MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise

All apple machines have issue with this no doubt. Last night accidentally stumbled upon the video about the Audio Engineer that built very expensive studio and could not use mac Book Pro because of the noise. He did not even complain about it, he just mentioned it as a fact. He invested a lot of money in specially designed desktop which is silent for the studio. He did mentioned that it costed a fortune to built silent desktop machine that can run mac OS. The amusing part for me was when he mentioned a noise from Mac Book pro as like this is normal for mac Book pro.

ntompson wrote:

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I meant DisplayPort to DisplayPort - you can substitute DVI for DisplayPort each time you see it in my post. My bad.

Thanks for that.

The primary performance difference between HDMI or DVI and DisplayPort family is that HDMI and DVI require the "heartbeat" refresh, required for old Analog CRT displays. If the entire screen data are not supplied every refresh period (like 60 times a second) an HDMI display may blank the screen momentarily, causing it to flicker.

To get an HDMI (or very similar DVI) signal out of the computer, the adapter signals to the computer port to use DisplayPort Dual Mode DP++, which switches to HDMI/DVI timing and asks the computer to send the heartbeat screen refresh data. For a large screen, that is a LOT more data.

DisplayPort displays have a screen buffer. DisplayPort sends only the changed data in most cases, so when the screen stops changing, the link goes quiet and we expect (but do not seem to be getting in this case) the generated heat to be reduced.

Welcome on board!

i have the identical specs on my MacBook Pro same issue... 2 visits to the Apple store and they have suggested I update the drivers on my LG ULTRAWIDE 34” .

i did that and a fresh Catalina install and the problem still remains.

The problem I’m having is that purchased my monitor after the 14 day return period And then became aware of the issue.

are you past your 14 day return period?

Unfortunately I am :( There are some warranty terms in European Union which allows to return a faulty product after the return period if the issue is unfixable, so I'll try to go that route. Hopefully it works out, or even more hopefully - Apple will fix this goddamn issue before it comes to me returning my laptop...

I just got a 16" MacBook Pro: 2.3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, 32GB, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB. I have it connected to an Apple Cinema Display (older model) with a USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter. The power supply is connect to the adapter. I am planning on getting a new monitor very soon. Sometimes I have an external Thunderbolt 3 drive connected. I've hardly begun to use the computer but there have been occasions when the fans have been running at high speed, and the computer feels warmer than normal. I read some of the posts but am not as technical, so don't understand the situations as well. Is there an app besides Activity Monitor that can help me report what is happening, when the fans are noisy? Just now I had multiple applications open, but not working in Photoshop or Lightroom or doing anything intensive and the fans seemed extremely noisy. I closed the apps and the fans are now quit. I'm worried going forward about this. I had a late 2016 15 in. MacBook Pro, and it was never this noisy.

Same here, no improvements at all. We are done wasting our time with this machine, there is enough proof that this machine is not good for a Pro user, we have videos of music and video producers complaining about the noise and we have a lot of developers and other professionals also complaining about the noise and the machine getting too hot or the GPU failing at some point.

We also realized that even when an external monitor is not connected if you go to apple website, specifically to the 16-inch section: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-16/ and scroll to the part where there is a video of the avengers movie, if you leave the video playing for a few minutes the machine will get really hot and the fans will go over 3700 RPM just for doing that!

This is unacceptable for a $4000 Pro machine.

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I'd return it ASAP since you're still in the 14 day return period.

TBH this is such a bad experience compared to when I got my 2013 13inch Macbook Pro which had really few problems. There's no fix in sight so there's no way I can recommend the Macbook Pro 16 inch if you want to use an external monitor.

I was thinking of switching to windows when I wanted to upgrade and then the 16 inch came out and that's what I got but now I really regret it.

:(

Well I don’t regularly use an external monitor and it’s the best MBP I’ve ever owned.

By all means, take advantage of the 14-day return policy to see if it meets your needs and return it if it does not - as should be the case with any Apple product.

Mine:connected to an old SAMSUNG SyncMaster 226BW 1680x1050 (DVI-USB type-C adapter) makes

no difference at fans, when I browse there (via Safari).

It gets a little bit warm all the time when connected to monitor (clamshell or not) but I barely hear the fans. When I play a game (via Steam) is an example...

I know that monitor's resolution is very low, but I'm afraid to change it with a new one @ 2560x1440, as I intended to do when I bought my MacBook, because of the things written here.

I would like to add, that I completely believe all of you who raise the issue of heating and fan noise. Unfortunately I don't have iStat Menus to make further tests.

What is slack?

Mine was running Affinity Designer, Publisher, Photo, ADobe Indesign, VNC, Mail, Adobe Acrobat, Libre Office, Messages, and Parallels running Windows 7.

If you turn off Slack does it still do that? Did you see that you can view the GPU only and show what is doing that?

I bet that shows the key if there is something wrong.

imajez wrote:

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I currently have 91 tabs open in Chrome on my 5,1 barely using any CPU. There were easily 20+ more open earlier. They quickly add up when doing research stuff on top of all my regular sites.

The lack of impact on my machine is why I do not bother closing things down.

A lot of research gives you mainly text sites. These are generally not an issue.

When you get more than a few Chrome windows with graphics and animation, then it is likely to get hot.

Does this only happen with one screen attached? I have a Pro Display XDR and Wacom pro 16 connected to my 16 MBP, and while I do see the Radeon wattage consistently at 20 like others here the fans are definitely not always blowing. They don't kick in until the system gets up to 70C+ (even though it idles around ~65C normally)

Very weird behavior nonetheless!

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

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?