It's extremely hot and loud and is likely damaging the machine. What can I do? I've reset the SMC and it's up to date. I don't know what else I can do other than try and sell one of my monitors and use the laptop in closed display mode.
MacBook Pro with Touch Bar
Those sound like good choices for cables and adapters. There are a far more trouble-prone solutions available.
The heatsink rail is shared by CPU on the right side and GPU on the left side. Heat spills over from each to the other.
Some readers have made a small improvement by connecting the Power adapter on the right side ports.
Some readers have been willing to turn off Turbo Boost with Turbo Boost Switcher, and that made some improvement.
If you like, readers would be happy to look at an Etrecheck report of what is running on your Mac and make any suggestions for improvement. No personally-identifiable information is included in the report. even the drive-names are obscured.
Using EtreCheck to Troubleshoot Potential… - Apple Community
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what resolutions are the displays you are using, and what interfaces and adapters are being used?
Have you looked into reducing the refresh rate of the built-in display? This is the fist MacBook Pro that has that capability.
Have you tired reducing the ACTUAL resolution of the external display NB>> this is Not the same as SCALING.
That computer is the "Muscle Car" of notebook computers. Many, many things are conspiring to cause it to throw a lot of heat. The fans were dramatically improved. Now they move about 40 percent more air -- but not enough to ensure users will not complain about them.
Intel is three years late producing the promised processors, and still has not done so. The current version was supposed to be a 7nm chip, but Apple was forced to use a 14 nm chip, which generates more heat than expected. In order to meet the performance goals, it has more cores than it should. In contrast, Apple's foundry for its A-series processors hit its mark and the chips in the newest IPhone will be 5nm chips.
When lightly loaded, it too-easily invokes Turbo Boost, (which in my option is just specsmanship), but that causes it to throw a huge burst of heat for no compelling reason.
The drive speed is a phenomenal 2500+ Mbytes/sec read and 2800+ MBytes/sec write. That's about 100 times faster than the drive in a MacBook Pro 2012. So if you run a third-party Virus scanner, the drive is so fast it does not suffice to slow down the rate of scanning your files. Third-Party Sync-ing Apps like DropBox, BackBlaze, iDrive, OneDrive, Google Drive and similar, when allowed to run at login, will chew up resources non-stop, and throw even more heat.
Modest sized external displays (well under 4K) connected with DisplayPort (or its cousins ThunderBolt-display and USB-C display) do not tend to force the DDR6 display RAM into high-speed mode (which demands an additional 12 Watts of power). All others -- it depends on whether the combined Horizontal timing of all active displays can be satisfied using Low-speed/Low-power Display-RAM mode or not.
That indicates extensive graphics use, that it needs to convert so many generic graphics calls to metal calls (and perhaps it caches the converted code in RAM once converted).
20 W is a light draw for a Mac that comes with a 96 W power supply. I’ve seen mine draw 125 W under heavy CPU load.
If your Mac actually overheats it will shut itself off, so if it’s not doing that it’s normal.
So idling at 80 Celsius, 20 watts for the radeon 5500M alone, and 5000rpm fan speeds is normal whenever you plug a monitor in? My Dad's 13 inch MacBook Pro runs a 24 inch 1080p, a 32 inch 165hz 1440p, and it's own display without a sound, but the second I plug mine in, it becomes burning to the tough and keeping the lid closed would likely damage the screen.
Thanks so much for the breakdown! I already knew about how intel's decision was to cram more cores without really thinking about power, but it's at the point where I literally don't want to use a monitor because I fear for the well being of the machine. I'll look for any third party apps that could be running, but I'm the kind of person that already always looks to turn off auto running apps. Adobe might be the only culprit. Any other advice on what I should do? I mean, I can't even use this laptop casually while using a monitor.
Edit: Just to make clear, it immediately runs hot and loud at idle with any external displays
One monitor is 1080p and the other is 1440p. I’ve tried with the monitor closed and open, but I haven’t tried reducing its refresh rate since I primarily wanted to use it with it closed, but because of the heat, I’ve been afraid to.
Also, I use 2 nice usbc to DisplayPort cables for the monitors, the stock apple 96 watt charger, and a nice usb c to ethernet adapter. The adapter is brand new, last week, but the problem has been persistent ever since Christmas
I should probably restart more often, but I just do it 4 times while on the phone with apple for 2 hours. I don’t keep a lot of tabs open, I actually try to minimize the number I use to stay focused. I’ll look into seeing anything about team viewer as well as investigating what might be causing avconferenced. Do you know what the MTL might be caused by?
Do you know if there's anything I could do to stop that? I don't use anything besides the actual monitor itself, could this just be a really bad design by Apple with the GPU + an external monitor or is it something I'm doing?
I’ll make one of those reports as soon as I get to my desk. I already charge on the right side and I’ve already tried turbo boost switcher and gfxswitcher, they didn’t have an impact
There are few unusual things, but nothing that jumps out as THE issue:
You are running TeamViewer. Is it sync-ing any set of files for you?
You are running:
avconferenced 12.94 % (Apple)
I do not generally see that, and I do not know what might be causing it to use that much CPU power.
Top Processes Snapshot by Memory:
Process (count) RAM usage (Source - Location)
com.apple.WebKit.WebContent (15) 5.91 GB (Apple)
MTLCompilerService (22) 1.25 GB (Apple)
that is a LOT of webkit use. Do you have a whole lot of tabs open?
... and a lot of MTLCompilerService (the translator for generic calls into Metal Graphics calls)
Your overall use of memory is not an issue, but is a little high. Consider doing a Restart more often.
No backup is showing. What is the date of your most recent backup, and by what method?
My MacBook Pro 16-inch(32gb, 5500M, i9) Always uses 20 watts on idle whenever there's more than 2 displays(ex and internal) running.