid is open, what kind of apps; the fans with spinning in full speed randomly; I spent sometime with chat support and re-installed the whole OS, reset SMC and PRAM with no luck. Then received a call from agent after my first reply on this thread and spent around couple of hours diagnosing the issue and sending him all relevant reports and recorded a video for him.

I ended up ordering new MBP with the same specs, got the new one and returned the noisy one.

The new one is less noisy, but compared to my 2017 i7 MPB, it still louder.

At some points I think seriously about returning the new one as well and just return back to my old laptop and live with it happily ever after. Waiting for another few days to return it as well before the end of the 14days

Hey, first of all, thank you all for your input. In my case I detected that indeed when I have an external monitor the overall temperature of the computer goes up and the fans kick in hard. What I tried, and it seems to work is to switch ports. I was using the dongle on the right side usb-c port, the one closer to the screen. Switched it to the left side and temp holds stable.

Can anyone confirm?

Thanks!

Worked now my 3rd day with my new MacBook Pro 16" 2019 (32 GB, 1TB, i9 2,3 GHz, 8-core). I installed everything from scratch.

Just doing normal development work (Visual Code and 10-12 browser tabs open). The Macbook Pro is connected to an external 4k monitor.

Fans are almost always on (approx. at 3100 rpm) and quite often on an even higher level. Don't like this so far. The activity monitor does not show any apps which consume much energy. Don't understand why fans are constantly running.

Used to work with a MacBook Pro Late 2013 in the same setup where the fans were most of the time dead silent.

Great machine though in terms of performance. Will give it another day but if this does not change I will return it.

Yeah, same here. Getting a new machine, let's see. But I don't have hight hopes.

The difference between normal and the use of an external monitor are 20°C. The AMD card uses 4W without and 20W with an external display. I think this is the problem, this generates too much heat.

BUT I am no expert whatsoever and really hope the new machine fixes the temps and fan speeds/noise.

Be sure you connect the power adapter and leave it connected (at least overnight) as an article posted above suggests (for a slightly different model, so far), and run software update to receive any changes to charging profiles afterward.

Three micro-controllers are cooperating to keep your Mac form over-charging. It will essentially NEVER over-charge.

Confusion about battery charge levels is a well known cause of problems (such as kernel task running 100 percent) and could be contributing to bad heat performance and therefore, excessive fan noise.

Grant Bennet-Alder in my case the charging doesn't seem like a factor (with two laptops so far), as they are always connected to a charger.

In my experience with the two laptops: first one, was totally defected device, the fans spin up to the max very randomly and unexpectedly while there is nothing going on at all. The second one is behaving way better; no randomness whatsoever; however, in ideal usage the fans are pretty audible and loud (ranging from 2900 to 3700rpm), in a way that once I shut it down, you feel the difference immediately.

If you restart in Safe Mode, does it have the same issues? If not, "It's something you added."

Safe mode loads a minimal set of Apple-only extensions, including no graphic acceleration extensions. Screen update will be wonky and slow, but ultimately correct.

Some Readers have been surprised to discover third-party add-ons that are punishing the performance of their computer, and/or making it too hot.

My new 16 inch MacBook Pro is attached to a NEC PA272w monitor via a HyperDrive dock using a mini-DisplayPort cable. Upon startup, I was getting five or six minutes of fan noise. The fan noise persisted when I tried a CableMatters USB-C to mini-DisplayPort cable. When I detached the external monitor completely, the noise was less, but still present.

I installed Temperature Gauge Pro and looked at it and Activity Monitor at startup. I was surprised to see just how many items loaded at startup—Spotlight was still indexing; DropBox, Microsoft OneDrive, Creative Cloud, BackBlaze, and a couple of other programs that I didn’t recognize all started up; the computer started syncing with the many gigs of files that I have in iCloud. While this was occurring, the CPU temps were in the red and the fans hit 5000 rpm. The CPU temps became normal again after a few minutes, but it took the fans several more minutes to decrease and become inaudible.

In particular, I found that loading OneDrive really caused the CPU temps and fans to spike. 

I changed permissions so that as little as possible loads at startup. I then measured everything again with no iCloud sync or Spotlight indexing going on. The fan noise was negligible, and the fan rpm measurements did not exceed 3500 and was that high only briefly. When I detached the external monitor, I couldn’t hear the fans at all.

I know everyone’s situation is different, but in my case, I’ve seen dramatic improvement and it may be worth a try for you.

Grant Bennet-Alder, yup I did several diagnostics (over three hours with apple tech support on chat and phone), the first laptop was high likely defected. The second one is in such noisy situation while nothing (at least what the Activity monitor shows) is going on except the WindowServer process is persistently using 8-12% of the CPU and nothing else beside it (couple of other apps consuming 1-2%).

But I agree the Safe Mode diagnostic is helpful to tell whether it is a hardware issue

I went into safe mode, opened two Safari tabs, and launched a youtube video. Fan speed rose above 3000rpm. Laptop closed, external USB type-C monitor connected, 2560 x 1440 60Hz.

I have been working behind my new MBP for 14 days now and the situation does not change in any way, I was hoping for a MAC OS 10.15.2 update but nothing has changed. In support of Apple shrug. What to do?

have you connected it to power adapter and left it overnight?

The numbers you posted above did not look especially evil to me. My recollection is that you had some components reaching 60 C. These newest MacBook Pros are quite powerful, and if you ask it to do a lot at once, it will do it, generate heat, and speed up the fans to keep itself at a reasonable temperature. It sounds like YOUR MacBook Pro is working as designed.

Users who MacBook Pro approach 100 C under a similar load and run fans up to 6000 RPM to keep cool have a serious problem, which may be difficult to isolate, but is definitely a problem.