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.

A question for the forum, if I may. Central to the heat / fan noise issue is the observation that the dGPU jumps to 20 W power consumption when an external monitor is connected. This 20 W eats a large chunk of the thermal capacity of the MBP 16" meaning that even light loads are enough to cause high temperatures and fast spinning (loud) fans.

So here's my question: for owners of recent MBP 15" models with dGPUs, what power consumption do you observe for the dGPU when an external monitor is connected (and the machine is otherwise idle)?

I am curious to get a sense for how the 16 compares with the 15, all other things being equal, from a dGPU power consumption perspective.

Thanks,

Nick

Just like many other user, I've posted it here couple weeks ago, but I will repeat that again.

My 2018 MPB 15" doesn't have 20W issue.

When I'am plugging exactly the same monitor using the same cable in both cases, MBP 15" 2018 => 5W (dGPU), MBP 16" 2019 =>20W(dGPU)

ntompson wrote:

So here's my question: for owners of recent MBP 15" models with dGPUs, what power consumption do you observe for the dGPU when an external monitor is connected (and the machine is otherwise idle)?

I am curious to get a sense for how the 16 compares with the 15, all other things being equal, from a dGPU power consumption perspective.

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.

Radeon™ Pro 5000M Series

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.

William Kucharski wrote:

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.

Radeon™ Pro 5000M Series

Well that is where you are wrong, it is of consequence, if you read the page you linked to it it actually compares it to the previous generation! Quotes from said page:

"Faster with lower power consumption compared to previous gen"

Here they are saying that it has lower power consumption than the last generation GPUs - therefore naturally we would want to compare results against the last generation, yes?

"Faster, smaller, lower power transistors"

Here they are saying it is using lower power transistors, if that is the case then we would not expect it to using greater power to do even less, yes?

The fact is that if it is not acting as intended, if it is not acting better than the previous gen as stated then there must be something wrong, yes?

I totally agree with your, if William loves Apple products like I do, he probably also watch the keynotes and presentations every year, and it's always about comparison, this iPhone is twice as fast as the previous gen, this chip is xx times faster than previous gen, this iPad is xx times thinner than the previous gen...... So if Apple can compare a product with a previous generation, why they keep trying to make us think that we cannot.

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.

I can hear Tim Cook now:

"The fans are 3X as loud as the previous generation and the discrete graphics chip consumes 4X the power of the previous generation dGPU when connected to an external monitor."

Thanks all - and apologies that I missed the earlier post (there are quite a few now). This characterises the problem really well: in its present form, the MBP16" thermal headroom is disadvantaged by 15 W compared to the previous MBP15".

There is simply no way to spin it any differently: this new machine has to get rid of 15 W more heat before it attempts to do any work.

It is hardly surprising, then, that light work loads cause the fans to spin up when previous machines stayed silent, or that moderate work loads cause the fans to spin like crazy.

Let's not miss the significance of this. 15 W is a massive impost on the thermal headroom of this machine.

Surely it's fixable...

Well, you can’t confirm that the people that had issues with their 16-inch MacBook Pro wasn’t related to thermal shutdown issues (like the GPU kernel panic, failing graphic issues, we’ve seen in this forum), so, since there is no additional proof if you want to be really specific, it’s a 50% chance until proven otherwise.

Nthompson,

great point!

I found this comment on the Gearslutz forum made sense to me-

***connecting external 4K monitors forces everything to run on the AMD GPU. In activity monitor the GPU utilization (could be found in the window menu) changes from internal to the Radeon. iStat Menus shows a power consumption of 18-20W for the 'Radeon Highside'.

- when the AMD Radeon completely idles and everything runs on the Intel GPU, it consumes 0.15 to 0.2W. 

The AMD GPU sits together with the Intel CPU on the same heatpipe. They share the same thermal budget. Those 20W the Radeon consumes, heat up the CPU and will force it to throttle down sooner. And/or will ramp up fan speed earlier and stronger.

I dont know if it makes a huge difference if you have the 5300M or the 5500M with 4/8GB on your 16" macbook. Theoretically the 5300M and 4GB should consume less power. 

My opinion: Apple should drastically reduce the power consumption of the AMD GPU. Sacrificing 20W on a laptop for doing nothing more than moving the locator in your (LOGIC PRO X ) DAW is absolutely unacceptable. *****

heres the link :

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/1287355-boom-new-16-macbook-pro-8tb-ssd-23.html

Let's not waste our time on certain guys in this forum who are "fine" with this issue.

We are all waiting for a solution here from Apple regardless of what their view is.

Simply irrelevant to our current problem and not constructive to all.

Apple please fix it in the coming update.

david.liu.sg wrote:

Let's not waste our time on certain guys in this forum who are "fine" with this issue.

We are all waiting for a solution here from Apple regardless of what their view is.

Simply irrelevant to our current problem and not constructive to all.

Apple please fix it in the coming update.

100% agree. It's not at all helpful to engage/reply to those guys