MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise

Good luck with Apple on Saturday.

Do you have any sensor apps like iStat and do you know how hot it was getting when you experienced the graphics glitches?

I too have that monitor, I dare not run any apps apart from an IDE when it is plugged in.

RICHD101 wrote:

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 DAW is absolutely unacceptable.

This may not be up to Apple.

A lot depends upon how the GPU is designed; it may well be an all-or-nothing type of thing.

FWIW, I also know of no DJs that would run their laptops off battery while doing a show.

ahmedfromreservoir wrote:

Yep agreed, especially considering the 5500m is in other laptops now which don't exhibit the same sorts of issues.

Do you have pointers to these?

I can find no use of the Radeon™ Pro 5500M in other laptops, and it appears the GPUs may be Apple-only:

Radeon™ Pro 5000M Series

When searching for other platforms that use it, they all use some variant like the AMD Radeon™ RX 5500 Mobile.

Since they're different packages on different dies, they're not directly comparable.

Ultimately this is Apples machine which they sold with promises and guarantees, failing to meet them it's their obligation to repair/replace or refund if the laptops are just inherently defective.

Certainly glitching graphics are defective, but simply high power usage and high fan speeds isn't in and of itself a defect unless you can tell me what advertised "promise or guarantee" they fail to meet.

If offered a refund, by all means, take it.

The radeon high side power usage has changed since updating, now when connected to an external monitor it's hovering around 22W and going almost as high as 28W when playing a 1080p video (instead of hovering just below 20).

I have to turn the volume waaaaay up just to hear the audio of a video playing over the sound of the fans - what a great user experience, clearly people who think this is acceptable of a machine and not a defect have very little understanding of technology.

Unfortunately the replacement logic board for my laptop has been delayed to late next month as well :-/

**** that sucks, what country are you in? Here in Australia I can probably force apple to give me a refund or replacement instead of waiting for a fix.

Did you go to an Apple authorised technician or thea pple store? I think the authorised technicians are more likely to be empathetic because they aren't tryng to tow the company line.

I'm on the latest.

artist999 wrote:

This MacBook AMD Combo is still beta.

Will return my 2nd MBP 16 tomorrow and wait until apple fixes these issues and buy again. They had enough time and evidence. So i think they cant or dont care.

I agree it's not production ready, the thing is, it's been out for months now so I don't even know if they will be bothered to fix it at this point. You might have to wait until they release the 2020 model...

Is there anyone with the replaced motherboard? I wonder if it helps :) By the way, it is not funny that they released the product without deep checking how it works under bigger pressure - a 4K display connected, MAC / Windows launched + games etc.

I'm also disappointed how AMD works with Apple on drivers update process for Windows (bootcamp). Apple says that drivers are provided by AMD, when I contact AMD, they say that Apple is responsible for providing drivers ...

Months and months are passing by, and we still have drivers for our PROs from 11/20/2019 - with errors, optimization problems etc. While Windows users got more updates in JAN, FEB ... As an Apple user, I should not be forced to use third-party drivers, modified to be able to use them on a Mac (if I want to have new releases).

Why did I start talking about drivers etc.? Who knows, maybe our problems are closely related to firmware or drivers?

Nevertheless I think that this is probably hardware issue. Strong processor + strong graphic card = a lot of heat. When we add thin laptop case limiting ventilation, then we might have situations described here.

I think my post will be deleted anyway :) It happens more often here recently.

I am fully on your side! Apple has to do something and should’ve done it long time ago.

But I don’t think it’s a hardware issue I think it’s a driver or software issue since the graphic card doesn’t have to pull so much power for being Idle or for running an external display. And the fans don’t have to go this way up for the temperature. Last Generation MacBook Pro With a worse cooling system had a much more quieter profile for the fans. I have a MacBook Pro 2015 With no discrete graphics and it can run a 4K external monitor to without much heat, power consumption or without any noise! And can run every app like sketch with the shabby internal Intel graphics and it runs totally smooth so there is no need for discrete graphic for for so many apps. Why isn’t it possible to turn off the discrete graphics? The battery could run so much longer.

William Kucharski wrote:

There's no free lunch, so a high powered GPU is going to draw power, and power means heat which means fans.

How come then it doesn't draw so much power and heat when not connected to a monitor? How come it draws less power and makes less heat when connected to 2 4k monitors when the lid is closed?

I just tried connecting one external display with the lid open and reduced the resolution of the external display to 1080p, the power draw remained stubbornly at 20W.

I wonder what sort of bug is causing the GPU to have such high power draw, clearly it's requesting the power for a reason but certainly the number of pixels it's drawing isn't one.

Also as slight tangent the CalDigit 3 dock I'm using finally managed to connect to two external monitors through as ingle thunderbolt 3 connection which is nice, so now there's just one usb-c cable connected to my laptop to run all my peripherals and screens.. gotta take the little ones as they come!

This machine is so close to brilliant it hurts, really hope Apple fixes it.

TailsDog wrote:

I think it's something to do with the WindowServer process misbehaving - often I see very high numbers for it in activity monitor under GPU and CPU Time.

That wouldn't explain why the same issue is happening in Bootcamp though, unless there's some sort of equivalent process in bootcamp?

That's true, maybe the high GPU time for WindowServer is some side-effect of something up with the firmware, hardware or drivers?

I mean sometimes I've seen it is ridiculously high like 2 million hours GPU Time in a single session.

salimsel wrote:

How was your experience with CalDigit 3 ? are the fans running smoothly without noise when you connect your MBP to an external Monitor or your are still facing the same issue with GPU.

I wouldn't be here if I wasn't having issues.

If anything it appears my experience is worse than others, some people here say their MacBook can drive two external displays as long as the lid is closed, mine can only drive one external display with the lid closed otherwise it's fancity, population: deaf.

Someone here posted a method to disable dGPU on MB 15inch:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/disabling-macbook-pro-2015-dgpu.2225058/

Maybe a person with MB 16inch could check if this can be a workaround for problems described in this thread? I imagine that after disabling dGPU the Intel-integrated GPU will be responsible for the whole work, even with external monitor attached, so no more problems with over heating and max fans spinning.

I want to buy MB 16inch but I hold back until there is some nice workaround for this issue or Apple starts working on solving this.

We have 5 16-inch, and all of them are having the same issue, another user, Tim also have a lot of units and he is also experiencing the same issue.

Some people had their MacBook replaced 2 or 3 times and all the machines are having the same issue.

We have no way of knowing if all MacBook Pro 16-inch are affected but, in my case I can tell you that 100% of the machines that we have are having this issue and if we do a case study with the info we have available here of people using an external monitor connected directly to the computer, we can agree that all machines are having this issue.