MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise

Most people here are completely provoked by the totally unhelpful contributions of your; so I don’t know what “most people” you are referring to.

Your comments about design specs, expectations, blah blah are nonsense and you are missing the most important hing that we all share, called “common sense”; when there is an upgrade, it means upgrade; so when an upgrade comes out more noisy while doing precisely the exact same thing that a previous model used to do with less noise; then the new version is broken.

So your contribution is just draining people energy and provoking.

"At that time it was impossible to run a display as large as the 4K displays we now take for granted."

Grant Bennet-Alder, you Sir are also giving misinformation. The monitor I used way back then was a Dell 27 UltraSharp Ultra HD 5K Monitor - UP2715K - this was a 5k display running on my 2014 Macbook Pro using dual mini display port - I had less thermal issues than I am having right now and I never noticed throttling when doing normal tasks such as web browsing watching video etc.

Throttling occurs when your CPU is under stress and is producing too much heat. When contacting support the first thing they say is to check the activity monitor because when there is heat and the fans spin up usually there is a process which is causing that and you can see what it is by checking the load stats. A lot of people are experiencing the heat and fans however there are no processes causing high load and that is what this issue here is.

When I called Apple support running the computer in safe mode was one of the first things they asked me to do and the fans were still running at 3000 RPM without doing anything, just by having the external monitor connected.

My monitor is not 4K, I was using it with an HDMI cable but I bought a USB-C cable to see if that was the issue

, I'm still having the same problem with both cables. So I wasted $35 on a cable (plus $10 on the iStat app).

So Loud and constant, I am really disappointed in spending so much money on this laptop. I spend more time on my on my old pc desktop from 2012 because of the noise. is there any solution to this ? I am going to sell this ASAP ....

TailsDog wrote:

You are giving misinformation.

This is a thread regarding abnormal heat produced in certain conditions when using an external monitor.

How does one define "abnormal" if Apple has not published specs as to what is normal or not?

It could be argued that if "they all do it," then that is normal for the MBP 16 regardless of what owners believe normal "should" be.

Good luck holding manufacturers responsible for things they never claimed a product would do.

Ahmed Ali Awad wrote:

So when an upgrade comes out more noisy while doing precisely the exact same thing that a previous model used to do with less noise; then the new version is broken.

The exact same thing? Running with the same amount of memory at the same CPU speed with the same GPU?

If not you literally have no ground to stand on.

New CPU. New architecture. New thermal design. New memory controller. New GPU.

But somehow it's supposed to act "the same" as a system designed at least three years ago.

I think people who are arguing our complaints are unfounded don't quite understand the problem or think it can be chalked up to regular high performance use.

This is my 16" MacBook Pro with the i9 9980HK and 5500m 8gb running from a cold boot connected to external monitors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJT660pUOMc&feature=youtu.be

I'm sure we can all agree this is not normal behaviour for a modern day laptop, certainly not one we would expect from a company like Apple who are known for their engineering excellence.

OK I figured that when connected on power cord than it is very very loud. When on battery the fan is working normally after turning off all the tabs in the browser and pretty much all programs and restarted the os. I will test to see when it will fan start screaming again, right now it is working as I would like (not to say what is expected)

That's really interesting. Maybe it's worth checking your Energy Saver settings and seeing what things are different between using a plug and being on battery? It certainly could be that the system runs more intensely when plugged in.

I totally agree with you.

I also have a MacBook Pro 15-inch 2019 (the one that was only available for sale for a few months) with a i9 2.4GHz, and a Pro Vega 20 and the MacBook Pro 16-inch has a i9 2.4 GHz and the AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB (so very similar specs), and the 15-inch can handle an external monitor without any problem, the fans never go over 1900 RPM and the machine stays really cool, so if the 16-inch is a better and more powerful machine it should be able to handle a simple task like being connected to an external monitor even better than the 15-inch because like our friend William says, it's a more powerful machine so it should be easier for the machine to handle this task and it shouldn't generate that much heat.

iTech23 wrote:

because like our friend William says, it's a more powerful machine so it should be easier for the machine to handle this task and it shouldn't generate that much heat.

Here's the thing:

Sure, drive a processor harder can generate more heat, but a processor running at full speed generates a lot of heat even without a particular workload.

For example, a processor basically at idle running at 3.2 GHz is going to generate more heat at idle than one running at 2 GHz unless specific hardware and software techniques are used to throttle down its speed when it is idle.

The same is true for GPUs, and driving a 4K or 5K screen with black is just as hard as repainting it with an image from the point of view of a GPU.

William Kucharski wrote:

iTech23 wrote:

because like our friend William says, it's a more powerful machine so it should be easier for the machine to handle this task and it shouldn't generate that much heat.

Here's the thing:

Sure, drive a processor harder can generate more heat, but a processor running at full speed generates a lot of heat even without a particular workload.

For example, a processor basically at idle running at 3.2 GHz is going to generate more heat at idle than one running at 2 GHz unless specific hardware and software techniques are used to throttle down its speed when it is idle.

The same is true for GPUs, and driving a 4K or 5K screen with black is just as hard as repainting it with an image from the point of view of a GPU.

Here's the thing:

There are other thin and light laptops with i9 9980hks and better than (higher TDP) 5500m GPUs in them which don't turn their fans to max blast when connected to a couple of external dispalys.

There is definitely something wrong with some of the new MacBooks.

I already mentioned like 10 times THAT I DON'T HAVE A 4K OR 5K MONITOR

Oh and by the way the TDP on the Radeon Pro Vega 20 is 100w and the Radeon Pro 5500 is 50.

One more time your comments don't make sense and are not helpful AT ALL.

If you are not experiencing any problem with your computer I don't understand why you keep posting here.

ahmedfromreservoir wrote:

There are other thin and light laptops with i9 9980hks and better than 5500m GPUs in them which don't turn their fans to max blast when connected to a couple of external dispalys.

Which ones?

This isn't being argumentative, rather I have been consistent in saying throughout this thread that I'd like to know what the results are on other systems using the same or very similar processors and GPUs.

That would help determine whether this issue is hardware, firmware or software or a combination thereof.

In particular, I'd like to know what "better" GPUs are in use; to be a good comparison they'd have to be from the AMD Radeon Pro 5000 family rather than a GPU from another manufacturer as there have been issues in the past with power consumption that have been isolated to a particular GPU vendor and so capabilities often cannot be directly compared.

William Kucharski wrote:

ahmedfromreservoir wrote:

There are other thin and light laptops with i9 9980hks and better than 5500m GPUs in them which don't turn their fans to max blast when connected to a couple of external dispalys.

Which ones?

This isn't being argumentative, rather I have been consistent in saying throughout this thread that I'd like to know what the results are on other systems using the same or very similar processors and GPUs.

That would help determine whether this issue is hardware, firmware or software or a combination thereof.

In particular, I'd like to know what "better" GPUs are in use; to be a good comparison they'd have to be from the AMD Radeon Pro 5000 family rather than a GPU from another manufacturer as there have been issues in the past with power consumption that have been isolated to a particular GPU vendor and so capabilities often cannot be directly compared.

Gigabyte Aero 15 to name one, only because I can personally verify.

I just have sincere doubts the midtier and lower TDP Radeon 5500M that Apple chooses to use can be that much hotter than an RTX 2070.